AOE official outlines staffing, planning and equity questions for relaunched school construction program

Bob Doniel, school facilities program manager at the Vermont Agency of Education, told the House Education committee on Feb. 14 that the agency has completed a statewide facilities assessment, launched a public-facing facilities dashboard and is preparing capital-planning and operations tools to support any future state school construction program.

Doniel said the position he holds was created by Act 72 and that his office has finished the inventory and assessment of school buildings statewide and is publishing those results on a public dashboard. "The link now to the public facing facilities dashboard is live," he said.

The work under Act 72, Doniel said, includes three additional pieces: a capital improvement plan template for districts, an operations-and-maintenance manual to encourage preventive maintenance (including options for districts without computerized maintenance management systems), and recommendations for facility-manager training and certification. He told the committee that a phase of the dashboard that will let districts build capital plans from the asset inventory is under development and "should be coming out within the next 2 months."

Why it matters: any future state-funded school…