Legislative Bills to Improve 
School Building Processes Moving Forward

A number of bills are moving forward in this legislative session to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase transparency and accountability in school building processes. Two Senate bills, SB2024 SD1 and SB2550 SD1, seek to raise the bar even higher, broadening the scope of responsibilities for the Hawai‘i School Facilities Authority (SFA).

SB 2024 SD1

The Community Need

Providing public school facilities is urgently needed in communities experiencing rapid enrollment growth. This has resulted in overcrowded schools and limited access to a quality education. These needs are outpacing the state’s ability to deliver schools through traditional procurement and construction processes. However, the Hawai‘i State Legislature recognizes that Hawai‘i has the highest public school construction costs in the nation. This makes it challenging to deliver public school facilities in a timely, cost-effective manner.

The Proposed Solution: A New Delivery Model

As a way to address this issue, this bill proposes that SFA establish a pilot program to develop three new public schools based on demonstrated need through public-private partnerships (P3). SFA supports this pilot program because it allows the State to evaluate whether P3 models, issued through a competitive bid process, can deliver school facilities faster, more cost-effectively, and designed for long-term durability and quality. The P3 model will also address the long-term maintenance of the school facilities.

The P3 model has been proven to work in other states. For example, Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland delivered six new public schools through a long-term P3 model that bundled design, construction, financing, and maintenance into a single performance-based agreement. The bill also includes legislative oversight through required interim and final reports to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot program, including costs, efficiencies, and implementation challenges. Read about Prince George's County Blueprint Schools Program approach to better learning.

Building by the Numbers: 
Data-Driven Decision-Making

SB2550 SD1

The Challenge

Numbers serve as a valuable guide and a database can be an indispensable tool to make smarter decisions, especially when millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars are at stake. When it comes to school buildings, the numbers show a very challenging situation. School facilities are aging and replacing them will be a costly endeavor. This bill was introduced because the legislature found an average of about $454 million per year in school capital improvement projects has been appropriated over the past 12 years, but there was not process to determine priorities for funding and construction. With a comprehensive planning framework, school building decisions are often made project-by-project rather than within a transparent, statewide modernization strategy.

The Proposed Solution

This bill seeks to establish a school modernization initiative through a capital improvement project (CIP) planning database for school facilities statewide. This initiative would provide a framework for an informed, unbiased process to responsibly address school facility needs across Hawaiʻi.

The measure would create a structured, data-driven system to guide long-term capital planning for public school facilities statewide, spanning seven school districts and 15 complex areas.

Importantly, the database would organize and present facility information geographically by Senate and House legislative districts. This feature would improve transparency and allow policymakers to clearly see school infrastructure needs within their own communities, supporting more informed budgetary decision-making.

If enacted, this would be the first time legislators and the public would have access to a one-stop, consolidated planning tool to evaluate school infrastructure needs using consistent criteria statewide. The School Facilities Authority estimates that a prototype version of the database application could be ready by the 2027 legislative session.

Besides identifying deferred maintenance and replacement needs, modernization would also explore how schools are designed to serve students in the decades ahead. Learning from trends in other school districts across the country, the design would feature flexible, reconfigurable classroom layouts, shared collaborative learning spaces, and adaptable infrastructure capable of accommodating evolving instructional models. Read about Santa Monica High Schoolʻs Discovery Building to explore the possibilities for Hawai‘i!