Based on the observations made after several major earthquakes occurred in Tai-wan,school building has been found most vulnerable to severe earthquake damage among all building types.Although the seismic design force for school buildings has been 25%higher thanthe ordinary buildings,its performance to resist strong earthquake has been proved insufficient.Serious casualties and losses may be resulted from the collapse of school buildings under strongearthquake.Furthermore,school buildings are usually required to serve as emergency sheltersoon after a major earthquake.The urgent need of seismic peHormance evaluation and enhance-ment works is evident.Lack of integral planning,lack of seismic resistance along corridors,effects of short columns.embedded pipelines and lack of lateral reinforcement has been found thekey factors responsible for the collapse of school buildings.A three-stage strategy for seismicevaluation and retrofit of existing low-rise reinforced concrete school buildings has been proposed.It is based on the common structural types.seismic resistance,possible failure modes and availa-ble experimental data.Seismic-deficient school buildings are being retrofitted based on the per-formance index introduced in this paper.
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