Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) grades the country’s infrastructure. On the 2025 school infrastructure report card, schools came in at a whopping D+. (Which is the same grade they earned in 2021.) While roads and bridges usually get the headlines, the state of America’s school buildings is near and dear to our hearts, and we know it is to yours too.
After reading the whole report (you can read the full report here), we can see that building age is the main factor influencing the grade. America’s public schools average 49 years old, against a 50-year design life, and fewer than half of them have had a significant renovation since the day they were built.
ASCE’s recommendations are not aimed at how hard facilities teams work. (We know you all work very hard, so it’s a relief to know that they recognize that too.) They are instead focused on information, and specifically, improving the way schools track and report information about school building maintenance. The report puts it plainly: detailed data on school building condition “is scarce.” Fewer than half of states collect representative data on their school facilities at all.
The good news is that this is a very solvable problem.
The Knowledge Already Exists
You know which roof is next. You know which chiller is on the fritz, and which building runs hot all year long. But is it clearly documented with asset information and work order history attached?
That picture is exactly the building condition data the school infrastructure report card says the country lacks. What’s missing is a digital format: it lives in your head, in spreadsheets, in your work orders, and in your utility bills, not in one consolidated location where the board can easily see the full picture.
| What ASCE recommends | What that looks like on your campus |
|---|---|
| Life-cycle cost analysis in planning | Repair history sitting next to replacement cost, so repair-or-replace becomes a calculation |
| Capital planning frameworks at the local level | One plan, priced by year, that holds up through staff changes and board turnover |
| Better building condition data | Cost and condition tracked by building as your team works, not reconstructed every budget season |
Life-Cycle Cost Analysis, Without the Consultant
ASCE urges schools to “adopt life-cycle cost analysis principles in planning and design processes to evaluate the total cost of projects.”
In plain terms: before you replace something, know what keeping it costs.
PlanningHQ gives you both halves of that math. Track repair history against replacement cost and you get a clear ratio; when maintenance costs climb toward replacement value, the decision makes itself. Inflationary factors show what deferring a project this year does to its price next year, which turns “we’ll look at it again in the spring” into a number.
Steffen Wiest, Executive Director of Operations at Neosho School District, had the plan long before he had the platform. It lived across a lot of files:
“We were managing everything across 19 spreadsheets, and it was ugly. Now it all comes together in one place. PlanningHQ integrates all those different spreadsheets and separate systems. That’s magical.”
Steffen Wiest, Executive Director of Operations, Neosho School District
Your Utility Bills Are the Condition Data ASCE Is Asking For
Often energy is separate from planning, but your energy data is where building condition shows up earliest and most consistently. Every meter reports every month, on every building, whether or not anyone has time to read the pattern.
EnergyHQ reads it for you. It pulls utility data in automatically, normalizes for weather so a warm October doesn’t look like an equipment problem, and shows cost per building and trends over time. When consumption stops tracking with the weather, you have a lead worth following, plus documentation for the project you have been trying to get funded.
ASCE flags cooling as the fastest-growing need in the country: a study it cites estimates that 13,700 additional schools require air conditioning, roughly $40 billion in work, with heat-day closures rising each year. Money is moving toward it, including U.S. Department of Energy grants through the Renew America’s Schools program for energy retrofits and HVAC upgrades. PlanningHQ tracks energy and safety grants against the projects they fund, so your application arrives with the numbers already attached.
The payoff can run for decades. ASCE cites Batesville School District in Arkansas, where an upfront investment in solar generation and water and electricity conservation is projected to save $4 million in utility bills over 20 years.
What It Looks Like When the Data Catches Up to the Work
You walk into the next budget conversation with weather-normalized energy cost for the building in question, the repair history behind it, a replacement figure, and the price of waiting one more cycle. With the data behind it, your recommendation becomes much harder to ignore.
Getting there takes less time than the size of the problem suggests:
“I imported my 10-year capital plan and was up and running with my plan in minutes. That’s epic.”
Steffen Wiest, Executive Director of Operations, Neosho School District
Learn more about how PlanningHQ turns your capital plan into a funded plan.
D+ is the national number on the school infrastructure report card. Your buildings are not just a number: they’re yours to document, and yours to change. The story of your buildings is yours to write. Start today.
That’s where we come in. OperationsHERO turns the work your team already does into the record that tells your buildings’ real story. You already know your buildings. We help you prove it, one logged fix at a time, until the story on paper matches the work you’ve been doing all along.
See how it works. Book a personalized walkthrough of EnergyHQ and PlanningHQ.
Source: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2025 Infrastructure Report Card: Schools (PDF), March 2025. Section overview available here.
