My wife is on a school board. She's seen a lot of portables come. Very few leave, though, unless they are condemned. You decide to get some portables, and within a year, you have classroom space. She went through one new school building. That took years. If you hire an architect, that takes time. Then the state architect has to approve it. It takes a *year* before those people even *look* at it. Well when they decided to open a new middle school, which had previously been an elementary school, they did build some new buildings, including the only two story building on any middle school campus in the district. IIRC, it did not take years, it took less than a year, but it was likely in the planning stages for a while. I guess it's different when you're opening a new school (or a refurbished one) rather than just adding on to a school that's already open, though the elementary school near us did build several new buildings (library, computer lab, science lab, admin building) which allowed those functions to move out of existing classrooms. Still they ended up adding eight portables as our city council pandered to their developer buddies and rezoned commercial land for high density housing without considering the impact on schools and other services. Some of the schools have so many portables that they also added portable restroom buildings, but my favorite addition was the portable trees,
http://i50.tinypic.com/dlqes9.jpg . We used that photo in one of our campaign mailers that we sent out in our successful attempt to overturn more rezoning for more high-density housing. No one was against housing per se, but most people didn't want to build more housing without a plan to build more schools.