RICHMOND, Va—- Richmond Public Schools launched the first of nine community meetings Tuesday night, focused on a new facilities modernization plan as the district grapples with aging buildings and a massive funding gap.
RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras said the average school building in the district is 62 years old, and about a quarter of RPS schools are more than 100 years old.
"The reality is that across all of our schools, we have hundreds of millions of dollars of maintenance needs, and we have only a fraction of that available to address those needs. In a typical year, we get about 2.5 million dollars for maintenance," Kamras said.
An independent study done in 2024 found roughly $680 million in facility needs over the next 20 years just for basic repairs and maintenance.
RPS Deputy Chief of Staff Luke Hostetter said the scale of the problem reflects years of neglect.
"The needs that we see right now are manifest of the years, the decades of systemic disinvestment that we've seen in RPS schools," Hostetter said.
At tables around the room, parents, teachers, and concerned citizens sorted schools based on need, considering factors including the condition of the building, enrollment trends, space, and more to help shape district priorities for the next 10 years.
Brian Coffill, a parent with two kids at Mary Munford Elementary, said he attended Tuesday night's meeting to learn more about the condition of RPS schools for the future of his children.
"Students succeed in buildings that are built to make them feel comfortable to learn, and everyone in the city needs that," Coffill said.
Coffill said more funding will be needed to address the problem.
"We obviously need more state and federal funding to take care of schools throughout the Commonwealth," Coffill said.
Once the nine community meetings are complete, Kamras said the district will develop a proposal for the school board.
"We'll gather all the feedback. Then I'll take it all, come up with a proposal, bring it to the school board. Probably around December, they'll debate it, take more feedback, and ultimately adopt a prioritized list of schools. Then in the spring, we'll take that prioritized list and decide which of those schools are we going to rebuild, which are we going to modernize, which potentially do we need to consolidate, what are all the different ways that we can stretch every dollar to get as many kids into as modern facilities as we possibly can," Kamras said.
The next community meeting is Thursday at Henry Marsh Elementary School at 5:30 p.m.
