São Paulo's School Repair Backlog: The Numbers Behind the Crumbling Classrooms

More than 4,200 state public schools across São Paulo are classified as needing some form of structural or maintenance intervention, according to figures compiled by the Secretaria da Educação do Estado de São Paulo, and parents who have spent years watching ceilings crack and bathrooms flood say those numbers are, if anything, conservative. On the first Friday of July, roughly 300 parents and students gathered outside the Diretoria de Ensino da Região Centro-Sul on Rua Borges Lagoa, in Vila Clementino, to demand a concrete repair schedule before the August school term begins.

The protest was not spontaneous. It followed a rainy June that turned structural problems into emergencies. São Paulo recorded 287 millimetres of rainfall in June 2026, well above the monthly average of 136 millimetres for the period, and the water found every crack in buildings the city has been patching for decades. At Escola Estadual Professor Azevedo Junior, in Itaquera, Zone Leste, a roof section collapsed into an empty corridor on June 19th. No students were injured, but parents pulled children from class for three days.

A Backlog Measured in Billions

The state's own audit tribunal, the Tribunal de Contas do Estado de São Paulo, flagged the school infrastructure deficit in a 2025 report that put the minimum cost of addressing critical repairs at R$ 3.8 billion. The Secretaria da Educação received R$ 1.1 billion for maintenance across all 5,100-plus state schools in the 2026 budget, leaving a gap of at least R$ 2.7 billion by the tribunal's own reckoning. For a city that hosts the headquarters of companies valued collectively in the hundreds of billions of reais and counts Faria Lima Avenue among Latin America's densest concentrations of financial capital, the contrast is difficult to ignore for the parents making the case on the streets of Vila Clementino.

The Federação das Associações de Pais e Mestres do Estado de São Paulo, known as FAPESP-APM, collected repair-request data from affiliated school parent associations in 2025 and found that the average waiting time for a non-emergency structural repair order to be completed was 26 months. Emergency orders, those flagged as representing immediate safety risks, averaged 8.4 months to resolution. The organisation says it submitted those figures to the state legislature's education committee in March, but a formal response has not arrived.

City schools, those administered by the Secretaria Municipal de Educação under Mayor Ricardo Nunes, present a different but parallel picture. The municipal network's 2025 infrastructure census counted 547 Centros de Educação Infantil, the so-called CEIs, with at least one item on a priority repair list. Of those, 112 had been waiting more than 18 months for work to begin. The Nunes administration announced a R$ 480 million infrastructure package for municipal schools in April, part of a programme called Escola Digna, with contracts expected to be signed by September.

What Parents Are Demanding, and What Comes Next

The coalition that organised the July 3rd demonstration is asking for three things: public disclosure of a school-by-school repair ranking, an independent engineering audit funded by the state, and a guaranteed minimum floor of R$ 2 billion per year for school infrastructure across the combined state and municipal networks for the next four fiscal years. The Sindicato dos Professores do Ensino Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, APEOESP, has formally endorsed those demands and says it will call a one-day work stoppage in August if no commitment is made before the start of term on August 3rd.

Families whose children attend schools in Guaianases, Cidade Tiradentes and Brasilândia, three of the zones where the infrastructure census recorded the highest concentration of deteriorated buildings, say they are not waiting for budget cycles. Parent groups in at least six schools in those neighbourhoods have launched their own crowdfunding campaigns on local platforms to cover minor repairs: roof patches, broken window glass, dysfunctional bathroom fixtures. In Brasilândia, one APM raised R$ 14,000 in three weeks. It fixed the gymnasium ceiling of one school. The main building's electrical wiring remains condemned.