As children, teachers, and staff swelter in rooms lacking air conditioning, the school district has delayed installing AC for many years--even after it got money to do so.
Kindergarten children are getting sick and have to be shuttled out of their classrooms in hot weather. The district, which refuses to comment, has left a trail of broken promises made to parents.
On December 6, 2022, voters in the Croton-Harmon school district voted 808 to 215 for a Future Facilities Capital Project worth $45.6 million. Among the many big ticket items the project was supposed to cover was air conditioning for sections of Carrie E. Tomkins Elementary School (CET) that currently do not have it. These areas include the entire kindergarten wing, the multipurpose/lunch room, the music room, and the gymnasium.
The lack of AC in many areas of all three of the district’s schools has been a burning issue for parents, teachers, and staff for at least the past 20 years. But as the days get hotter, with record breaking temperatures every year, and the number of hot months expands from May all the way to October, the lack of cooling has reached a crisis point.
Earlier this year, a kindergarten student had to be sent for emergency medical treatment after suffering what appeared to be heat stroke. Many other children have suffered from overheating and had to be moved to cooler areas or to the nurse’s office. As spring turns to summer, and in the fall, kindergarten kids are routinely shuttled out of their classrooms and into cooler parts of CET, often without their parents ever being told about it.
(The problem does not end when the school year does, because CET is used for summer camp and children and staff continue to work in incredibly hot conditions. See the temperature readings illustrated in this story.)
This report is based on interviews with numerous parents, teachers, and staff in the district. For fear of retaliation against them and in some cases their children, these sources have asked to remain anonymous. Meanwhile, school district officials have shut down communication with the Chronicle and refused to provide information about the situation or discuss it with us. Thus district superintendent Stephen Walker and school board president Ana Teague both declined to comment for this article. Before this shutdown of communication, however, district clerk Denise Bisaccia did tell us that the current plan was to install AC in the kindergarten wing by August 2025, or perhaps a bit earlier.
In other words, these small children will probably go another full academic year without AC. But the lack of communication is not just with Croton’s local news media. Parents tell us that district officials have failed to discuss the AC situation with them for a number of years now, and ignored their concerns, even after their children have become ill.
“I have worked at CET for 20 years,” one staff member told us. “It is no joke that no air conditioning has been a problem not only for the children but also the adults that work there.” As a parent told us, “This is a major leadership failure. Heat-related illnesses in Croton schools are not uncommon, and I believe the administration is unprepared, unaware, and not serious about protecting our children.”
Among the facts that our investigation has uncovered, with the help of sources in the district:
— Parents are not informed when their children have to be evacuated from the kindergarten to “cooler” areas of CET, usually to areas that are not themselves served by AC.
— There does not appear to be any routine temperature monitoring in the classrooms during hot months.
— It gets so hot in kindergarten rooms that fans are useless and only circulate hot air.
— For security reasons, windows can only be opened slightly and so there is no possibility of circulating outside air into the kindergarten classrooms nor other CET rooms without AC.
— Teachers, parents, and staff have complained to district officials many times about the situation, without, we are told, receiving adequate responses or sometimes any responses at all. In the meantime, other projects covered by the 2022 referendum, including renovation of Spencer Field, have gone ahead.
— The district office on Gerstein Street, where the administrators work, is fully air conditioned.
The situation was even worse during the pandemic. “My child was there masked during the pandemic and would come home beat red and so hot,” another parent of a kindergarten child told us.
We are also told by parents that students at both the high school and middle school have suffered from heat exhaustion, and in a few cases actually lost consciousness.
“It gets very, very hot,” a lunch room worker at CET told us. “It’s really brutal in there.” The worker adds that the heat causes food trays to overflow and leak, “which should be a red flag for food safety.” Lunch room workers do constant temperature checks of the food just to be sure. (The good news is that all three of the district’s schools continue to get good marks from health inspectors.)
“It’s become a joke to hear the district continue to say, maybe next year,” this worker says.
The increasingly dire situation in the schools has led some parents to become very insistent, in emails and other communications to the district, that something has to be done. We can expect that to be more openly obvious this coming fall at Board of Education meetings, we are told.
Part of the problem, one parent told us, is that many parents do not know this is going on, nor does the district make any real effort to tell them about the conditions their children are suffering and trying to learn in.
“This is very dangerous for the children,” another parent said. Speaking of the last weeks of this past school year, they added, “The classrooms were literally ovens. These are not safe spaces for learning or working.”
The Chronicle will update this story as necessary.
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Thank you for this very important article. I am very happy for this information to become available to the public. When I think of a school superintendent or the president of the school board, I think it’s a privilege for them to be in those roles and stand before the community. Their unwillingness to address this serious heat issue with parents or The Croton Chronicle is very disappointing. The district needs to do much better for our kids. This heat situation is unacceptable for them to learn, work and grow in. It’s also unacceptable for the staff to work in. Yet no response from them even though many hundreds of residents will be reading this? Sad. They need to step up their game and not only give a response but actually fix serious health issues in the buildings like this. I myself am tempted to take this to a much larger news agency to get this situation rectified for students and teachers and aides alike.
Their leadership failures are numerous. They also covered up a sexual predator teacher in the high school who groomed a student and then slept with him literally right after he graduated. They allowed this teacher to resign and did not report her or the grooming to the state, so she’s free to do it again somewhere else.