Time - While there is no federal data on how many public schools have air conditioning, many schools were built for cooler temperatures, and are unprepared for how our changing climate is making extreme heat days stretch further into the fall. “Most people think of heat as a summer problem,” says V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies urban design and the environment.
Failing to address heat can lead to problems in the classroom. Heat slows down children’s cognitive functions, along with their ability to concentrate. “The best learning environment is when the thermal conditions are conducive to that,” says Turner. “So if it's too cold or it's too hot, children can't learn, and then you start to get behavioral issues associated with heat.”
Natural disasters are also presenting their own set of challenges for schools—causing long term losses for both learning and infrastructure. New Orleans, for example, completed its last Katrina-related school restoration in March 2023, 18 years after the hurricane first made landfall in 2005—and severely damaged or destroyed 110 of the city’s 126 public schools. And in 2018, the Camp fires in California closed schools for almost a million students and impacted more than 1,500 schools.
Earlier this year, more than 750,000 kids at over 1,000 schools missed anywhere from two to more than ten days when wildfires broke out in Southern California in January, according to a report from UndauntedK12, a nonprofit working to make public schools resilient to climate change. The researchers also found that Latino and low-income students were hit hardest by school disruptions.
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