About & methodology

What this is

The NCSI K12 Facilities Policy Explorer is a prototype research tool for state PK-12 public school facilities policy: governance and authority, planning, funding and financing, facility standards, data and reporting, approval and compliance, and state support.

Methodology

• Policy evidence comes from NCSI's 2025 state profiles ("State Roles and Responsibilities for PK-12 Public School Facilities").
• Each state's NCSI state profile is broken into atomic policy provisions — one requirement, authority, program feature, or practice per record.
• Each provision is classified with the NCSI K12 Facilities Policy Taxonomy and controlled vocabularies (authority level, obligation type, responsible actors, facility issue, and more).
• Each provision records the printed profile page it came from and, where the profile cites one, the statute, regulation, or other legal source.
• Where a profile states that a state has no policy on a subject, that is recorded as a "confirmed absent" provision.
• Records go through a structured quality review before publication; only published records appear in this explorer.

Current coverage

404 published provisions: Alabama 92 · Arizona 132 · California 180. It is not a national dataset.

Ask NCSI

Ask NCSI retrieves relevant published provisions and uses AI to write an answer from those records only, citing each record it relies on. It is instructed to say when the records do not answer a question. Always check the cited records — AI summaries can be imperfect.

Profile-based vs. verified records

Every record currently published is marked "Profile only": it reflects what the NCSI state profile reports, and the cited statute or regulation has not yet been checked directly. A record would be marked as primary-source verified only after a researcher confirms it against the current legal text. None are yet.

Limitations

Laws and agency guidance change. Use the explorer to orient research, then confirm requirements in primary legal sources. This tool is not legal advice.

Prototype research tool. Records are normalized from NCSI state profiles and have not been verified against current statutes or regulations. This is not legal advice — consult primary legal sources for current requirements.