When You’re Hot You’re Hot and Not Apt to Learn

It is 90 degrees inside a third-grade classroom at Bell Gardens Elementary School. The lights have been turned off, and a big ceiling fan circulates air. But such meager efforts fail to beat the summer heat, and the 29 students, many draped over their desks like limp rags, show it.

“When it’s this hot,” said teacher Jack Haraksin, “the kids don’t want to exert any energy. They’re just washed out.”

Bell Gardens, the largest elementary school in the Montebello Unified School District with 1,300 students, operates year-round because of overcrowding. There are 106 such schools in Los Angeles County, and most of them, including Bell Gardens, lack air conditioning in many classrooms. That means that when the temperature rises during summer months, students and teachers have no choice but to literally sweat out the school day, a situation teachers say is not conducive to learning.

One Thermometer Cracked

When the mercury skyrockets beyond the comfort zone, “There is no learning after 10 o’clock,” said Eileen McDermott, a teacher at Roscoe Elementary School in Sun Valley, one of the hottest of 94 year-round schools operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Classroom temperatures of 85 to 95 degrees are common there during the summer; one teacher said her thermometer cracked at 104 degrees one day last year.

At Bryson Avenue School in South Gate, Assistant Principal Chere Talbert said the 90-to-100-degree heat makes students sick. “There have been several instances of children throwing up on the yard,” she said.

Talbert and other educators in year-round schools in Los Angeles County are hoping relief will come from the Legislature, where a bill providing $25 million to air-condition hot classrooms has made some progress but faces tough opposition.

Board to Vote Monday

Help for some schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District may come more quickly. On Monday the Los Angeles school board is expected to vote on a $7.2-million allocation for air-conditioning installation and design costs for as many as 52 year-round schools. “I can’t imagine anyone not voting yes” on the funds, said East San Fernando Valley board member Roberta Weintraub, whose area encompasses some of the hottest year-round classrooms in the district. “Every one of my colleagues is affected by this problem or will be affected in the future.”

The $25-million bill in the Legislature, authored by Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles) and proposed by United Teachers of Los Angeles, does not identify specific schools to receive the funds but authorizes the State Allocation Board to award grants based on climate and degree of overcrowding.

It passed the Assembly by a 63-6 vote in June and cleared the Senate Education Committee 8-0 earlier this month. However, it must pass another test in the tough Senate Appropriations Committee before it can be sent to the Senate floor sometime in August. Moreover, the governor has no position on the measure, but his Department of Finance opposes it.

Other Source of Funds

“It’s a fiscal matter,” department budget analyst Bill Van Gundy said. “It’s a $25-million appropriation, and (an appropriation of that size) is almost consistently opposed by the Administration.”

According to Van Gundy, the Finance Department also believes the appropriation is unnecessary because, he said, air-conditioning money is available in other funds set aside for school reconstruction and deferred maintenance.

But Richard Harris, legislative assistant to Roos, said there is not enough money in those funds to pay for the air conditioning needed by many of the 40 school districts in the state with year-round schools.

School officials in Los Angeles County agree. They argue that there is an urgent need to earmark special funds, even though they acknowledge that more air conditioning brings some disadvantages, such as added energy costs.

$20 Million Needed

The Los Angeles school district alone needs approximately $20 million to completely air-condition its year-round facilities, district officials say. “I certainly want to see that bill passed,” Weintraub said.

Of the three districts in the county where overcrowding has forced children to attend school year-round, only the Lennox School District, with fewer than 5,000 students, has air conditioning in all its classrooms. None of the seven year-round schools in the Montebello Unified School District, with about 30,000 students, is completely outfitted with cooling equipment. And in the Los Angeles Unified School District, only about half of the 120,000 students in 94 year-round schools are in classrooms with cooling systems. Most of those schools are in the Los Angeles district’s San Fernando Valley, Southeast and South-Central regions.

Officials in Los Angeles and Montebello say they would welcome state assistance to solve a problem that, they stress, directly affects the quality of education.

Forcing students to attend school in classrooms as hot as 85 to 100 degrees is “not only educationally unsound,” said United Teachers of Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson, “but it’s torture. I was at 20th Street School (a year-round school in the Los Angeles district’s Southeast region) last Friday. I spent an hour in a first-grade classroom after lunch, and it was absolutely awful. Those poor little kids were suffering . . . . They would come up and say, ‘Teacher, when is it time to go home?’ There was no learning going on at all. The kids were wiped out, and the teacher was equally wiped out.”

‘Cumulative’ Effect

During a heat wave last year, Bell Gardens’ Haraksin recalled, the mercury rose to a withering high of 104 degrees inside the room. For the next several days, he said, the temperature “hovered around 98 to 99 degrees.”

Heat waves, Bell Gardens Principal John Myers said, are debilitating because they have a “cumulative” effect.

“If we had just one day that was 105, that would be manageable,” Myers said. “But when it’s 105 the first day and the heat accumulates, there is no way to evacuate it from these old buildings. Instead of starting at 80 and going to 105, the room starts out at 90. It’s real bad for the kids.”

“You wish you could go someplace else,” said Lorena Danuelos, 13, a ninth grader at South Gate High School, an overcrowded year-round school built more than 50 years ago. Trying to study in a stifling classroom is “not that hard, but it’s not that easy.”

Teachers report that their students often get nosebleeds and complain of nausea, headaches, dizziness, lethargy and stomach aches. To avoid these problems, each school employs a variety of tactics to beat the heat. But all the methods cause some disruption.

Switch Rooms

At Bell Gardens, for instance, teachers in the 24 out of 45 rooms without air conditioning take turns shifting their classes into the few cooled rooms that become empty when one track of students goes on vacation, Myers said. (Year-round schools operate on staggered cycles known as tracks, with no more than three-fourths of the student body in class at any one time.) In addition, on very hot days teachers try to cram basic math, reading and science lessons into the morning hours when it is easier to concentrate. “In the afternoon,” he said, “they do the kinds of things that can be done outside under the trees, like music. Something to shake their minds out a little.”

At Roscoe, the heat is aggravated by the school’s proximity to Burbank Airport. “We are within 500 yards of the airport,” Principal William Holland said. “When jets stand at the end of that runway revving their motors, I do not have a conversation in my office. I just stop talking. But we can’t close the windows to minimize the noise because of the heat.”

At Victory Boulevard School in North Hollywood, 11 of the 27 classrooms are not air-conditioned. When the classroom temperature becomes unbearable--”usually around 11 a.m.,” said program coordinator Diane Hagemeister--six teachers are allowed to move their classes into the cool of the auditorium. But there is only space there for six classes at a time, and the noise level is hard to control, Hagemeister said.

Along with other year-round schools in the Los Angeles district, Victory has sent children home early several times because of the heat since the current track began on July 1. But teachers find “minimum days” frustrating because they cut down on precious instructional time.

‘Kids Will Be Off Track’

“This isn’t summer school. This is regular school,” said Victory teacher Marjory Woolf, who, with 14 fellow teachers, took her beefs about the heat to the Los Angeles school board meeting July 15. “These kids will be off track in a month or so. So we try to give them the curriculum they’re supposed to have in that time. But it’s not easy.”

The $7.2-million allocation that the Los Angeles board will consider Monday will cover air-conditioning costs for Victory and at least 51 other schools in the East Valley, Southeast and South-Central regions.

The allocation is part of a six-year heat-reduction program launched in 1983 to air-condition all year-round classrooms, according to Byron Kimball, who oversees district construction and maintenance. He said the district has been spending $5 million to $6 million a year on air conditioning for the year-round facilities and estimated that it will cost $20 million to finish all the schools by 1988.

If state funds become available through the Roos bill, Kimball said, the work could be accomplished about a year and a half sooner.

But district officials say that, while the state aid is attractive, they face disadvantages associated with more air conditioning. Kimball, for instance, said he worries about how the district will maintain the equipment in light of a shortage of air-conditioning technicians. The district employs 30 such technicians now, but he said it will need twice as many in one to two years.

Another concern is rising energy costs.

“No one has really addressed the continuing cost generated by air-conditioning schools,” said Stephen Phillips, business manager for the Montebello school district. The district’s utility bills have mounted steadily since it began installing air conditioning in its year-round schools a few years ago. Next year the district anticipates spending $2.2 million out of its $100-million budget on utilities alone.

Others, however, say they hope money will not be the sole consideration.

“Somehow,” said Bell Gardens Principal John Myers, “there has to be a way to bring the schools into the 20th Century.”