Best investment? School buildings

THE DEARTH of funding for Pennsylvania's crumbling transportation infrastructure - our roads, bridges and mass transit - has rightfully produced ample amounts of hand-wringing and dire economic predictions.

However, education infrastructure has been consistently shortchanged for even longer, and continuing to ignore it is an expressway to Third World status for the world's richest nation.

The last comprehensive report on America's school facilities was done in 1995 and found that our nation's schools needed $112 billion to be brought up to speed. And, just as with transportation shortfalls, the costs have grown with each passing year, to the point where $542 billion is needed over the next 10 years to modernize our schools.

Sinking billions of dollars into public education "software" - programs, improved teaching methods, better-trained instructors and up-to-date technology - makes little sense when the hardware is rotting away with decrepit, half-century-old schools that drag neighborhoods and tax dollars down with them.

Instead of putting a $20 shine on a $10 pair of boots, consider the potential advantages of "booting up" and retooling older and even closed school buildings. These benefits include:

* Tremendous taxpayer savings on the more than $50 billion spent annually on school operations and maintenance

* Reduced energy usage and spending

* Improved property values and reduced crime levels

* Better learning environments with upgraded lighting, heating, ventilation and acoustics

* Improved health for students and school employees

* Vast job-creation potential

An easy, first step in this direction would be a tweak of federal tax laws so local school-modernization projects could rejuvenate aging and closed schools.

The Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, a 1986 progeny of the Reagan administration, encouraged renovation of the nation's declining infrastructure, but included a "prior-use rule" that stiff-arms school boards wanting to tap the tax credits and private developers to modernize an aged K-12 facility.

"Fixing the glitch" has spurred startling bipartisan support in Virginia, where its governor, Bob McDonnell, notes that excluding school buildings from the tax credit forces localities to pay up to 40 percent more to retrofit an aging school.

"If localities could utilize these tax credits, they would save dramatically on local construction costs," Gov. McDonnell said. "Those savings would then be available to go into the classroom for instruction, without raising local taxes."

Nature hates a vacuum, but crime and deterioration thrive in them. Across the commonwealth, aging educational relics dot the landscape, and stonewall educational and economic renewal efforts.

I don't have to look far to find such a ghost, as Germantown High School was shuttered in June. Once home to 3,000 students - including comedian Bill Cosby, Comcast founder Ralph J. Roberts, the late activist and former state Rep. David Richardson, my fellow House member Steve Kinsey and me - the 99-year-old structure now is an abscess in the making in a proud, improving community.

Across Philadelphia, two dozen schools have gone the way of Germantown, victims of poor policy decisions in Harrisburg and millstones on the necks of urban renewal plans.

Fixing the glitch in the federal tax code will help, but Harrisburg still would have to step up to the plate and realize that amputating schools is a short-order fix that produces costlier long-term woes.

What if the commonwealth began investing in, rather than eviscerating, education infrastructure?

I saw a hiccup of hope with last year's adoption of the Pennsylvania Historic Preservation Incentive Tax Credit. It is meant to dovetail with the federal tax credit, but is capped at $3 million overall and $500,000 per project.

It took 16 years for the effort to bear such paltry fruit, and Pennsylvania can ill afford more dithering on education. Reform does not mean retrenchment, and the advantages of investing in education and its infrastructure are indisputable.

Eight years ago, Pennsylvania voters heartily and sagely approved a $625 million bond issue for environmental cleanups and open space. Today, a similar bond issue for education infrastructure would provide educational, economic and environmental benefits. (Reduce, but also reuse and recycle older schools.)

This is not a pipe dream, even with the current regime in Harrisburg. Education ranked first among pressing state issues in a recent survey, and the tea party canard about Pennsylvania's debt level ranks with ObamaCare death panels on any reasonable person's myth-o-meter.

The future waits on no ideology. Pennsylvania needs to begin providing a "thorough and efficient" system of public education - especially its infrastructure - and reap the ample benefits that will follow.