Who Pays to (Re)Build our Schools? Resource Equity in State School Capital Finance Policy: The Case of Washington

Abstract

Modern, high quality school facilities are essential to safe and effective learning environments for K-12 students. However, current spending on school facilities has been identified as insufficient to meet the health, safety, and educational needs of students across the country (Filardo, 2021). This problem persists in part because school districts rely heavily on local financing for capital projects, which creates highly varied access to funding. States also are inconsistent and often lacking in policy and funding available to support school construction. While the school finance literature is robust in examining resource equity in operational school spending, less attention has been paid to the distribution of school capital resources, and specifically a state’s role in allocating resources. In this thesis, I use a resource equity framework to examine the long-standing School Construction Assistance Program (SCAP) in Washington state, which provides supplementary funding to school districts for capital construction projects supported by local revenue. I use data on historic SCAP allocations, school district elections, and current inventory of all public school buildings in Washington to provide a landscape analysis of Washington school capital finance and identify systemic patterns of funding distribution that demonstrate inequitable access to high-quality school buildings. As one of the first studies to examine the relationship between building age and quality, elections outcomes, and state and local capital funding, this thesis serves as both an advance to the school finance literature and an important program evaluation of school capital finance policy in Washington.