Suffering from the Heat Wave? Ask LAUSD Students—Thousands of Classrooms Lack A/C

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At this time, Southern California is experiencing a dreadful heat wave. People prefer not to go out during the day unless necessary or stay close to the coast to benefit from the beach breeze. But the students of LAUSD will not have an escape. Thousands of classrooms do not have air conditioning or enough spaces to protect students during recess.

Schools K through 12 across California are not required to have air conditioners or other cooling systems, and there is no regulated limit for how hot the indoor temperatures can get in schools. Knowing what working cooling systems are in schools is important, but in California, it’s not an exact science.

“We don’t know how many schools have air conditioning, if the air conditioning is functional. And we also don’t know if schools can pay to operate them,” said V. Kelly Turner, Associate Professor of Urban Planning & Geography and Associate Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. She says there is no legislation in the state to track cooling systems in schools.

The miserable reality is that some California students are returning to classrooms this month with inadequate cooling — or no air conditioning at all.

“When schools do reporting, they have annual reporting that they have to do, that’s not included in that,” Turner said. Updating that reporting system is one of the recommendations in Turner and fellow researchers’ report, “Protecting Californians With Heat-Resilient Schools,” which calls for better ways to address heat in schools. Researchers also explain there is no state standard for how hot temperatures can get inside classrooms.

And then, there are what are often called “concrete jungles” – the playgrounds at many schools in Southern California. Technicians have been whittling away at more than 1,000 cooling systems service calls, including about 650 classrooms with units in need of repair.

But school interiors aren’t the only problem. Kids don’t often find relief outside because many campuses also have inhospitably hot, parking lot-like schoolyards covered in asphalt that can heat up to 145 degrees.

The district says that level of demand is typical for this time of year. And it’s crucial work. Having safe temperatures in classrooms should be a basic expectation, especially given that kids return to school during the worst heat of the year. But it’s not, because California doesn’t require air conditioning in K-12 classrooms, a carelessly outdated position at a time when climate change is making heat waves more dangerous and intense.

The miserable reality is that some California students are returning to classrooms this month with inadequate cooling — or no air conditioning at all. In the meantime, district officials said, classrooms without A/C will be equipped with chilled water dispensers, new or repaired window coverings, and portable fans. But these are Band-Aids at best, and not much help to overheated students struggling to hear their teachers over the drone of fans that do little more than circulate hot air around like a convection oven.

But school interiors aren’t the only problem. Kids don’t often find relief outside because many campuses also have inhospitably hot, parking lot-like schoolyards covered in asphalt that can heat up to 145 degrees. That calls for a holistic approach: investing in quick-turnaround projects to get adequate air conditioning inside classrooms while installing shade structures outside, planting trees, and replacing heat-absorbing pavement with cooler, natural landscaping.

A year and two months after its original deadline, Los Angeles Unified School District leaders have released their official plan to upgrade more than 600 schools to create more green space and add shade on campus. The 188-page “Green Schoolyards For All” Plan details what it will take to achieve this goal by 2035 and finds it could cost $3 billion, or more, to get there.

“Certainly, the delay has been disappointing, because I think there is a lot of momentum around this topic,” said school board member Kelly Gonez, who originally authored a resolution in 2022 to try and get the green schoolyard plan going. “There’s no time to waste because there is a lot of work to do, and so much is needed.”

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