443-984-2000
From August 2016 through January 2020, EMG worked under contract with City Schools to provide independent assessments of all of City Schools’ school facilities. The Facilities Condition Assessments (FCAs) are best used as a snapshot, from this four-year period, for the purpose of capturing the condition of the major systems and components for each educational facility operated by Baltimore City Public Schools.
The assessments only evaluate the physical condition of each facility’s major systems, not educational adequacy to meet the educational needs of our students. City Schools uses this information as an initial ranking of the many capital needs across all our facilities to plan improvements and repairs.
However, all systems are monitored and receive regular preventive maintenance to optimize performance. The FCAs are compared against these day-to-day maintenance evaluations, known plant performance issues, and capital funding availability to determine the extent and effectiveness of previous updates.
Systems observed and evaluated include site paving, HVAC, roofing, electrical, plumbing, elevators, building envelope, and structural systems.
Because the FCAs are snapshots in time, the qualitative and quantitative assessments only reflect the conditions of systems at a building at a single moment within a four-year window. In some cases, capital projects are complete, and conditions have improved.
The assessments also do not include the following:
This information can be found in the annual Capital Improvement Plans developed by City Schools. Additionally, the State of Maryland maintains a facilities inventory database of building and system upgrades.
As part of the assessment, the physical condition of each facility’s major building systems and related components are rated in one of five conditions: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Failed or a combination thereof. For the purposes of this assessment, the following definitions are used:
The FCA system condition ratings represent the initial rankings of the many capital needs across all our facilities. Identifying these needs informs the first step in City Schools' Capital Improvement Program (CIP) Project Prioritization Process. Because the need of our systems is so much greater than available resources, following this first step, the initial list of project needs is reviewed, scored, and prioritized based on:
This qualitative and quantitative review allows City Schools to develop the district's annual Capital Improvement Program (CIP) as a focused list of current urgent systemic needs.
*System conditions are based on the time the assessment was performed. In some cases, capital projects have been performed and conditions have improved.