In 2016, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Chicago that the city’s remaining 61 schools without air conditioning would receive it by the following spring, at a cost of $27 million in capital budget expenditures. Over the six years prior, the City and school district spent $135 million cooling over 200 schools — but with more frequent extreme heat days suffocating the city, there was much more work to be done.
But 2017 came and went, and as heat waves bore down on the city over the years following, the district instead found itself delivering thousands of fans to keep students cool. Parents and teachers were still reaching deep into their own pocketbooks to install portable air conditioners in scorching classrooms.
Even in schools with air conditioning, many units are failing, in need of repair or complete overhaul. Since the spring of 2020, the district has spent $100 million upgrading its HVAC systems in public school buildings that are an average of 80 years old. “It is impossible to learn or teach effectively in a sweltering school, yet that’s exactly what many classrooms continue to confront, as CPS drags on addressing a $3.5 billion backlog of facilities repairs that the District has delayed for years,” said Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey.
“The real issue that I worry about is respiratory health,” a teacher at Hancock College Prep said on the school’s student-hosted podcast. “Humidity can affect people who are asthmatic, as can changes in temperature. If a kid has an asthma attack then they have to leave class. These problems aren’t new… and we’re put in a situation where there’s nothing we can do.”
The threats to health and learning are particularly acute for low-income families and students of color. According to UCLA professor R. Jisung Park, who coauthored a study on the impact of heat in unairconditioned classrooms, a 90°F school day has a negative effect on learning that is nearly two and a half times as severe for nonwhite students as for white students, owing to the disproportionate lack of air conditioning for schools in those neighborhoods.
These inequities are exacerbated by Chicago’s warming climate, which means more frequent and severe heat waves for the city. “Nine out of ten of our students are Black and Brown, so lack of a basic need like air conditioning in the face of climate change is fundamentally an equity issue,” Sharkey said.
“If we want to see Black and Hispanic [kids] rise, why not simply fix the fact that we lack air conditioning?” asked a student at Hancock College Prep and one of the podcast’s producers.
Chicago Public Schools will incur some of the highest cooling costs in the country. To read more about all of Illinois’ schools, check out the Illinois state page.