Billions Of Dollars Later, Some San Diego Unified Students Still Dealing With Hot Classrooms

By Jakob McWhinney and Will Huntsberry, the Voice of San Diego

September 19, 2024

Taxpayers have voted to give San Diego Unified School District $11.5 billion over the last 16 years with the express purpose of bringing working air conditioning to every classroom in the district. But nearly two decades in, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, some students are still dealing with dangerous heat.

This summer, several San Diego Unified schools were hit hard by high temperatures. Hoover students complained last month that some classrooms reached 100 degrees. Henry High last week also dealt with soaring temperatures in classrooms.

And at Garfield Elementary, a 9-year-old who was having trouble breathing due to the heat was taken to the hospital.

Hoover, Henry and Garfield all technically have air conditioning in all their classrooms — as do all the other schools in San Diego Unified. It’s the working part that has been the problem.

Since 2008, district officials have asked San Diegans to pass four construction bond measures totalling $11.5 billion. In some cases, district officials made air conditioning a central part of their argument for why voters should pass the bonds.

Pass these bonds, they said, and we will make sure every classroom has working air conditioning.

Even the verbiage from bond to bond looks copied and pasted:

2008: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”

2012: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”

2018: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”

2022: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”

But AC problems are still a yearly occurrence at San Diego Unified schools.

As part of the bond programs, district officials promised they would have a working AC in every classroom by 2019. It didn’t happen. In 2022, San Diego High School still didn’t have air conditioning for every class — though district officials said at the time it was the last school to not be fully air conditioned.

That year San Diego High was plagued with heat problems. Students complained that their classrooms reached nearly 90 degrees.

In 2013 only about one-third of district classrooms had air conditioners, according to district spokesperson Samer Naji. By 2019, he wrote, installation of air conditioners at the other two-thirds of schools was “substantially complete.” During that period, officials spent $460 million installing air conditioners.

All told, there are about 15,000 HVAC systems districtwide, Naji wrote.

District officials have received more than 1,100 work orders for heating and cooling problems in the last 30 days. As of last week, it had resolved 468 of the highest priority orders, NBC 7 reported.

“Issues have been reported from throughout the district, however only a few schools have experienced widespread AC issues, like Hoover or Henry,” Naji wrote. He also noted that the district fixed the malfunction that sent a Garfield student to the hospital in a day.

District officials have long gotten heat on their bond spending priorities. Despite talk of the need to remove asbestos when pitching the 2008 and 2012 bond measures, the district prioritized installing new turf fields at campuses that proved to be faulty and needed to be replaced just a few years later. Promises to fix aging plumbing fell by the wayside because, as former school board member Scott Barnett put it, “You can’t do a ribbon-cutting on new plumbing, right? But you can do it on a new stadium.”

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