At Park Elementary in Alhambra, just east of Los Angeles, a chain-link fence runs across the playground. Elementary students on one side. Three- and four-year-olds on the other, in a preschool run by Options for Learning, which now operates classrooms inside more than 160 schools across Los Angeles County.

California has empty classrooms and too few child-care slots. In communities across the state, nonprofit providers are moving infants and toddlers into underused classrooms and, in some cases, taking over entire shuttered campuses. Districts get a way to keep buildings active and potentially build future enrollment. Families get care in a place they already know and trust.

Detroit is confronting the same question from the opposite direction. The district planned to demolish four schools that closed because of low enrollment and high costs. Now board members are reconsidering after residents urged them to find businesses or nonprofits that could reuse the buildings instead. Demolition alone would cost nearly $5 million.

Both stories treat a school building as a community asset waiting for a new purpose. But other districts are struggling to make their buildings serve their original one.

Around 50 Philadelphia schools will begin the year without adequate cooling. Kensington High finally got air conditioning after two years of construction and an estimated $17 million. Baltimore spends about $2 million a year repairing heating and cooling systems that failed almost as soon as the buildings opened. Eleven schools closed for part or all of a day during heat waves in the last month of school, and nine of those were newly built or renovated.

A 2022 Siegel Family Endowment paper argued that schools should be understood as vital community infrastructure, not merely buildings but a combination of physical spaces, digital systems and social relationships.

This week's stories show why the physical part still matters so much. A building can become a child-care hub, a community center or the anchor of a neighborhood. But first it has to be open, safe and capable of keeping children warm in winter and cool in August.

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