Boston Public School’s 10-year Master Facilities Plan, Build BPS, is still in need of further research and contextualizing before its release in early 2017, school officials told city councillors at a hearing on Tuesday evening.

The city allocated funding for a BPS master facilities plan two years ago. City Councillor Tito Jackson said “the level of urgency and the speed has not been to my liking relative to this information in raw data form being shared with [the] council.”

BPS oversees some 56,000 students in 125 schools and is allocated a $1.013 billion operating budget. The master facilities plan has the stated goal of assessing educational, demographic, facilities, financial, and community input data to create a more unified system of school with an equitable spread across the city.

Boston’s school footprint is larger than other comparably-sized districts, school officials note. More than 20 grade configurations can be found across the district, including in a number of very small schools and specialized programs not always filled to capacity.

Budgetary shortfalls between $20 and $25 million hang over school facilities discussions.

The city-commissioned “McKinsey Report” audit released last May sparked concern across the BPS community. Among several cost-saving proposals, the report said consolidating 30 to 50 of the district’s schools would save the city an initial $120 million to $200 million, and between $50 million and $85 million annually.

Parents and students panicked, though the city quickly said the report’s recommendations were not being incorporated into the independent Build BPS plan. Councillor Jackson asked at the Tuesday meeting for clarification on the McKinsey Report’s assessment that BPS could seat upwards of 90,000 students but only filled about 54,000.

Rahn Dorsey, the city’s Chief of Education, said those metrics were formulated with new school builds in mind, and the assessment underway now would incorporate more accurate standards and student need, likely to conclude with a much smaller number.

Through November and December, the administration will continue community presentations and conversations, meet with site councils, teachers, and staff, and finalize demographic reports. The final Build BPS report is expected to be released in January for site council feedback. Implementation planning for near term projects will begin in February, school officials said.

Research is still taking place, Dorsey said. The second phase of demographic analysis will provide projections of neighborhood demographics and shifts in race and income.

Some Build BPS facilities data is already available online, Dorsey said, with the rest of the planning process more focused on putting that information into a user-friendly tool for release around January. It would help provide context and make for an easier analysis of trends across schools and the district, he said.

“We do think that releasing this data without context and a little bit of a picture of what we’re trying to solve for... probably would not serve us well and wouldn’t serve the public very well,” he said.