Hot times at CET as staff shuffle children and teachers out of stiflingly hot rooms. [Updated: Misery in the school buses.]
District officials say AC will be installed at the elementary school this summer, nearly three years after voters approved the money to do it.
Last Friday, Kerri Bianchi, principal of the Carrie E. Tompkins Elementary School, sent a note out to CET parents in anticipation of this week’s brutal heat wave. It read:
Dear CET Families,
It appears that summer weather will be with us for the last week of school. In anticipation of this warm weather we wanted to reach out and encourage families to prepare their children as much as possible ahead of time so that they can have an enjoyable last few days. We ask that parents dress their children appropriately for warmer weather ie. shorts and short sleeves. We also encourage parents to send their children to school with water bottles that can be refilled at school throughout the day. We will plan for indoor recess as necessary.
All Kindergarten classes will be provided with an alternate air conditioned room to relocate to if the K rooms become too warm. All other grade levels have A/C in their rooms.
Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
Best,
Kerri
As we reported last year, and many parents will remember:
“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.”
It turned out, however, that providing AC for CET students, including the most vulnerable kindergarten kids, was given a low priority relative to other projects, even though there have been episodes of severe heat stress including one child having to go to the emergency room.
District officials say that AC will be finally installed this summer. But it is coming too late to prevent what one staff member told us was a “shit show” today, as teachers and staff tried to find ways to protect children from the stifling heat.
It was so hot in the multipurpose room that the kids had to have lunch and recess in their classrooms. The speciality teachers for PE, music, art and Spanish had to push into classrooms as well, because their own rooms were unbearable. Kindergarten kids were scattered throughout the building, mostly in 3rd and 4th grade rooms.
We would ask district officials to comment, except that they have adopted a policy and practice of not talking to the Chronicle.
(The Chronicle’s editor discussed this problem with the Board of Education and other district officials at a recent BoE meeting. We pointed out that since no other media outlet covers the school district in any serious detail, the policy deprived parents and other residents of important information and perspectives that only they could provide.)
We will monitor the progress of the AC installation this summer, if it really happens, and report to readers as events dictate.
Meanwhile, with local temperatures expected to reach 93 degrees tomorrow, we expect a repeat of today’s desperate shuffle to keep kids from getting sick.
Temperature in CET art room on a hot day last August.
Update: We have now talked to sources in the district’s transportation department who have told us how much bus drivers and kids suffered who rode the large buses today and yesterday, most of which do not have AC. (The district’s mini-buses do have AC.)
“It was hard to breathe,” one driver told us, adding that the sun beats down on the bus and turns it into an oven. "We also have the engine heat on top of that. We have fans that blow hot air and give no relief. I honestly don’t know how any of us that didn’t have an AC bus did not pass out yesterday or today. You step on that bus and you instantly have sweat just rolling down your face arms and legs. Let’s just compare it to getting into your car after it’s been in the sun all day and driving with the windows up and no AC” for the entire ride.
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Alas. One of the reasons I retired from teaching at age 60. Not Croton schools but another Westchester district where no regular classrooms had AC. We recorded classroom temps and humidity for the state as proof of almost unbearable conditions, but the 89 degrees with 87% humidity in the classroom, sometimes for several days, wasn’t quite awful enough. September and late spring. It did make me feel a lot of empathy for my teachers from the 1970s when I was a child.
There was at least one other classroom with broken AC (not for the first time) and there was no communication to parents about the plan for students in rooms without AC. Fortunately, parents are saddled with half-days the rest of the week at the end of this insanely late ending to the school year.
The HVAC system seems outdated and perhaps needs an overhaul if it’s not functioning properly - will any rooms outside of the few mentioned also be eligible for new systems?
The school this year also had rampant issues with respiratory and highly communicable diseases, including your run of the mill coughs and colds to flu, Covid, norovirus and stomach bugs, plus lice all year. A whole building air filtration system, which is much less costly than some of the projects in the budget, was not part of that. Why not?
Additionally, actually enforcing health policies would help in preventing highly contagious diseases from spreading all over school. Lice checks and having children stay home until at least one treatment would also help prevent the spread of the highly contagious bugs, which are difficult and very expensive for families to eradicate. So much for equity.
Why are Walker, the BOE, and Bianchi okay with these major issues? Why is there again no communication?