on hot weather, New England, air conditioning, climate change, and, of course, schools

 Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?
Avril Lavigne

If you were in or around schools last week, there's a very good chance that you had one, if not repeated, conversations about the heat. 

To clarify a few things first:

• Yes, it's actually hot. This year, we had the hottest July on record in the hottest summer on record. Last week was breaking records across the Northeast and Midwest. Here's the average temperature for the month of September in Massachusetts going back to 1895, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: 
  
  
  
  
  
• And as you can from the above, no, it did not used to be this hot ("when I was in school") and thus, no, districts didn't used to "just have school anyway." This is part of a trend.
  
  
• Yes, this does have an impact on students and staff. First, yes, it makes it harder to learn. There's strong research backing up the impact heat has on academic performance, which like so many things is also demographically inequitable: 
  

  ...the impact is substantially larger for Black and Hispanic students than for White students, for at least two reasons. First, Black and Hispanic students tend to live in parts of the country that experience more days of extreme heat. Second, Black and Hispanic students are less likely to attend schools (or live at home) with adequate air conditioning. We show that the combination of these two factors implies that hot school days explain about 5% of the racial gap in PSAT scores. 

• Heat also has an impact on staff and student health. Children are naturally more susceptible to heat illnesses like dehydration and heat stroke. Those with asthma and other conditions may find it more difficult to breathe. And children aren't the only ones in buildings, of course; staff, some of whom may have their own health complications, are also in the same buildings, as noted by the National Education Association, which are then heated further by lots of bodies in those classrooms. 
  
  

Thus it is hot and we have to care about it. 

Why haven't we done something about this already?

There's two main reasons, the first of which is possibly apparent the above chart: the number of days in a school year that the average Massachusetts school has needed air conditioning prior to the past twenty or so years was small, unless they were running summer programming. Very few places spend money on schools for things that won't be needed often, and so schools across New England traditionally have not had air conditioning. 

The second? We, not just as a city, not just as a state, but as a country, don't actually spend nearly enough on school buildings. See, for example, the last "State of Our Schools" national report from 2021: 

Districts are spending about $110 billion every year on maintenance, operations, and capital construction – but the educational facilities standards for good stewardship necessitates nearly $195 billion. 

Thus when you read the headline about more Boston schools having air conditioning this year, be sure you read far enough down: 

Retrofitting some of Boston's aging school buildings with window AC units was a heavy lift, Forde said. In addition to ordering and installing the custom-built window units, officials also had to upgrade most of the buildings' electrical systems — Forde says they weren't designed to power anything more than light bulbs.

You cannot simply plug in individual AC units in school buildings. While it isn't clear to me if the $7M is just the window units, or is also the electrical upgrades, this is part of Boston's New Green Deal: a deliberate and focused investment in school buildings, not something that the district simply could do. And the reason for the electrical upgrade, of course, is that window AC units are a major electrical draw, which then raises questions of both long-term costs (the district has to pay for electricity) and the long term climate cost of using all of that electricity.

When the Globe then followed up with a piece that lauded the virtues of heat pumps, noting their much more responsible use of electricity, one again had to read far enough down to get to the catch: 

...when it comes to upgrading Massachusetts’ school buildings, it can be complicated to switch over to heat pumps, which first require that buildings are weatherized and insulated and may necessitate major electrical upgrades.

And where is the money for this going to come from? School facilities in the United States are overwhelmingly funded locally. Even in Massachusetts, where we have the strong partnership with the Massachusetts School Building Authority, the funding of the authority is (while larger this year) still too small by testimony of its own board: 

Following Pichetti’s update, board member Sean Cronin chimed in to say that while what the executive director presented was helpful and “obviously great news on all the fronts,” it amounted to a “short-term band-aid” and not a solution to long-term challenges the agency faces.

“I think there’s a larger fix to the problem. And the problem being defined as not having enough money to do as many projects or to increase caps so that poorer districts get closer to their real reimbursement rate,” Cronin, the Department of Revenue’s senior deputy commissioner for local services, said.

When there is underfunding of that nature, we see precisely what we did with operational budgets: this who have the ability to fund more do, and those who have less ability simply fund less. Translated into school buildings, that means both buildings not built, and buildings not repaired and maintained to the same degree or extent.

And the powers of the MSBA are strictly legislatively restricted--to new school buildings, extensively renovated buildings, or new boilers, roofs, and windows. And while there is action on that last: 

Pichetti said the agency is “proposing a study to understand what would be needed to bring forward a change to electric and consider boiler replacement using heat pump conversions.”

...if it is only the heat pumps, that's only going to do districts so much good; they need the full building retrofits for that to be worthwhile.  

In testimony before Congress last March, officials testifying referred to this gap in funding as "a national security issue":

The annual gap between what's needed and what's invested nationwide nearly doubled from $46 billion in 2016 to $85 billion in 2021..."Education is the foundation," da Silva said. "If we don't do it at the federal level soon, I fear we're going to reach a point where it's really difficult to bounce back."

Similarly, Mike Pickens, the executive director of the National Council on School Facilities in an interview in 2022 said: 

“We’re getting to a critical stage now,” said Mike Pickens, executive director of the National Council on School Facilities. “The average age of a school building now is from 49 to 50 years” – the highest in memory. Some schools date back to World War II.

And, Worcester and others would add, many date back even farther. 

 And while air conditioning and other temperature controls are only part of that facilities need, it is part of that greater need and enormous gap. To go back to the EdWeek piece cited above: 

The ongoing global threat posted by climate change is bringing more severe storms and extreme temperatures to many parts of the country. States anticipate devoting larger chunks of their facilities' budgets to emergency repairs, which means fewer resources will be devoted to routine, maintenance and other needed, proactive renovation.

Climate change isn't, of course, just heat. As I write this, Leominster has just announced a second day of closed schools due to flooding from yesterday's storm, where they are estimating they received nine inches of rain in a single (non-hurricane) storm.  Andover and North Andover schools were closed Monday due to storm damage from last Friday. And that is just Massachusetts, and I am only talking right now about the past two weeks.

While I am not a cock-eyed optimist, I have often thought that one has to be at least something of an optimist to work in public education policy; we're so often the ones fighting uphill battles. This one's a doozy. 
Our kids are for certain depending on us fighting on this one. It isn't about a growing number of half days, or sweating it out in sweltering classrooms for more days. It's about if the buildings they learn in are worthy of the charge of public education: 

Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties...