As far as I know, CA Public Schools could use ED to acquire land, but I have never known one to do it.
Public schools in California do need to go through the local building authorities as well as the state DSA (Division of State Architect) for approval. The local building authorities are generally the easier part—as long as you meet the local zoning regulations (e.g., not overheight, apropriate setbacks, etc.) it’s pretty OK.
DSA consists of three review boards: Fire & Life Safety (FLS), Accessibility, and Structural.
The Structural folks require everything that’s wall or ceiling mounted and weighs more than 20# to have an engineered or pre-approved attachment method, and everything floor mounted more than 400# to do the same. There’s a list of “Deferred-approval” items, like elevators, that get engineered by the contractor. This is largely in response to the ‘94 Northridge quake where there was much more damage to public buildings than to private buildings and they wanted to increase the structural safety of these buildings.
FLS I don’t deal with much, I know they review exiting and sprinkler systems, but I don’t deal with them directly.
Accessibility is sort of the wildcard. California code (Chapter 11B) calls out the specific requirements, but DSA writes its own rules as well. The different DSA offices will have different things that they care about, and you can even get pre-approval of a given accessibility plan, but when it goes in for formal approval it can be totally sunk. (I’m not a big fan of the DSA Access reviewers, you can tell)