Boards of Education 2017 Positions Include School Construction

The Maryland Association of Boards of Education have adopted positions to guide their advocacy in the upcoming General Assembly Session, including school construction.

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County governments provide local school boards with the overwhelming majority of school construction funding statewide, according to the 2016 State of Our Schools Report.

School construction, one of MACo’s top four priorities, is one of the Maryland Association of Boards of Education’s (MABE’s) legislative positions for the 2017 Session of the General Assembly.

MACo and MABE frequently work together on advocacy in this area, including fighting legislation that could increase school construction costs.

MABE’s legislative positions state,

For MABE, key areas of concern include rising costs of construction, unmet demands for new construction and renovations to upgrade aging schools and increase capacity, and escalating costs of deferred maintenance. Other cost drivers include Maryland’s prevailing wage requirements and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. MABE supports optimizing local flexibility to achieve cost savings and efficiencies through alternative methods of project delivery, alternative financing, and cooperative purchasing.

MABE’s school construction resolution includes the following language,

  • . . .MABE urges a continued commitment by the Governor and General Assembly in future years to provide the state’s share of the funding needed to address the school facility needs identified by local school systems; and
  • . . .MABE supports maintaining the option for local school systems to use alternative methods of project delivery, and to procure school construction by methods other than competitive bidding, in order to optimize cost savings and efficiencies in procurement. . .

For more information, see the full list of MABE’s legislative positions and MABE’s Resolution of School Facility Funding.

For more information about MACo’s school construction initiative, see Q&A: Keeping Up With School Construction.