
Hawaii Department of Education
FACILITY IMPROVEMENT PROCESS REDESIGN
Data-driven facilities improvements
The Hawai’I Department of Education is the only state-wide department of Education in the US. Its 319 sites and 600 MM square feet are located on six islands covering a range of over 300 miles. Despite an annual budget of over $200MM for school improvement projects only 37% of the budgeted funds are actually spent prior to expiring. The district needed a new method to rapidly identify projects, equitably distribute funding, and contract with providers. MKThink developed an approach called HI-FIT (Hawaii facility inspection tool) to perform rapid assessments of school campuses against a common set of guidelines. The assessment tool evaluates up to 112 attributes of each room on a campus. These assessments are analyzed to identify common needs across multiple sites and prioritize relative to DOE goals such as learning outcomes and student safety, and published via a publicly available website. Large scale multi-site bundled projects are then assigned to prequalified contractors, replacing the conventional one-off design-bid-build process.