Schools Keep Their Cool : Weather: Teaching in classrooms without air-conditioning during a heat wave is a little easier with ice and some imagination.

In the swelter of this summer’s second heat wave, students and teachers in summer school and day-care programs around the county used a creative arsenal of weapons--blocks of ice, cornstarch, mudpacks and their imaginations--to beat the heat and high humidity.

“We’re having Wet and Wild Days,” said Ed Massey, camp director at Ventura Christian School. On Friday, students were instructed to bring water pistols as part of a Wild West theme day, squirting each other during “water play.”

Some of the school’s 80 students got more than just wet on the playground. Rolling in the dirt, they became so muddy that teachers allowed the dirt to dry into an impromptu “kind of a mudpack,” Massey said.

“I told parents, ‘Don’t care what they wear, they’re going to get wet,’ ” Massey said.

Students were also issued ice cubes, which they placed on their heads while thinking cool thoughts, Massey said. “As the cubes melted, they felt the cold water coming down from the tops of their heads,” he said.

At the Roots and Wings Family Development Center in Thousand Oaks, counselors kept the blinds closed, the windows open and the fans on.

Center Director Christine Lewis said she sprinkled cornstarch on the children while they were napping, to absorb heat and moisture.

“If we can survive this we can survive any weather,” Lewis said. “It’s uncomfortable.”

At 102 degrees, Thousand Oaks had the county’s highest temperature. Simi Valley ran a humid second with 100 degrees, while temperatures in Ojai reached 97 degrees and Moorpark 95 degrees. Even in Ventura and Oxnard, cities that are normally fanned by cool sea breezes, the temperature climbed to 84 degrees.

But the worst thing was the uncharacteristically high humidity, at least 80% in much of the county.

“It’s just hot and muggy,” said Rick Wells, program director at Thousand Oaks YMCA. “Normally, we would be doing a lot of crafts, but instead the kids are having water fights or sitting in the wading pools.”

YMCA officials ordered huge blocks of ice, which some youngsters sat on to chill out, he said.

In Oxnard, Norman Brekke, superintendent of the Oxnard Elementary School District, spent part of the morning teaching penmanship to a third-grade class at Juanita Elementary School.

“I had a full appreciation of the discomfort of the heat,” Brekke said. “Not only is the temperature warm outside, but when you put 30 to 35 youngsters in a classroom--particularly a classroom without air-conditioning--it can get quite uncomfortable.”

Because it is on a year-round schedule, the Oxnard district has received $13 million in state money to install air-conditioning at its 16 schools over the next two years, Brekke said.

Usually, Oxnard’s hottest temperatures occur in September and October when easterly Santa Ana winds push temperatures close to 100 degrees.

“Truly,” Brekke said, “we need air-conditioning in all of our schools.”

Oxnard’s was the only public school district where year-round classes were in session Thursday, although many districts had summer school classes that ended about noon. School districts in Fillmore and Ventura are set to begin a year-round schedule at the end of July.

In Ventura summer schools in particular, teachers said they had to balance the need to keep kids cool against the city’s water-rationing restrictions.

“We don’t turn the water hoses or sprinklers on and let them run for unlimited periods through the water,” said Marian Everest, director of Ventura’s Discovery Junction, a child-care facility a block from the beach. Instead, students played water games and walked to the shore, she said.

The heat “has gotten to our kids a little bit,” said Becky Graves of the First Baptist Day School in Ventura, where students were drinking lots of water and fruit juice. “It’s unfortunate that we can’t fill our wading pools or use our sprinklers because of the water restrictions. . . . Other than that, we try to do a lot of quiet, indoor activities.”

Besides water games and shorter nap periods, toddlers at Patagonia’s Great Pacific Child Development Center in Ventura relied on their educational theme of the week to turn their thoughts to cooler climates, preschool director Kelly McHugh said.

“Fortunately, our theme this week was water and oceans,” McHugh said. “We talked about hot beaches and cold oceans.”