Heat’s still on, AC’s not: PBC’s sweating schools
Failures on the increase as district delays fixes to cooling systems.
Nearly two years after voters raised taxes to pay for better school facilities, air conditioners are breaking down more often in Palm Beach County’s public schools, forcing more students to study in overheated classrooms.
In the first five weeks of classes, the school district logged 2,172 reports of malfunctioning air conditioners on its campuses and facilities, a 6 percent increase from the same period a year ago, a Palm Beach Post analysis of school maintenance records shows.
The growing problems come after district administrators delayed $20 million
of AC repairs and replacements scheduled for the last school year.
Flush with money from an increase in the county’s sales tax, the district had planned $27 million in fixes last year.
But three-quarters of the work was postponed, district officials said, as a result of new priorities and a slow-moving competitive-bidding process to select firms to do the work.
With most planned fixes left undone, AC malfunctions increased this year in many of the district’s 165 traditional schools and other facilities, The Post found.
The growing problems have wreaked havoc on campuses across the county. AC breakdowns have made learning more difficult for thousands of students, forced some classes outdoors and in some cases even required students to seek medical treatment.
“It definitely does make it a lot harder to work when it’s that hot,” said Lauren Shapiro, a senior at Olympic Heights High School near Boca Raton. “I’ve actually had to go home. You’re sitting there and you get a headache. It’s very hard to concentrate.”
Olympic Heights is one of at least 30 schools that have reported campus-wide AC failures this year, The Post’s analysis found.
The school with the most reported campus-wide failures in the first five weeks of classes was Pahokee Jr./ Sr. High.
During that period, district records show the school reported four campus-wide breakdowns and 56 malfunctions overall.
The school’s principal, Dwayne Dennard, did not respond to a request for comment. But School Board member Marcia Andrews, who represents Pahokee, said at a recent board meeting that the school’s AC has been plagued with problems for years.
“We had graduation one year and no air,” Andrews said. “Something’s wrong out there. Every time I go out there, there’s something wrong.”
‘Unsafe’ conditions
In an encouraging sign, the county’s public schools may be experiencing fewer campus-wide AC failures and fewer problems affecting multiple buildings at once.
But while district records suggest large-scale breakdowns appeared to decline, malfunctions affecting single buildings and individual classrooms rose.
To track the problems, The Post analyzed thousands of school district work orders for AC repairs from last school year and the first five weeks of this school year, dating from Aug. 13 to Sept. 14.
More than a third of this year’s work orders did not specify how extensive the malfunctions were, making it difficult to know whether campus-wide failures fell overall.
But while reported breakdowns increased this year, fewer were labeled as affecting an entire school.
The middle school with the most reported malfunctions was Bak Middle School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, with 40 in five weeks.
During one breakdown, some teachers ushered students out of sweltering classrooms to study in hallways.
“We went through this over and over this year,” said one teacher who asked not to be identified. “These are unsafe working conditions, as someone already threw up from the heat.”
Bak Middle Principal Sally Rozanski declined to comment on the school’s AC troubles.
Westward Elementary has the second-highest number of campus-wide breakdowns in the county, with three in the first five weeks. Overall the school reported 12 malfunctions during that time period.
At the West Palm Beach school, students endured several days in overheated classrooms in late August and early September.
One teacher told The Post that the classrooms were “stifling” and that it was “hard to breathe” in rooms where the windows wouldn’t open.
“We were sitting here dripping, and the kids were crying and upset,” a second teacher said. “It was horrible.”
Both teachers requested anonymity to speak frankly about the problems on their campus.
The school’s principal, Bobbie Brooks, said in an interview last month that the problems improved after a water pump in the AC was replaced.
Fixes get delayed
Air conditioner problems are a stubborn fact of life in steamy South Florida, and the county’s schools have long been plagued with breakdowns as their systems age.
District administrators admit to skimping on repairs and replacements when tax revenue fell during and after the Great Recession, setting the stage for many of today’s problems.
But voters’ decision in 2016 to raise the county sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent flooded the district with new money for maintenance, repairs and construction.
All told, the district is expected to receive an extra $1.3 billion between 2017 and 2026 and plans to spend 16 percent of it, or $215 million, on air-conditioner upgrades and repairs.
Awash in cash, the district last year quintupled its annual budget for AC repairs and replacements to $27 million, financial records show.
But most of the fixes scheduled for last year were not completed, said Mike Burke, the school district’s chief financial officer.
“The budget for (the last school year) was reduced as some of the projects were delayed,” he said in an email.
“It was a combination of things,” he added. “We were prioritizing projects within the available funding, but also went through a [bidding] process based on the large volume of work to be completed.”
“The [bidding] process does take some time,” he said.
The postponed projects are now scheduled to be carried out during this school year, Burke said.
All told, the district plans to spend $44 million this year on AC repairs and replacements.
Administrators did not say which schools are scheduled for fixes, but Burke said the protracted bidding process led to lower-than-expected costs for the work.
As decaying facilities languish, many of the growing AC problems can be attributed to aging systems, the district’s top facilities chief said, but some are triggered by power failures beyond the public schools’ control.
“We do have some older equipment, but I think also what we’re seeing is quite a few power surges,” said Wanda Paul, the school district’s chief operating officer. “Oftentimes machines shut down to protect themselves.”
A spokesman for Florida Power & Light Co. said company officials “are working closely with the Palm Beach County School District to determine the cause of its AC issues.”
“Once we complete our investigation we will communicate our findings with the school district and make any necessary repairs to our equipment to ensure safe and reliable service,” FPL spokesman Richard Beltran said.
When a power surge or outage trips a school’s AC, the system often shuts down automatically, Paul said.
To restart it, a specialist has to be dispatched to the school from the district’s understaffed repair team.
The district’s team of about 16 AC repairers struggles to keep its workers, who flee for higher-paying jobs in the private sector, Paul said.
Currently, she said, a halfdozen of those positions are open and the district is having trouble filling them.
Paul said the district is weighing whether to boost the team’s pay scale to reduce turnover and whether to hire private companies to share the workload.
‘Difficult to focus’
While AC outages are merely uncomfortable for most students, spending hours in overheated classrooms has affected some children’s health.
At Westward Elementary last month, a teacher told The Post that a student was treated for a heat rash after hours in a hot classroom.
After an AC failure at Olympic Heights last month, the school clinic treated about 20 students who complained of feeling overheated, according to School Board member Frank Barbieri and the school’s principal, Kelly Mills Burke.
“I’m at my wit’s end with how to deal with this situation at Olympic Heights,” said Barbieri, who raised the issue during a school board workshop this month.
Overall, Olympic Heights suffered through three separate campus-wide AC failures last month, the school district said.
Two have been blamed on faulty equipment, and the third one — in which both of the school’s chillers stopped working — was prompted by an “electrical issue” with FPL’s power grid, the district said.
In a letter to school parents, the district said temperatures on campus rose past 79 degrees during the third breakdown, on Sept. 27.
But during one of the breakdowns, Shapiro, who is managing editor of the school’s student newspaper, said a teacher measured the classroom temperature at 86 degrees.
While the school’s administrators and teachers have taken the problem seriously, Shapiro said that when it came time for scheduled math test, “we just had to push through it.”
“When you’re at school for seven hours and we have tests, it’s definitely difficult to focus and perform,” she said.
The school district said it tries to keep its classrooms’ temperatures at between 76 and 78 degrees.
But when the temperature rises beyond that, it has no policy on when or whether to cancel classes, and no classes have been canceled this year, Deputy Superintendent Keith Oswald said.
Tim O’Connor, a spokesman for the county health department, said health officials inspect schools annually to ensure they have working ACs but do not set guidelines for classroom temperatures.
While parents and teachers often call for new air conditioners when problems emerge, Paul said the district cannot order up multimillion-dollar replacements to resolve every incident.
For one thing, she said, the problem often isn’t the chillers themselves, but a smaller electrical problem or broken part.
Determining what is causing the problem can frequently take days, she said.
“It’s not as simple as just replacing them,” she said. “The worst thing you can do is put three new chillers there and not fix the problem.”
And as administrators weigh solutions, children often are left to sweat.