Urban disaster risk management and reduction requires the development and periodic updating of regional building inventories. However, the development of such inventories can be very cost-intensive and time-consuming, making this a challenging task, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. We used a combination of side-walk and remote survey methods to develop an inventory of 2536 school buildings in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Central Sulawesi region was affected by the 28th September 2018 Palu earthquake. The moment magnitude (Mw) 7.5 earthquake caused intense ground shaking in the epicentral area, triggering liquefaction, tsunami and major landslides, leading to over 4,000 fatalities and 165,000 displaced people. At least 1299 schools were reported to have been damaged or collapsed, affecting about 184,000 students. The developed inventory includes information on location, number of stories, occupancy characteristics (building use and population), age, type of lateral load resisting systems, building materials, structural vulnerabilities, and structural conditions following the 2018 earthquake. The developed database can be used in pre-event/long-term risk analysis and management, post-event/near-real-time loss estimation, and regional-level decision-making on school assets and related policies. The database has been made available for public use and can be readily harmonised with similar databases for other regions. This data repository also contains information on interviews with 30 school principals in the region. The interview details the damage states and functional recovery trajectory of school buildings in the 30 schools.