New Mexico State Agency Selects VFA for Capital Planning

BOSTON — The New Mexico Public Schools Facilities Authority has contracted Boston-based VFA Inc., a provider of facilities capital planning and asset management software, for oversight of its 89 school districts and charter schools — comprising 795 separate schools with 4,700 buildings and about 60 million square feet of space.

The state agency selected VFA.facility, the company’s capital planning and management software solution and flagship product, and VFA.auditor, a web-based guided self-assessment survey, to manage information about its facility assets.

“Today, the (agency) is able to quickly and easily obtain consistent, defensible data to create a statewide ranked list of facility needs, as well as to provide intelligible reports to schools,” officials from the company reported.

Officials said reporting to schools regarding their ranking and the calculations behind it often proved difficult. The executive summary report was formerly difficult to produce and confusing to stakeholders but can now be produced in VFA.facility, providing all data and calculations for a particular school or district in a format that is easy to understand and interpret, officials said.

The VFA.auditor allows the facility authority staff to complete building surveys on their own and upload reliable, error-free data to the system, company officials said.

“Public school systems face many unique challenges in managing and planning for their facilities,” said Jerry Kokos, CEO of VFA Inc. “Most school systems have funding constraints that force difficult decisions and tradeoffs regarding maintenance, renewal and functional adequacy.”

The facilities authority’s weighted New Mexico Condition Index, the metric by which all schools are compared, takes into consideration facility condition, educational adequacy, and key priorities, such as life, health, and safety.

This model is the primary tool used to allocate state capital funding to school facilities needs.

“Using VFA’s software solutions, NM-PSFA is able to calculate the weighted New Mexico Condition Index and rapidly produce a prioritized list of objectively determined facility needs,” officials said.