Amid record-breaking temperatures in some areas of the country, educators are forced to find alternatives for keeping their students safe and cool when their first line of defense proves itself helpless against a lingering summer heat wave despite spending millions in funding toward HVAC upgrades.
“We want to assure you that we are treating this matter with the utmost urgency,” reads a statement from Fort Worth ISD. On Monday, the district’s first day of school, 25 of its schools reported air conditioning outages, affecting nearly 100 classrooms.
Earlier this year, school board trustees approved roughly $11 million to replace heating and air conditioning units at 22 campuses, The Dallas Morning News reports. But North Texas has been met with more than 35 days of at least 100 degrees, which is unusual for a typical summer.
However, the outages affected mainly the older buildings, which included some elementary, middle and high schools. District Spokesman Cesar Padilla told The Dallas Morning News that their teams are working around the clock to ensure the HVAC systems, but there’s no estimate as to when they’ll be fixed.
“We want to emphasize that the well-being of our students and staff is our primary concern,” according to the district’s statement.
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Another Texas school district, the El Paso Independent School District, announced in July upcoming improvements to their heating and cooling systems this school year using federal relief funds. According to reports from KFOX14 in September of 2022, 29 schools across the district lacked refrigerated air conditioning in their classrooms. Instead, they utilized evaporative cooling systems, also known as swamp coolers.
“These upgrades, which are ESSER federally funded projects, address concerns expressed by community members and will provide comfortable settings for students to thrive,” reads a statement from the district received by KFOX14. “The district is actively developing a comprehensive plan to minimize disruption to our students and staff during the implementation of these projects.”
Until those upgrades are made, parents are voicing their concerns as they send their children off to school where proper air conditioning is lacking.
Parents told KFOX14 that the swamp coolers being used at some of the older buildings aren’t enough to keep their kids cool. The district also said it would keep a few windows cracked at some schools to keep air circulating.
“The record heat is just subpar of an ideal environment for them to learn and for the teacher to be able to perform their job and their ability,” one parent said.
School buildings aren’t the only places being impacted by extreme heat. Bus drivers at the Ascension Parish School District in Louisiana are pleading for air conditioning on their buses, WBRZ reports. As temperatures reach 100 degrees outside, temperatures inside their buses can reach well over 125 degrees.
“The heat from the motor is coming in our faces and in our laps,” one driver told WBRZ. “And all of the small children sit in the front, pre-K, kindergarten. They’re getting the majority of the heat also.”
Jared Bercegeay, vice president of the school board, said in a Facebook post that adding AC to the district’s nearly 300 buses would cost a total of $23 million. However, the district can only utilize general funds toward transportation, which is the same funding source used for salaries, educational needs and other important matters.
“As a board, we analyze all spending and make conservative decisions on where to allocate funds,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, we do not have unlimited funds, and by law must operate on a balanced budget.”
