The guide is intended to simplify and identify procedures taken by the federal government to approve, construct, and evaluate a Department of Indian Affairs capital school building project. The approach involves extracting the basic information provided in a number of government publications and dividing the various elements into specific chapters. The first chapter explains how the Prime Minister and his Cabinet determine where and why the money goes to each department. Chapter 2, building a school, is divided into the following specific topics: project identification, project planning, design phase, construction phase, tender, day labour plan, construction, and evaluation. The final chapter explains the concept of benefit-cost analysis or, in other words, whether the benefits of building a school on a given reserve are equal to or greater than the costs. The guide stresses that the reader keep in mind that the descriptions of stages are stripped to their simplest levels and that what is presented is how the process of decision-making should occur in theory. (AH)