Schools Look to State Relief as Pupils Sweat Out Summer

At mid-morning on what teachers called a cool day at Roscoe School in Sun Valley, it was already 85 degrees inside a second-grade classroom. A giant fan blew hot air around the room, making it uncomfortably warm. But, as Roscoe teachers and students will tell you, the summer heat can be unbearably worse.

“I walked in the room one morning, and it was 90 degrees at 7 o’clock,” said Kathy Binnie, who teaches fifth and sixth grades. “The room had been all closed up, and in the evening there’s little letup of the heat. The room never had a chance to cool off.”

According to teachers, summer classroom temperatures of 85 to 95 degrees are common at Roscoe; one teacher said her thermometer cracked at 104 degrees one day last year.

Such broiling heat makes Binnie’s students so sluggish, she said, that all they want to do is cool themselves in front of the portable fan supplied by the school district--the closest thing to air conditioning her classroom has.

Year-Round School

Roscoe is one of 94 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District that operate year-round because of crowding. There are 106 such schools in Los Angeles County, and most of them, including Roscoe, lack air conditioning in many classrooms. 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.

“There is no learning after 10 o’clock” when the mercury skyrockets beyond the comfort zone, said another Roscoe teacher, Eileen McDermott. “It’s just a strain trying to learn.”

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

Help for some schools in the Los Angeles school district may come more quickly. The Los Angeles school board is expected to vote Monday 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 crowding.

It passed the Assembly on 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 next month. Moreover, the governor has no position on the measure, but his Department of Finance opposes it.

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

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

Not Enough Money, Roos Aide Says

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.

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

Of the three districts in the county where crowding has forced children to attend school year-round, only the Lennox Elementary School District, with fewer than 5,000 students, has air-conditioning in all its classrooms. But none of the seven year-round schools in the Montebello Unified School District, with about 30,000 students, is completely outfitted with air conditioning. In the Los Angeles school district, 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 San Fernando Valley, Southeast and South-Central regions.

State Assistance Welcomed

Officials in the Los Angeles and Montebello school districts 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 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.” The 20th Street School operates year-round in the Los Angeles district’s Southeast region.

At Roscoe, the heat is aggravated by the school’s proximity to the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena 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.”

Classes Move to Cooler Auditorium

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 space there for only six classes at a time, and the noise 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. Teachers find “minimum days” frustrating because they cut down on precious instructional time.

“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, said 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.

Problem of Maintenance

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

Although the state aid is attractive, district officials said, 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.

Extra 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 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.”