Headquartered on UC Berkeley’s campus, the National Center on School Infrastructure, or NCSI, began operation of its online resource hub in mid-November.
The NCSI was funded by the Department of Education through a $10 million grant to campus’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development, or IURD. The focus of the NCSI is to assist states and communities in the United States in building, operating and maintaining schools for students from pre-K to 12th grade.
“There are a lot of issues that intersect at a lot of resource types, that intersect from federal, state and local levels, and a lot of information about how to effectively and efficiently do the work of improving school infrastructure,” said Naomi Cytron, managing director for the NCSI. “NCSI was established for state and local leaders to find anything they’re looking for relative to implementing, improving and modernizing school infrastructure so that it can do all the things that schools promise to do.”
The NCSI is a consortium between four entities including campus’s IURD, the 21st Century School Fund, the National Council on School Facilities and Child Trends. Created in tandem with the Supporting America’s School Infrastructure, or SASI, grant last November, the NCSI hopes to provide resources for both the eight SASI grant recipients, including California and educational entities nationwide.
Cytron describes the NCSI as an “online information clearinghouse” with the intention to provide guidance in topics ranging from how school facility design can affect students’ learning outcomes to how educational entities can secure federal funding.
“It’s a database of resources, and those resources can take many forms, whether it’s journal articles, news articles, webinars, data sets, slide decks from presentations or podcasts,” Cytron said. “The clearinghouse and database structure is intended to enable users to find, search and discover an array of content based on their own kind of interests and search parameters.”
The current website is the first iteration of the consortium’s overall project that will continue to develop over time and include a wider range of topics. However, the website now provides users with a basic curation function that prompts them to consider intersectionality, such as how addressing climate resilience can promote learning and health for students.
According to Cytron, the basis of NCSI’s current and future plans is to ensure all K-12 students have “great learning environments,” which she said are currently inequitably distributed.
“At the end of the day, ZIP code shouldn’t matter, geography shouldn’t matter for what kind of educational environment a kid has access to,” Cyrton said.