In a city where most of the 56,000 public school students sit in classrooms without air conditioning, the growing frequency of hot and humid days at the start and end of the school year has not gone unnoticed. According to Jessica Tang, President of the Boston Teachers Union, only 37 out of 127 school buildings have HVAC.
“Every year, particularly in June but also in May and in the fall school starts, we get reports on classrooms that have extremely high temperatures,” said Tang, who recalled putting paper on her windows to block the sun when she began teaching in 2004. Her classroom had neither air conditioners nor window shades. “As you can imagine it’s a huge distraction for students to be learning in that kind of environment, and even taking high stakes tests and final exams in sweltering classrooms.”
Many of Boston’s public schools were built before World War II and suffer from aging or lacking infrastructure. Others built in the 1970s are in desperate need of retrofitting and repairs. According to a 2017 city report, more than half of Boston public schools have deficient air quality, which can trigger asthma attacks, a disease that plagues on average 16% of students across the district and 30% in some schools.
“We have young people who come and they have heat rashes, we have young people who say they feel like passing out and we have young people who have passed out because it’s too hot,” Jenny Fernandez, a youth program director at the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health, told the Boston Herald in 2019. Fernandez works with a group of volunteer teachers and students to track temperatures in Boston Public Schools.
The district does not currently have a plan to install more air conditioning in its buildings, and teachers like Michael Maguire at the Boston Latin Academy say the problem is getting worse. “It might’ve been just a couple of weeks in June in the old days, but starting in May, probably all the way to mid-October, the classroom is warm,” Maguire said. “They just can’t concentrate as much, their heads are down, it’s harder to focus, they get irritated, and the message it sends the kids is that they’re not important. It’s frustrating.”
The lack of cooling infrastructure has come up as an issue in contract negotiations with the Boston Teachers Union, according to Tang. The BTU is now partnering with the American Federation of Teachers and building trades to push for a Green New Deal for schools that would address the need to update facilities and build new schools, creating both union jobs and cost savings with more efficient energy use. “That’s something that could go back into our communities and our schools,” said Tang. “At the minimum it helps our students learn when they’re in comfortable environments.”
In 2019, State Rep. Joan Meschino and State Senator Patrick O’Connor cosponsored a bill that would authorize a study of the maximum and minimum allowable temperatures for classrooms, and would create a commission to evaluate the process of upgrading and installing air conditioning in public schools. As of yet, the city is still unprepared to deal with extreme temperatures — including potential snow days that might extend the school year to late June — and when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Tang says, the district’s lack of air conditioning and ventilation problems delayed its reopening.
In the meantime, students’ health and productivity will continue to suffer — especially for children of color, who make up the majority of the district’s student population. A 2018 study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that for every 1°F increase in school year temperature, the amount learned that year will be reduced by 1 percent — an impact that is nearly entirely offset by air conditioning.
Boston Public Schools will incur some of the highest cooling costs in the country. To read more about all of Massachusetts’ schools, check out the Massachusetts state page.