Essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently in the South schools are fitted with air conditioning, but in Philadelphia and Baltimore schools cannot afford a bit of insulation and some air conditioners.
Climate change is forcing schools to close early for ‘heat days’
With no air conditioning and no money to install it, districts are sending students home
By Laura Meckler and
Anna Phillips
June 4, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDTTemperatures kept rising in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Finally, it was just too hot to keep students in classrooms without air conditioning. On Tuesday, both systems let students out early.
For Principal Richard M. Gordon IV, it was just another early-summer day in the halls of his West Philadelphia high school, where sweltering temperatures, high humidity and a lack of ventilation made classrooms so uncomfortable that students could barely sit still.
“Can I honestly say effective learning is happening in my building? I can’t,” said Gordon, the principal of Paul Robeson High School.
Climate change poses a growing threat to American schools. Regions where extreme heat was once rare — from the Northeast to the Pacific Northwest — now periodically find their buildings unbearably hot as spring turns to summer and again when classes resume in August or September.
In much of the South, air conditioning has long been a necessity, and schools are typically outfitted with centralized systems, although rising temperatures may require upgrades.
But in places such as Philadelphia, air conditioning was a luxury decades ago, when most school buildings were constructed. Perhaps there was a hot day in mid-June or an uncomfortable swelter in early September. They were flukes.
No more. Urban areas, in particular, tend to have a dangerous combination of older buildings, less money to upgrade them and concentrated heat. Designed to maximize space in crowded environments, urban schools often lack green space and shade. Asphalt often covers their playgrounds and other open spaces, radiating heat during the summer.
…
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/06/04/school-heat-days-climate-change/
My first impulse was to slam Principal Richard Gordon for being a useless teacher making excuses, but in 2020 Principal Gordon received “National Principal of the Year” award – so maybe the problem is not him. And reading the article carefully, Principal Gordon just said the classrooms were too hot – maybe the global warming claims were added to the story by the journalist. And to be fair, the pictures of the schools I’ve viewed, they look like ovens – large blank sun facing walls made of bricks, no obvious attempt to mitigate the heat, say by covering the walls with heat reflective paint.
Of course, that leaves the question – why can’t Baltimore and Philadelphia schools afford a bit of building maintenance and air-conditioned comfort for their students?
The article I quoted suggests teachers are fed up with the political neglect of their students’ needs.
One possible explanation for the lack of cash for schools is that civic leaders of Baltimore and Philadelphia are too busy blowing money combatting climate change to spare some funding to care for their crumbling educational facilities.
In January this year, Mayor Brandon of Baltimore promised over $100 million by my calculation, to support the city’s net zero push. Given a basic aircon system costs around $1000, that would have been enough cash to install 100,000 air conditioners in Baltimore’s classrooms.
Philadelphia also committed to Net Zero in 2021. Although the Philadelphia document didn’t throw budget numbers around, I think we can be safe assuming Philadelphia is also wasting crazy amounts of cash chasing the carbon demon, when they should be taking care of their children’s educational facilities.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood the situation, it looks like some complicated things are happening. There may be other issues I’m unaware of. But from what I have read, if I was a voter in Baltimore or Philadelphia, I would demand that my civic leaders stop wasting money on “climate emergencies” and other irrelevant grandstanding nonsense, at least until real problems like the poor state of their district’s school buildings was addressed.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
They spend over $16,000 per pupil per year in Baltimore and can’t afford air conditioning. To this, one might say, “Bullshit.”
I’m inclined to give Principal Gordon the benefit of the doubt. From what I saw in England most of that money is likely consumed by back seat driver bureaucrats micromanaging the principals.
“One possible explanation for the lack of cash for schools is that civic leaders of Baltimore and Philadelphia are too busy blowing money combatting climate change to spare some funding to care for their crumbling educational facilities.”
You can add high-salaried diversity departments as well as useless courses to
this list. School security, if inadequate, should be a higher priority than AC.
You may be right but what I’s seeing in today’s world, anything run by Democrats in which awards are given, are not given for excellence but for having the “right thinking,” especially, if one is in the “right” segment of the population currently favored by Democrats.
Yes, but I give no benefit of the doubt to the “journalist” who is unworthy of that title who saw fit to use this as another chance to pimp the “climate crisis” bullshit.
The issue is that most big city buildings were built last century, many over 50 years old. They are not designed to make this retrofit cost effective. The cavity walls lack adequate insulation if it is even there. Many have flat asphalt roofs with R-8 to10 insulation board. Totally inadequate.
The fenestration in many buildings is single pane uncoated glass and needs replacement to make AC effective.
When you start tearing out walls to run ductwork you find asbestos.
The only reasonable approach is demolition and start over.
Spent 50 years in the energy business including designing and building HVAC systems.
UHI has effected most inner city buildings. PECO just announced rate increases due to Gov. Wolf’s unconstitutional RGGI initiative. Philadelphia is f#cked.
These schools have been adequate for the last 50 to 100 years but they now are too hot for the students. The data shows that heat waves aren’t getting worse and the fraction of a degree rise in temperature isn’t noticeable, so what is the real problem?
My K-12 education, with exception of the 6th grade which was in a separate newly constructed school that had a/c (built due to the student volume of that time), was in buildings with no a/c. The classrooms had big windows and you opened the top end of them with “window poles.” The bottom half you just opened by hand.
If it was hot, you perspired. And if it was raining and the rain was blowing in, you closed the windows, heat be damned. We never got a day off because we were sweating.
And the same idiots crying about the lack of a/c are the ones trying to make it unavailable through their anti-fossil fuel campaigning. It’s sadly becoming a strict correlation between how educated you are and how clueless and detached from reality you are.
What is the real problem? Increased urban activity – more people, more cars and more infrastructure creates more heat within the urban bubble. If you’re going to encourage more people to move to urban areas then you’ve got to start dealing with more waste heat and activity than these buildings were designed to cope with.
Put some in-window or portable a/c units in, and plastic wrap over the windows. And get back to your books, class!
Everyone in government just wants to gold-plate every project – NASA and the military have been very bad role models for the public ‘service’.
Has it actually got warmer, or are teachers and student just becoming limp-wristed wimps through indoctrination?
USCRN shows very little warming in the last 17 years
PS, and the article is all about urban heat effect, not “climate change”
It may have gotten more crowded in the classrooms
Perhaps the classrooms weren’t originally designed to accommodate large numbers of computers and other heat-generating devices
Less crowded, Eric.
When I started attending school back in the 1950s, some of my school’s classes had 50-70 students per class.
A decade later the school boards’ and politicians decided on maximum students per class room. Numbers far smaller than 70 children crammed into the rooms.
Nowadays, they whine if classrooms have more than 24 students.
Most of my high school classes had 30 something students…
I dought the classrooms are more crowded today than they were when I was in school (“baby boom” was certainly evident in terms of student numbers back then).
The hallways in my high school were like a Lexington Avenue line subway train during rush hour at times – it was ridiculous.
What has been the population increase in Philadelphia between when these buildings were built and today? More people, more activity means far more waste heat, all contained within that urban bubble. There is no climate change, this is an urban microclimate problem.
Never let a (made up) crisis go to waste.
Ahhh memories . . .
All my school years spent in un-airconditioned, un-ceiling-fanned rooms full of stinky boys with sociopathic nuns wielding canes left, right & centre.
Mainly what we learned was –
survival!
But then when I got to university –
NOTHING CHANGED! 🙁
For a minute there I thought we went to the same school. But my school didn’t have nuns, and we had paddles, not canes. Everything else was the same, though.
Choir practice was the worst time.
20 or so of us sardined together on the stand, then “Farts” Flanagan would let one go that stayed with us for the whole repertoire.
Was he in tune?
More so than the piano we had for “music”.
I had unairconditioned and unfanned rooms but they were built with high ceilings and windows that open. I was blessed in that the nuns I had were great and wonderful educators.
Amazing for Cumbria at the (early June) time 46 or 47 years ago, there came A Sunny Day
It was also maths (O Level) exam day and I found myself with a window seat
(They’d used an ordinary classroom but mandated 2 of every 3 desks be vacant)
This was The Grammar School and you had to wear your school uniform – black blazer, white shirt and blue & yellow neck-tie at all times.
The examiner saw my distress and I was allowed to remove my blazer.
-still no good
The neck-tie came off
-still sitting in a lake
So he drew the curtain to stop the sun shining in on me and my desk
The reduction in direct sun and also, effectively, snow-blindness so I could read the exam paper allowed me to get a A
Simple things
I’d have got an A++++ super duper mega ++++ if 20 minutes out of a 2 hour exam hadn’t been lost
i.e. Why wasn’t I allowed to move to another desk NOT in direct sun?
The slide into mediocrity and oblivion was starting even then…………..
My memory of hot days in Scottish schools too. Windows all along one waall usually facing southwards rather than north.
How I hated sitting in the sun even in winter. Sunshine on the white jotter, it’s no wonder I had regular migraines
Oh god yes – Grammar School rules. We had green blazers and green, white and gold ties and they were very warm; woe betide you if you were spotted without blazer or tie before you got home!
You took the words right out of my mouth! No air conditioning and no ceiling fans. Just large windows with slatted blinds both in elementary school and high school.
Of course I grew up in a rural area where the kids all played outside in the heat or did chores on the farm in the heat. We were all used to it!
Part of the problem today is that most of the kids have air conditioning at home and don’t spend all day outside in the heat (when not in school). So the contrast between home and school is large. With no acclimation to the environment what do the liberal elites expect?
That the “leaders” in the cities have chosen to chase the NetZero phantom with big taxpayer bucks, says a lot about their intelligence and priorities. Climate change is not a problem, prioritizing the upgrades for schools seems to be. Virtue signaling at its finest at the expense of the school system and education. Not surprised.
The claim that heat waves are more common is utter trash. It’s easily refutable. I want to identify who these reporters are and their editors and confront them with the facts.
Why would they bother to look at your list of facts …they make up their own every day !!
Embarrassment and public ridicule? Eventually it works.
Philly’s Hottest Ever Day Happened 100 Years Ago, the High Temp Hit 106
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/100th-anniversary-of-phillys-106-degree-day-hottest-ever-recorded/57496/
This is total b.s. I lived in eastern Canada in the 70’s and the heat and humidity were unbearable. Oh and as to the Pacific N.W. where I live now, come and visit but bring your parka. We’ve got the heat on.
I lived 40 miles south of Baltimore in the 70s, and the heat and humidity were unbearable. That’s the climate of the mid-Atlantic. By June, the heat starts to become unbearable, and by September it starts to get a bit better but is frequently still unbearable. Perhaps Principal Gordon just moved to Baltimore from the Arctic Circle.
My Michigan schools, K thru college, we’re not air conditioned. We survived, although it was often quite uncomfortable around Memorial Day. People all over the world live with discomfort, too hot or too cold, every year. Worse than heat and humidity during the day is trying to sleep when it’s hot and humid.
BS. An available excuse for poor performance.
They have the funds to do building maintenance, but keeping the city councilman’s nephew on the payroll matters more.
The schools also have billions of dollars in covid funding not yet spent. They should buy themselves some air conditioners.
And it was just as warm in the recent past as it is today. The heat of the past was not “a fluke” as the author of this article claimed. The author must be very young, and/or ignorant of history to make such a claim. Or perhaps the author has an agenda.
I’m going with with “D. All of the above.”
It may seem odd, but something like 50 years ago they were doing similar things if the temperatures were in the 90s during the school year. Since this is the action done in the past for the same circumstance, I’m not sure how the climate change nonsense figures into it. You’d have to show and increasing trend of hot days during the school year over the last 30 years and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t exist.
May 2019 had 3 straight 90+ days as did the previous September. Strategic whining-
it’s an election year!
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/baltimore/historic?month=5&year=2019
At my primary school in Western Australia it had to be over 105F for an hour.
In Wisconsin when I was growing up (w/o AC), school was not scheduled in the “warm” months of June, July and August. May we suggest the good burghers of Baltimore and Philly do the same?
The burgers are really good in Baltimore and Philly, so are the hot dogs.
I wonder if they have heard of a marvellous new invention – opening windows?
Also, fans. Those may be too new fangled for these folks, though.
This is a clear case for addressing specific issues.
It would be interesting to compare the energy released in say Baltimore now compared with 50 years ago as well as the amount of treeless built environment. I would be surprised if this did not make it at least 3 to 4C warmer.
So clearly the the money being spent on wind generators and solar panels in the countryside to reduce CO2 emissions would be much better spent on improving the classroom environment.
So misdirecting scullions on useless stuff rather than addressing immediate issues with pocket change.
I grew up between Philadelphia and Baltimore in the 1960s and 70s. Our brick schools (in nice suburban districts) had no air conditioning. There were quite a few uncomfortably hot days.
I can remember arguments with the teachers when we crafted paper fans to try to cool ourselves. They claimed the extra activity to work the fans made us hotter than if we just sat there – I think they just didn’t want the distraction…
And when I lived near Seattle in the late 1970s, I was amused to learn that they closed the schools there when the temperature hit 82F (28C) due to excessive heat.
Probably happened 1 day every 5 years or so. The average Memorial day temp in Seattle Is 69, the 90th percentile is 79.
We lived in Seattle for 8 years during the 1980s. I vividly recall one glorious Memorial Day weekend. My husband said he hoped that wasn’t summer. It was.
Ed Bo: “I can remember arguments with the teachers when we crafted paper fans to try to cool ourselves.”
–
–
Ha! That’s where I learned to fold paper fans. Our teachers would pass out colored paper, let us scribble fanciful imagined ‘Oriental’ designs on it, then we folded them and used them.
Somehow, we always made fans on hot days, and for some reason, we mysteriously didn’t have an Art project that week.
I didn’t figure it out until years later, but the teachers were using that to fulfill the Art Education time block. 🤣
It seems that they are taking the path of attempting to control the climate rather than adapting to whatever it may have in store. Good luck with that.
They are merely following the recommendations of scientists like Prince Charles, Attenborough, the Pope, Mann, Gore, etc. All of them are so arrogant as to believe they can control Nature!
Especially when even if their imaginary crisis WAS real, China, India, and other “developing nations” will ENSURE that “emissions” WILL continue to climb, NO MATTER WHAT ‘we’ do.
Of course, here in this place called REALITY, adapting to whatever changes to the climate ACTUALLY HAPPEN is the only “choice” we ever had. The notion that we are going to stop the climate from changing, or direct how much or in what way it changes, particularly via attempts to regulate CO2 emissions, when CO2 from ANY source has NEVER been empirically shown to drive the Earth’s temperature, is just delusional.
As probably almost everyone knows, when politicians and bureaucrats want to increase taxes or create new taxes and fees, but the voting population seems disinclined to accept the bait, they start cutting back on police and fire budgets because those generally have the most widely noticeable results for people at large. Who is going to notice the loss of some cushy perks for politicians and bureaucrats except those same politicians and bureaucrats? ‘School children are suffering’ is another such popular attention getter.
Baltimore is a scary place. There is a murder a day in the city. Before the pandemic, the city was given enough money to add AC to all schools. For some reason, with the kids learning remotely, the city did not try to accelerate the work with the schools empty. City Hall stayed closed for nearly 2 years because of the pandemic and just opened 2 months ago. Lack of AC is an indication of administrative disfunction, not climate change.
Besides missing AC, Baltimore is missing students. To make the enrollment numbers work for funding, they enroll kids who never attend class called ghost students. https://www.mdpolicy.org/research/detail/baltimore-schools-1-billion-ghost-student-fraud-should-be-investigated-by-state-ig-institute-says It seems that missing students ought to be a bigger problem than missing AC.
Here in Colorado it’s a balance. We have many homes (I’ve had one) without A/C, and much of the summer it’s fine because a box fan in the window at night (at 39°N, summer nights are still acceptably long) gets you by. However, our homes and buildings are designed to trap heat. This is a good thing for most of the year in Colorado, but at times during high summer, late June until the end of August, it is difficult. But school is usually out then. My feeling is, suck it up, but in much warmer and more humid climates, we have HVAC, you know…
If it happens 5 days a year then it’s not worth installing air-conditioning for. Go outside and have class on the lawn under a tree.
We had exactly the same problem when I was in highschool, in the early fall there would be temps to that hit 105 in late September in the North Bay Area in California. We didn’t have air-conditioning then either. That was in the early 70’s, so it’s hard to blame on global warming.
Studied in South America grwoing up, school and unoversity, right at the Tropic of Capricorn. Never been in a air-conditioned classroom, and my school demanded long pants from 5th grade on.
Bunch of wimps.
I hear you, my old school didn’t close early unless the outside temperature hit 100F. But the school buildings I saw look awful, multi-story brick boxes, no paint or trees.
Ditto for the schools I attended, with the exception of a newly constructed “annex” for Junior High due to the number of students.
And you really aren’t supposed to paint brick – it needs to breathe.
“…For Principal Richard M. Gordon IV, it was just another early-summer day in the halls of his West Philadelphia high school, where sweltering temperatures, high humidity and a lack of ventilation made classrooms so uncomfortable that students could barely sit still.”
And all the billions for classroom ventilation for Covid went where in Philadelphia?
Start the school day at 6 am and finish at noon in the Summer.
Is that too difficult or unmanageable?
They’ll probably say it’s racist, sexist, misogynistic or something to make students go to school that early.
The question to ask is: have the cities warmed in recent years? They seem to have managed without A/C in the past, the schools were built without it, so what, if anything, has changed?
People are used to A/C at home, so they are going to be sucky if there is no A/C at school.
A/C was relatively more expensive ‘back then’ as well – only luxury cars had it say 50 yrs ago, now it comes standard on many cars.
No climate crisis induced global melt down inferno doomsday involved.
I didn’t have ac in any car I owned from 1965 through 1990 when we bought our first Jeep Cherokee. I didn’t die. My wife didn’t die. My kids didn’t die.