POWAY, Calif. — It’s reading, writing...and rising temperatures in the classroom for students in Rancho Bernardo, and now, relief is on the horizon as Poway Unified School District has been working on solutions.
“With hot temperatures in the classroom, that stuffiness, that humidity, we’ve been hearing from our students and staff that those are less than ideal learning conditions. It’s hard to concentrate,” said Christine Paik, spokesperson for Poway Unified.
Since Friday, students have had special minimum half-day schedules to minimize their exposure to the afternoon heat. CBS 8 has learned that the school district will be extending the minimum day schedule beyond Wednesday, as originally planned, to Thursday and Friday also.
Since school started back up two weeks ago, CBS 8 has reported how students and teachers have been dealing with temperatures of over 85 degrees in the classroom and a thirty-year-old air conditioning system prone to failure.
Repairs to the HVAC system have kept the A/C running the past few days, but students CBS 8 talked with said the A/C is working in some classrooms but not in others.
“My middle schooler said yesterday that the A/C was working in her two classes and she was comfortable,” said parent Amber Stefanick. “My high schooler does not have air conditioning yet.”
To deal with these ongoing issues, Poway Unified bought 177 portable air conditioning units, costing $75,000 dollars. They can be placed in classrooms and held on standby as backups in case the main system fails again.
“It was a top priority for the school district to try to figure out how we can provide steady, reliable cooling, especially with this heat wave coming,” said Paik.
It would cost $10 million dollars to replace the entire HVAC system, so as a short-term fix, they plan to spend $100,000 dollars to rent a 600-ton chiller for two months that will bypass the existing one.
“This A/C HVAC system is outdated and it’s been very unreliable and so after multiple attempts to make repairs, we determined that the next option would be to bring in a chiller to bypass the system,” said Paik. “Hopefully that will be installed by the end of this week.”
Parents are grateful to Poway Unified for moving quickly on this, but they’re also frustrated because it’s been a problem for many years.
“This is not a surprise. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to the district,” said Stefanick. “It’s something we feel that they should have been setting aside funding for and being more proactive instead of waiting until we, you know, obviously have no choice but to replace it now.”
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