It's because they're built by tax dollars and the last thing you want to do is be seen to be wasting tax dollars on frivolous things. Nice private schools look

It's because they're built by tax dollars and the last thing you want to do is be seen to be wasting tax dollars on frivolous things. Nice private schools look great because the clientele expects that and pays for that aesthetic. Also consider that often the highest tax payers and most influential people in a community won't send their kids to the local school so have no interest in having higher taxes fund a nice building. I'm not saying that's good or bad, just that it is. > Before the prison/factory campus came into existence, we did have beautiful schools. And they're still standing. The nice ones are. There are likely many old school buildings that were cheaply constructed and didn't stand the test of time. The nice old school building in my town had to have hundreds of millions of dollars put into it because it didn't have AC, a staircase collapsed, and about 100 other serious issues that needed addressing to modernize it. Our community voted YES to funding it through a raise in property taxes but our community is already affluent and the town did a good job specifying exactly what the money would be spent on. So it costs money and often times people don't see the value in that.