Consultants present facilities study and interactive PowerBI dashboard showing $301M 10-year needs

Consultants from DLR told the Topeka Public Schools board that a facilities condition assessment across 42 district buildings identified roughly $301 million in essential maintenance needs over the next 10 years and produced an interactive PowerBI dashboard to guide planning.

"We've been through 42 facilities across the district... that's 2.7 million square feet," said Ian Kilpatrick of DLR, who described a detailed inventory of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, barcode-tagged equipment and a living dashboard that can be updated by district staff. The consultant said the figure reflects essential maintenance, not optional new construction, and uses a 3% annual escalation ("escalation") to approximate future costs.

Presenters described a four-part approach: educational adequacy and capacity, facility condition assessment, stakeholder engagement and funding/policy layering. The dashboard shows a district overview map with facility-condition indices (lower is better) and educational adequacy scores (higher is better) and includes tools to filter by project year, funding source and cohorts of buildings. The tool can model short-term project planning (for example, focusing only on 2026 projects) and produce line-item cost reports by campus and system (roofing, HVAC, site work).

Board members asked whether the dashboard could model the effect of dollar investments on facility-condition and adequacy scores and whether the system would be updated after projects are completed. DLR and district facilities staff said district personnel will own the backend data and can refresh the dashboard after tagging completed projects; Mr. Ner said the district intends to maintain both a finished baseline copy and a constantly updated working copy of the dashboard.