Climbing temperatures are baking San Diego as its school districts search for solutions. Data provided by National Weather Service lead forecaster Dan Gregoria, and cited by the San Diego Union-Tribune, shows that the average temperature from June to October in San Diego has risen 5 degrees since records began being kept in 1874.
The San Diego Unified School District says it has finished installing air conditioning at all but one of its schools in 2019 as part of the Board of Education’s September 2015 decision to implement districtwide air conditioning in classrooms and campus support spaces. The cost of doing so was estimated at $429 million in 2018, and was financed with taxpayer dollars through municipal bond measures.
The job was made all the more necessary by warming temperatures. When most of the district’s schools were originally built close to 50 years ago, extreme heat was rarely an issue and air conditioning wasn’t considered essential — especially for schools near the coast.
“A number of studies indicate that human function, attention span, and learning capacity begin to decrease as temperatures rise above 78°F as the human body function works to cool itself,” wrote San Diego Unified District Spokesperson Jamie Ries in an email.
Ries says that despite installing air conditioning throughout the district in response to rising temperatures, San Diego Unified has actually reduced its total net energy consumption over the last five years by increasing its renewable energy production with new solar energy systems and energy efficiency projects, including HVAC systems. “We estimate that our solar energy systems alone save $4.5 million in utility costs and offset 8,100 tons of CO2 emissions annually,” she wrote.
The project of installing air conditioning across the city’s schools was expedited after above-95°F temperatures cut school days short and brutal conditions led to reports of children falling ill.
“If all of my kids were animals, you could all be arrested for inhumane treatment,” Jill Schenk, a physical education teacher at San Diego High School, told the Chicago Tribune in 2015. “People don’t consider gyms and locker rooms as classrooms — they are.”
Ries says that San Diego High School is the district’s single remaining school without HVAC, but will receive it by 2024 as part of a Whole Site Modernization.
San Diego Unified School District will incur some of the highest cooling costs in the country. To read more about all of California’s schools, check out the California state page.