Montgomery County Public Schools staff presented a long‑term capital prioritization approach centered on a facility condition index and urged the board to shift investments toward renovations and renewals for aging school buildings.
The presentation, led by Andrea Swiatoka, deputy chief of facility management, and DJ Connolly, capital budget manager, said the district will use the FCI alongside other criteria — such as educational adequacy, air quality, classroom size and equity measures — when the capital improvement program (CIP) opens in October. "We are really trying to realign with the state and think about our goals for the next 20 years," Swiatoka said.
The change reflects an effort to move from piecemeal, single‑system fixes toward projects that address five or more major systems at once; Swiatoka said meeting that five‑system threshold makes projects eligible for state renewal funding. She explained the difference: "For renewal, it really means bringing everything down just to the structure... In a renovation, you might keep a lot of those existing walls." The district will favor renovations and renewals where feasible, while acknowledging some replacements will remain necessary because of site constraints or Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) limitations.
Staff presented system‑level life‑cycle estimates and dollar figures for deferred work. For the district’s core 202 schools, staff said roofs with an expected useful life of 20 years require about 10 replacements per year but the district has averaged about five per year; the cost of roofs past useful life was presented as approximately $175 million in today’s construction dollars. HVAC needs were larger: staff estimated roughly $740 million in immediate needs for HVAC systems past their expected useful life and said the district has been replacing about five full schools’ HVAC systems per year when the modeled need would be about 10 per year.
Committee members pressed staff on sequencing and holding‑school capacity. Board members asked whether the district would attempt to “package” multiple systems when a school is due for work (for example, replacing HVAC and roof together). Swiatoka said staff will try to combine work where practical and aim to bring projects to a five‑system level when possible, but acknowledged that sequencing must balance summer‑work windows and the availability of holding centers to relocate students during multi‑year projects. She noted large high‑school projects are commonly phased over multiple summers and sometimes multiple years.
Staff said the FCI is weighted by replacement cost — higher‑cost systems such as HVAC push a facility’s FCI toward 1.0 — and that the FCI will count as 50 percent of the CIP prioritization formula, supplemented by educational adequacy, air quality, enhanced student‑needs metrics and utilization measures.
The district noted an FCI public website is live with the first 54 facility assessments posted and that the consultant continues to assess older facilities built before 2023. Swiatoka urged public users to consider the FCI alongside the other criteria, saying the FCI alone is a non‑subjective cost‑based measure and does not capture all lived‑experience factors.
The committee did not take formal action on policy during this session; staff said the CIP launch and proposed project list will return to the board in October.