Most of the Bay Area is under a heat advisory until Thursday evening. And in Oakland, the schools are hot. But leaders there are taking steps to cool classrooms down.
This summer, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) started coating school roofs with reflective paint, building shade structures, removing asphalt, and installing tinted films on windows to reduce solar heat. It’s part of a $12 million district-wide program to cool schools down.
Right now, 83% of OUSD facilities have no cooling, and that affects more than two thousand classrooms.
“This creates tremendous challenges during the Heat Advisories,” said Preston Thomas, the district’s Chief Systems and Services Officer.
One of the schools that got window films was Chabot Elementary in Rockridge.
Carol Guggino, the principal at Chabot, asked teachers if the darker windows were helping. A couple said it’s cooler, but most said they hadn’t made much of a difference.
What has made a difference at Chabot is air conditioning. Last year around this time, Guggino said she told the PTA to purchase portable AC units for classrooms after a particularly hot week.
"It was unbearable. Like, it was really, really hot," she said.
She says the AC units cost about $16,000. But this year, when the teachers went to turn them on, there was a problem.
"This building is so old that it's blowing fuses when everybody's running because it takes up so much power," Guggino said.
Now, teachers alternate using AC.
When the classrooms are hot, it makes it harder for students to learn, Guggino said. "They can't focus. They're so hot and exhausted."
As part of its heat mitigation and cooling work, the district has installed temperature sensors in all of its classrooms. These sensors will also monitor humidity and CO2 levels.
Oakland leaders say they will use this information to decide which schools should be prioritized for new cooling projects.
“This is a complex problem and will take years to address,” Thomas wrote to KALW. “We want to make sure that our investments align to the highest areas of need."
A public dashboard of this data will launch this week.
