Schools are sending kids back in July heatwaves without working AC
Sending eight-year-olds to play kickball in 117-degree weather without shade feels less like education and more like a survival reality show.
American school districts keep pushing start dates earlier into July and August to chase state funding bonuses and squeeze in test prep. The slight snag in this plan is that mid-summer happens to be when the planet is actively trying to melt everything in sight.
In cities like Phoenix, kids walk to school in 117-degree heat, only to land in classrooms where the air conditioning was installed during the Nixon administration. Over 40% of US school districts need to overhaul or completely replace their broken cooling systems, a fix estimated to cost over $40 billion.
Meanwhile, outdoor schoolyards are covered in asphalt and black rubber that turn into literal frying pans by noon. Students take exams in sweatboxes, absenteeism spikes, and high school athletes routinely collapse from heat exhaustion because nobody bothered to build a simple canvas canopy or staff a nurse.
Society somehow decided that spending forty billion dollars on school air conditioning was too expensive, but frying millions of children for an extra 5% grant made complete sense.
Source: The Conversation
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