Like rising health care and insurance costs, the impact of hotter classrooms in schools that historically have not needed air-conditioning is yet another poorly understood but very expensive consequence of climate change.
Nearly 40 percent of schools in the United States were built before the 1970s, when temperatures were cooler and fewer buildings needed air conditioning.
That has changed. In recent decades, heat has crept northward, increasing the number of school days with temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Large parts of the country, where temperatures were previously cooler, now experience at least one month of school days with temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Many schools in these places still don’t have air conditioning.
America’s aging school buildings are on a collision course with a rapidly warming climate.
Last fall, school officials were forced to send students home across the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic — just as many were returning from summer break — because of extreme heat and schools lacking air conditioning. In Baltimore and Detroit, high heat led to early dismissals,the same as it had four months earlier when summer temperatures struck in May.
In Philadelphia last year, administrators moved the first day of school from late August to after Labor Day, in part to avoid a repeat of heat-related school closures in previous years. But the weather didn’t cooperate. They ended up closing more than 70 schools three hours earlier than usual for the entire week.
Hot weather is not a new concern for school districts. But as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet, it’s delivering longer-lasting, more dangerous heat waves, and higher average temperatures. Across much of the northern United States, where many schools were built without air conditioning, districts are now forced to confront the academic and health risks posed by poorly cooled schools. Fixing the problem often requires residents to pass multimillion dollar school repair bonds, which can be hard to do. Climatic change is arriving faster than most can adapt.
There’s this odd middle ground for a lot of features that people have always taken for granted: People in Buffalo don’t screw around with snow removal budgets and people in New Orleans (which gets its water from the Mississippi) have been serious about water treatment. Likewise, throughout the South, once schools got air conditioning there was no turning back.
While living in a town in Massachusetts that got highly variable amounts of snow from one year to the next, the town hall meeting discussing the annual budget only put in enough for a lower-than-average amount of snowfall, and anything more than that would fall under “emergency funding” (and they did it with a straight face). Towns that take their wells for granted aren’t prepared if the aquifer drops or gets contaminated, and places that could get along without A/C in the past are likewise presented with an unprecedented cost.
It’s situations like these where a modest change can introduce a great cost that make me want to take the nearest economist that soft-pedaled the effect of climate change and slap him silly.