Despite bipartisan congressional letters urging Trump to support an infrastructure bill that allocates funds for education, a leaked White House infrastructure plan released by Axios includes no provision for school facilities. And despite calling on "both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable, and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve," Trump did not mention school buildings in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

Kosta Diamantis, president of the National Council on School Facilities, sent a letter to Trump urging him to name school infrastructure funding as a priority in his State of the Union speech. Diamantis noted that last year America’s schools got a grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

"The federal government has kept its eyes closed for well too long," he told The 74.

Nationally, an estimated $145 billion per year is needed for maintenance, repairs, and new construction in America’s public school districts, according to a 2016 report by the Center for Green Schools, the National Council on School Facilities, and the 21st Century School Fund. Actual spending on infrastructure is about $46 billion under that, however, according to the report, which relied on data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Read the full article about the need for school infrastructure spending by Laura Fay at The 74.