State school building program favors wealthier districts and leaves lower-income urban students in aging, dilapidated buildings, according to new study

 

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State school building program favors wealthier districts and leaves lower-income urban students in aging, dilapidated buildings, according to new study   October 7, 2025 By HALLIE CLAFLIN

At Aborn Elementary School in Lynn, a cramped room on the third floor serves as the school assembly space, art classroom, and library on any given day. Without a gym, students bundle up in their hats and coats during the winter for physical education class, which is held outdoors year-round. Outside, on a few occasions, bricks have fallen from the 130-year-old building. Built in 1897, it is Lynn’s oldest school, and one of 19 elementary schools in the district that are in similar shape.

Every day, nearly 240 students – more than half of whom come from low-income households, and nearly 40 percent of whom are English language learners – file into the small building.

“The majority of our elementary schools don't have art rooms, music rooms, gym spaces, or a cafetorium,” said Superintendent Evonne Alvarez, severely limiting the district’s ability to provide the kind of enrichment activities taken for granted in suburban schools.

It’s hardly a problem unique to Lynn, the state’s fourth largest school district, with 16,000 students.

The overcrowded and antiquated building conditions in the low-income, majority Latino school district are a testament to an inequitable state reimbursement process that disadvantages urban districts when it comes to school building projects, according to a new report by the MassINC Policy Center. (The policy center is based at MassINC, the nonprofit civic organization that also publishes CommonWealth Beacon.)

Boston and the Gateway Cities have been significantly underrepresented in the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s Core Program, which distributes large grants to help communities build new schools or fully replace or renovate existing buildings.

Together they make up nearly a third of all schools in Massachusetts, yet they have received less than 19 percent of invitations to the Core Program since 2015, the report says. Suburban projects accounted for 57 percent of Core Program invites, despite accounting for just 43 percent of schools in the state.

As a result, the report says, despite efforts by the Legislature aimed at adequately fund school building projects, “students in Boston and the Gateway Cities continue to learn in buildings that are deteriorating, lacking in basic features, and often cramped and overcrowded.”

School construction projects are funded with a combination of state and local dollars through the MBSA, an independent state agency. It was formed two decades ago and charged with implementing a progressive funding formula in which state funds would cover up to 80 percent of construction costs for the lowest-income communities.

But it often hasn’t worked out that way, according to the report.

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More Context School building formula failing Gateway Cities (March 2021)  Fixing the Foundation: Uneven Access to Modern Schools and a Blueprint for a More Equitable Future (October 2025)

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Published by MassINC

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