Yes, Boston is running summer school without A/C

 Today's Boston Globe piece on BPS running summer school in buildings that don't have A/C:

After the hottest June in Boston history, the school district will reopen multiple schools for summer learning Tuesday without air conditioning to cool the students seeking to catch up after a year of mostly remote learning.

Only 29 of the 63 buildings have air conditioning, leaving the rest to resort to other methods to keep classrooms cool, including turning off overhead lights, opening windows, and using fans and blinds. The high on Tuesday is forecast to be above 90 degrees.

 ...sent me back to the numbers. The Mass School Building Authority--MSBA--did a survey of nearly all public school buildings in Massachusetts in 2016, which is a handy document to know exists. I went back to take a quick look at Boston (that starts on page 53). Boston, of course, takes up several pages; it seems to have (numbers differ!) about 130 school buildings.

And most of them have been around for awhile. 

We say that so often that it feels nearly like a quip, but here's what that ends up meaning: by my count, per the MSBA report (which, remember, is from 2016, 'though I know BPS hasn't opened a new building since), Boston has five school buildings that were new from 2017 (the Dearborne) back to 2000. Boston had another five school buildings new in the 1990's (all the late 90's, in fact), and then none in the 1980's.
If my count on that is right, that means that Boston has only ten buildings that are newer than 40 years old.

That matters for a couple of reasons: 

1. The lifespan for which schools are built now, per MSBA, is fifty years. That means that every other district building in Boston, save those built in the 1970's--of which there's at least 25; Boston went on a bit of building boom in the '70's (which was not unrelated to what else was happening the Boston Public Schools in the 1970's!)--should be cycling in for either a major renovation or rebuild.
2. Massachusetts, by and large, wasn't putting air conditioning into buildings much before then. Yes, I'm sure you'll find exceptions, but for the most part, public schools in Massachusetts aren't as full buildings being air conditioned in the 1980's, even.

The Globe notes that 29 of the 63 buildings that are running summer school have AC, so clearly other parts of this are at work, but we might also note, from the Build BPS report, how many buildings have issues with what it terms their "heating distribution systems." My sense is that some have a notion that we can simply plunk AC into existing systems. For the most part, we cannot. Many, many schools of any age are running heating systems that don't make that possible.
(And no, you absolutely cannot plug those window units into every classroom window of a school; you'll blow the circuit breakers!)

Replacing or adding HVAC systems in buildings like this is big work; it isn't something you can do around students and teachers while they're using the building, for example. Nor is it inexpensive. 
That means, for those up on MSBA and reimbursements, that those sorts of projects are the kind that tip a district over into a full renovation/replacement, which, depending on cost and other considerations like what else is going on with the building, even makes sense.

I raise this for a couple of reasons:

• Everything I said here about Boston also goes for Worcester. We're very excited to bring our new high schools online, but the majority of our buildings date back to the Second World War or before, and the vast majority neither have AC or can easily get it. Three high schools built in the past ten years is...three new schools. Add Nelson Place and that's four new schools out of nearly fifty buildings (which is a better ratio than Boston, but not great).
  And those new buildings are built under the same ticking clock on replace/renovation as anything else.
  
  
• This problem isn't going away. We're in a climate emergency, and need to recognize it.
  
  
• We have to start thinking about school buildings in terms of the climate emergency--see this good piece in The Hechinger Report, for example.