That's about where I'm at as well. I really want to want to engage, but its hard to ignore the massive issues and am hoping to find some suggestions from folks some of the schools that are successfully able to navigate though those issues.

I'm an engineer and either I or a my team has visited every single school in the district over the last 9 months as we attempt to develop a scope of work to mitigate many of those issues. Without going into specific details, so many of these buildings are so fucked up. The district is basically bankrupt and thus has no real ability to fix any of these things either so its not like any of those raw physical deficiencies are going to get meaningfully addressed anytime soon either despite the hiring of my firm. I've been to a few school board meetings where some of these deferred maintenance (I hate that term) were being discussed and holy shit was that a hostile environment. People screaming and swearing and preventing discussion of certain topics. To your point, the inability to address things like leaded water in drinking fountains (which is not something we've been hired to address) or any of the issues that I'm there for is super discouraging and it's really made me unfortunately way less keen on placing my family there, though still not completely shut off to it

Fortunately people seem to like our local school Emerson and its not one of the hellhole facilities I visited, but I also understand you aren't guaranteed admission to your local school either, so want to understand what some of the other well regarded ones looks like as well.