Summer may be coming to a close, but that doesn’t guarantee that many classrooms opening across New York City this week won’t be stifling, as lingering elevated outdoor temperatures and indoor temperatures keep old buildings and everyone in them feeling the heat.
Even when temperatures begin to drop as fall approaches, some public school students are experiencing more frequent uncomfortably hot days in summer and the shoulder months of September, October, and March through May. A 2022 Chalkbeat analysis of federal data found that more than 30 days of the school year are at temperatures of at least 80 degrees.
“You get the hottest temperatures in September,” said Janice Quiles-Reyes, an arts educator and former parent coordinator. “The whole month of September fluctuates so much. You get some of the hottest, most stagnant pockets inside a classroom.”
Extreme heat has a negative effect on health — it leads to an average of 350 deaths every year in New York City. Children are among the most vulnerable to the effects of heat, with symptoms including increased sweating, swelling in hands, clammy skin, and muscle cramps.
“They’re far more sensitive to heat … and then you’re trying to teach them, in 110 degrees?” said Tricia Geisel, a former school nurse and a workplace health and safety specialist for New York State United Teachers (NYSUT). The union’s report last year on extreme heat provided testimonies from hundreds of teachers on the sweltering conditions in their classrooms across the state.
“Children’s learning conditions are staff’s working conditions,” Geisel said. “Who could really function” at such temperatures?
Heat has other negative impacts for the students: Student performance drops in class, and testing scores for Regents exams and PSATs go down as temps go up. Children, including younger ones and those with disabilities, are also often unaware of how the heat is affecting them or cannot speak up for themselves. Teachers like Quiles-Reyes say students’ tempers also flare as patience wears thin on hot days.
“A lot of the fights would break out in the hallways,” said Quiles-Reyes. She believes that the heat compounds other issues at older, underfunded schools where she’s worked in Sunnyside, Queens, and the South Bronx, further disenfranchising her students, most of whom are of color.
“We’re all clawing at all these other levels of oppression, and then we can’t even have a say in how our environment feels, and when we do try to make our environment feel softer, more open, cooler, it’s just not enough. And then it gets taken away from us, because systemically, the inspection says we’re in violation,” she said.
There isn’t complete data about air conditioning in schools nor good information about A/Cs by classrooms, but it’s been reported that 38% of New York City schools lack air conditioning. Back in 2017, the de Blasio administration announced that the city would get air conditioning in all classrooms by 2022. A 2021 report to the City Council reported that one in five classrooms still did not have A/Cs. When asked about updated figures, a spokesperson for the NYC Department of Education provided the Amsterdam News with the following statement: “Every instructional space that was part of the AC for All initiative has been equipped with air conditioning and school custodians are ensuring that HVAC systems are operational.”
“Children’s learning conditions are staff’s working conditions… [at such high temperatures] who could really function?”
– Tricia Geisel, former school nurse and workplace health & safety specialist
Most New York City schools are also in older buildings: Half of NYC’s schools, more than 1,400 in all, were built before 1949. These aged buildings were built before the widespread use of air conditioning; without a major overhaul of their HVAC units, they would not be able to keep a school cool.
Cooling schools and updating HVAC systems is a complex and expensive endeavor, said Geisel. The city has spent more than $400 million in capital costs and A/C installations.
No two schools are alike, so recommendations for repairs and maintenance vary depending on the reported needs of a school. The New York State Department of Education requires schools to complete a building condition survey every five years to identify conditions and potential issues.
The reality is that schools depend on someone in the building to see the process through, said Todd Crawford, a research scientist at the New York State Department of Health’s School Environmental Health Program, a program that provides guidance and best practices to schools across the state.
“Things really get done when there’s one particular person or group of people that are really interested,” said Crawford. This might be the special ed teacher or a janitor who takes on the cause and stays on it, he said; they refer to those who take on this initiative as “champions.”
Formal processes exist to report broken A/Cs, but Quiles-Reyes said that when she tried to get her classroom’s A/C replaced since it was not working, she was told that the process relied on her school’s main office to handle the communications to get a repair done.
Another challenge with cooling schools is that there are no rules regulating how cool schools should be. Schools, like all buildings, have to provide heat in the wintertime, and there are temperature limits on how cold it can get, “but there isn’t an upper temperature limit in the summer or in the heat,” Crawford said.
Teachers’ unions have advocated for legislation to mandate a maximum temperature for schools. In April, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) passed a resolution calling on NYC to adopt its own heat thresholds for classrooms. NYSUT took a mobile sauna to Albany and challenged legislators to feel the heat that students, staff, and teachers experience. The latest bill to establish a maximum indoor temperature in schools and indoor facilities has passed the State Senate and assembly. A spokesperson for the governor’s office said she’s in the process of reviewing hundreds of bills, including this one.
Nationally, a lot of schools don’t have extreme heat policies, said Melissa Guardaro, an extreme heat researcher at Arizona State University. Part of making sure a school is “heat-ready” is making sure kids are safe at school outdoors as well.
“Just like we need policy about workers and exposure, we need policy about children and exposure,” Guardaro said. “There aren’t really a lot of school policies around that say when it’s over x degrees, we are not going to have outdoor recess, or when it’s x degrees predicted, we will have an hour of recess in the morning as they arrive.”
A/Cs in windows along façade of Prospect Heights High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. (left) and school playground at St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn, New York. (right) (Helina Selemon photos)
Guardaro runs a training program throughout 51 schools in Phoenix for school staff, such as nurses and principals, about how to monitor students during recess and other activities when it’s very hot. The program, called the HeatReady Schools project, also aims at cooling outdoor areas where kids play, involving the community, and preparing people at school to know the signs and implement the policies for their school.
Quiles-Reyes said parents may play a part in changing the momentum. “Parents have such a strong voice,” she said. It may be hard for some parents to know just how bad it can be in the classroom, though, she added.
She now teaches at a school in Brooklyn — a new building that is fully air-conditioned — but she still remembers an early day of her career in Queens when she was bringing snacks for students who were taking exams in extreme heat.
“I walked into a classroom where it was just all Brown faces in tears in the sweaty heat; all their little upper lips were all beaded,” she said. She sighed. “And I walked out of there, and I just went to my office and started crying. Like, how can I be a part of this? And now, what can I do?”
Quiles said she never regretted speaking up about the extreme heat at her schools, although some might be discouraged if leadership took issue with their complaints. “All of us ever said, anytime we were in small groups and safe groups and clusters … we just want to teach.”
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For educators, school staff, and administrators: The NY State School Environmental Health Program will host a free health conference on “Climate Action in Schools” in Saratoga Springs, NY, on Thursday, Oct. 24. Register by Friday, Oct. 4, at 5 p.m.
Support for this reporting was provided by the Wake Forest University Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative. Helina Selemon is a 2024 fellow of the program.