The Price of Neglect

Some officials say the problems' roots are in the cutbacks in budget and staffing that accelerated during the city's fiscal crises of the past 15 years.

"There hasn't been adequate resources to do any maintenance. Period," said Paul Taylor, who has been deputy director of the schools' facilities department for two years. Moving his hands apart and then closer together, he said: "This is how much you need, this is how much you got. Something is not going to get done."

Sarah Woodhead, who ran the facilities department from 2001 to 2003, said slashed budgets forced her to focus on emergencies and ignore preventive maintenance. "It's not just a risky thing to do; it's a guaranteed failure," she said. "I think it's a tragic situation."

Since 1996, the number of engineers licensed to run the boilers has dwindled from 400 to 140, said John Woodall, secretary-treasurer of the union representing the workers. Licensed engineers are the only school employees who can operate the boilers, and, in the past, each school had its own engineer. Now engineers oversee multiple buildings and boilers.

"Things are set up to deteriorate," Woodall said.

Most of the seven school administrations that have come and gone since the 1980s set out to fix the buildings, but each failed and, in some cases, made problems worse with shortsighted spending decisions. Projects were complicated by the political interplay among the school board, the D.C. Council, the mayor and, at times, Congress.

The most recent cash infusion came last year when the council approved an additional $1 billion for school repairs, bringing to $2.3 billion the total to be spent over 10 years. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who took over the school system in June, gave control of construction to Allen Y. Lew, who had played key roles in the city's biggest recent building projects: the convention center and the baseball stadium.

Lew quickly pushed to expand his authority to maintenance. "It's not even worth building the schools if we're not going to commit to maintenance," Lew said in an interview. "It's just repeating history. It's a miserable way of investing taxpayer dollars."

He said that even after an $80 million fix-up blitz last spring and summer, the new administration inherited a backlog of $120 million worth of additional repairs, equal to four times the annual repair budget.

Tony Robinson, Lew's spokesman, said the school system signed a contract with a company last month to treat the boiler water at all schools.

Robinson said Lew's agency is getting calls from schools every day to fix heating problems. The staff is now responding immediately, he said.

"No more putting in work orders and getting it fixed three years later," Robinson said.