...another 186 under active design,” he says. The Ohio school district’s fiscal strength derives from the state’s decision to securitize its $18-billion share of the national tobacco settlement and to put the immediate cash proceeds into building new classrooms and other educational space, Savors says.

Several school districts in other states are benefitting from recent bond issues, some of them quite large. In North Carolina, Guilford County Schools recently started construction on the first of more than two-dozen major projects to be financed by a $457- million bond issue approved by voters in May 2008. The multiyear plan includes five new schools, plus a $45-million replacement for Eastern Guilford High School, which was destroyed by fire three years ago.

In late September, voters in Berkeley County, W.Va., approved a $51.5-million bond issue that, with up to $45 million from the state’s School Building Authority, will enable Berkeley County Schools to build a new high school and new middle school as well as undertake major renovations at two existing schools.

Higher Ed, Lower Spending

For the most part, colleges and universities are struggling. Even elite Dartmouth College is cutting back, says Matthew Purcell, Dartmouth’s associate director of planning, design and construction. Activity at the Hanover, N.H., college has declined significantly over the past two years because of financial constraints, he says, and several planned projects—including a renovation of its campus dining facility—have been postponed indefinitely.

Dartmouth currently is building only one major project, a 175,000-sq-ft life-sciences building, and Purcell’s office expects to put a second major job, a 105,000-sq-ft visual-arts center, out to bid this fall.

The life-sciences building’s construction cost is about $93 million, and the facility, whose construction is being...