After lunch, the fans whirl in Pat Schleeter’s classroom at San Benito High School but the air is stagnate. On warm days, the students struggle to keep their eyes open as heat lulls them away from classroom discussions toward daydreams.
“When it’s really hot, I can’t concentrate,” said Andrue Valles, 14, a freshman in Schleeter’s English class. “I just try to concentrate on myself and trying to cool down.”
Valles is one of a majority of local high school students who deal with non-air-conditioned classrooms after lunch on a regular basis. Just a handful of rooms – an estimate of five – plus three computer labs have air conditioning, said Superintendent John Perales. That means most classes are warm after lunch.
The topic surfaced at the board meeting Oct. 8, when several teachers spoke during public comment about the need for air conditioning in every classroom to improve academic performance on balmy days.
“I don’t exaggerate when I say I walk into those classrooms after lunch and the teachers are dripping sweat,” said Perales in an interview with the Free Lance days after the meeting. “The students are dripping sweat. It’s not cool – no pun intended.”
Perales affirmed air conditioning was a priority for trustees in his superintendent’s report at the close of the same meeting. The following day, he told @BalerNews, the twitter account run by the high school’s journalism students, that air conditioning might be installed on the new campus and in the 300 wing as soon as this school year. He also spoke about the importance of air conditioning with the San Benito High School Teachers’ Association members when they gathered Oct. 9 to begin voting on a tentative agreement with the district for a two-year contract.
The same day, the district’s new architectural firm, Aedis Architects – which came on board last month – began a study of current campus buildings to see which ones could take air conditioning immediately and which might need to be redesigned to support the weight of a unit, Perales said. Any potential changes to the structural design of school buildings would have to go to the Division of the State Architect for approval – a process that can easily take three to six months, Perales said.
The lack of air conditioning on campus has surfaced at board meetings many times before. Last August and September, about 20 teachers approached the board at various times to voice their concerns that a lack of cool air affected student academic performance, said Katherine Foster, a high school science teacher and the president of the teachers’ association.
It’s a topic that Foster – who has had air conditioning in her classroom for at least seven years – takes personally because she remembers the days when her room got so hot in the afternoons that students would faint. Her classroom had computers, which made it even warmer than some of her colleagues’ rooms.
In September of last year, 26 teachers filed Williams Complaints, a uniform state-mandated complaint process that requires school districts to identify and resolve things such as urgent facilities conditions and deficiencies in instructional materials.
As part of filing complaints, teachers tracked the temperature levels in their own classrooms but by the time the school custodian was asked to do the same thing in October, the temperatures had already cooled off, she said. The district eventually determined that the warm rooms were not in violation of the education code 17592.72 – which describes “emergency facilities needs” and includes a line about “nonfunctioning heating, ventilation, fire sprinklers, or air conditioning systems,” she said.
“They denied that the temperatures posed a threat to the health and safety of students at the school, which is funny because I thought passing out on the floor definitely poses a threat to students at the school,” Foster said.
While Schleeter’s classroom is hot after lunch, just a few classrooms away, colleague Tom Rooth is one of the few teachers at the school who has air conditioning. Although Rooth’s classroom is comfortable now, he remembers when his classroom hit between 85 and 90 degrees on a warm day.
“It becomes kind of inoperable,” he said. “With air conditioning, I’ve only seen a couple heads on desks in the whole year.”
Aedis Architects presented the findings from an air conditioning study during a facilities study session meeting with school administrators and trustees at 6 p.m. Oct. 23 in the Davis Library on Monterey Street. The meeting was open to the public.
