Using the Web for Long-Term Facilities Planning
By: Martha Harmon

Your school's facilities represent much more than just required operating expenses; they are a significant investment in the financial well-being and ongoing success of the school itself. In fact, the total current replacement value of school facilities sometimes exceeds that of the total endowment by as much as three times!

Though the importance of your facility assets may be underestimated or not fully understood by some school stakeholders, proper construction, maintenance and repair of your organization's facilities should be essential elements of your school's strategic plan. Building and maintaining quality facilities not only protects your infrastructure investment and capital outlay, but also improves student enrollment, retention and learning. Additionally, properly maintained facilities can help you recruit and retain excellent faculty and staff, while appealing to alumni, parents and other donors vital to ongoing fundraising efforts.

Developing a facilities planning and maintenance program is clearly of critical importance, but establishing a process to achieve this goal can be a challenge in itself. According to an exclusive nationwide educational market research report, Capital Planning Survey , conducted by SchoolDude.com, more than 80 percent of educational institutions are required to develop a multi-year facility capital plan. However, more than 85 percent of survey respondents use spreadsheets rather than capital planning software to develop and manage their facility capital budgets, and they face problems such as inadequate reporting capabilities and limited data access and integrity.

Your first step in successfully planning and maintaining excellent facilities for learning is to conduct a facility condition assessment. Facility audits can be conducted by third-party firms, but are often cost effectively conducted by in-house facility staff as well. Though many different levels of assessments can be performed, you should always capture detailed information on all your structures, including building components (e.g., roof systems, flooring) and building systems (e.g., HVAC, life safety).

Conducting an accurate assessment of your facilities and facility assets is necessary so you can make data-driven decisions about required and preventive maintenance, as well as the future facility needs of your school. You must identify your facility deficiencies and evaluate the cost of repair versus replacement, and then determine how to budget and schedule all needed facility corrections.

Unfortunately, many school administrators stop there with just a hard-copy report detailing their facility audit and needed capital improvements. But utilizing a Web-native capital planning and budgeting system allows stakeholders across your organization to track and access valuable facility assessment data online in real time for immediate analysis, prioritization, and costing. You can easily document facility needs and develop an action plan based on a funding forecast, and that real-time facility plan can be quickly updated throughout the year as your facility needs, priorities and budgets evolve.

A capital planning system enables you to create a comprehensive plan to manage your facilities needs over several years, while tracking, categorizing and equitably prioritizing the individual facility improvements needed to achieve that goal. Your capital planning application should track multiple estimates for correcting each deferred maintenance deficiency, allowing you to easily justify funding requests while selecting the corrective option that best fits your budget.

Snoqualmie Valley School District #410 in Washington uses a Web-native capital planning and budgeting system.

"This has allowed us to develop a five-year plan and schedule out all of our capital, deferred maintenance and general fund projects in advance," said Carl Larson, the district's plant operations supervisor. "We have been tracking our costs for these projects and planning our budgets accordingly. Previously, we were using a spreadsheet to try and do the same thing. There is no comparison between spreadsheet information and data-based programming. It's easy to run reports and retrieve the information you need when you need it."

Web-native capital planning systems provide additional benefits by improving communication, information sharing and reporting across your facility assessment and long-term planning process. Your real-time facility data is available online to authorized personnel, bringing together the capital improvement team with school administration for centralized analysis of facility needs and communicating needed facility improvements and priorities to the maintenance and operations team. Integrated facility data tracking further empowers you to easily develop professional, fact-based reports that help you justify budget requirements and capital improvements to school stakeholders and decision makers.

Gresham-Barlow School District 10Jt in Oregon also uses a Web-native capital planning and budgeting system.

"We now submit and manage capital requests online," said Terry Taylor, the district's director of operations and maintenance. "Site Administrators can submit safety, capital and 'like to have' improvements for their schools, and we can process and evaluate requests in a timely open manner. This improves overall confidence in our total operation at the administrative office, O/M and school level."

Long-term facility planning for your school is critical because failure to plan for your future facility needs could mean failure for the school itself. Developing and implementing a multi-year capital plan demonstrates to internal and external school stakeholders that your organization is committed to building and maintaining a quality learning environment. And managing that plan with Web-native capital planning technology not only provides a formal way to track and prioritize capital improvements, but also helps you extend facility life, improve service, reduce operating costs and relieve facility capital budgets.

Martha Harmon is marketing manager for SchoolDude.com.