Cool schools a hot goal for Eastern Iowa districts

Next week, school districts throughout Iowa will begin opening their buildings' doors to kick off another school year. The start of classes coincides with middle of astronomical summer. This year, the forecast calls for highs in the mid-70s - warm but bearable.

“The weather is beautiful,” Alburnett Community School District Superintendent Dani Trimble wrote in an email to The Gazette. “Will it hold?”

It was a different story last year, when Trimble made the call to end the school day early three times in one August week because of the heat. It's not that the facilities weren't air-conditioned, it's that the ventilation wasn't sufficient to keep students and staff in school for the entire scheduled instructional day. That soon won't be the case, as this summer the district was able to complete geothermal conversion of an old boiler, which Trimble called “a significant update.”

“Because of this, we anticipate being able to keep enough areas of the school at a reasonable temperature this year,” she wrote.

Alburnett is a rural school system that had 558.4 pupils in 2012-13 according to certified enrollment data from the Iowa Department of Education. The Iowa Department of Education does not track which districts' buildings have air conditioning, said Communications Director Staci Hupp, but a 2012 estimate placed the number of schools without air conditioning between 10 percent and 15 percent.

The hot facilities issue also struck the Iowa City Community School District, which has schools in Iowa City, Coralville, Hills and North Liberty and educated more than 12,000 students as the state's fifth-largest school district in 2012-13.

Half of the district's 26 schools are 100 percent cooled, meaning that the buildings' entire square-footage is cooled. The other 13 facilities range from 74.19 percent at Penn Elementary School in North Liberty to 10.63 percent at Iowa City's Longfellow Elementary School.

“When you walk from the second floor to third floor, you can feel the change of temperature in the stairwell,” said Renae McKay, a parent of two current Longfellow students as well as two older children who formerly attended the elementary school. “My son, who's (entering) seventh grade, he would come home from school and his hair would be soaked in sweat.”

Educational implications

Aside from the discomfort of being in stuffy classroom, the lack of air conditioning can have a real impact on student learning. Vickie Robinson, department head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Postsecondary Education in the College of Education at the University of Northern Iowa, said students can lose focus when classrooms are too hot. It's the reason many administrators cite when they decide to release students early on hot days.

“Research tells us that climate and culture are important,” she said. “Students know if the room is inviting, and by that I mean it's organized, you want to be there, the paint is really fresh and the teachers want to be there.”

Physical climate is just one part of students' overall educational environment, Robinson said. She recalled her days as a high school teacher, when hot weather would even dictate classroom activities.

“I would even say, ‘Look guys, why don't we just have silent reading for the rest of the period?,'?” she said. “It takes so much energy to interact when you're in the heat.”

Iowa school districts are required to have students in school for 180 days. In order to count as a full day, there must be at least 5.5 hours of instruction. Whereas many districts build their calendars to include makeup days for time lost due to snow days, Iowa law does not mandate that schools need to hold supplemental class time when students are let out early for hot days as long as they hit that 5.5 hour mark.

That could potentially change in 2014-15, when a law will take effect that allows districts to track instructional time either in 180 days or 1,080 hours.

Early releases also place a burden on some families, because adults may have to scramble to rearrange their schedules or find child-care options with no more than a few hours' notice.

“That doesn't impact our family that much because I have a flexible work schedule,” McKay said. “For other families, it is an inconvenience.”

Expensive solutions  

September is school board election season, and some school systems, such as the Cedar Rapids Community School District, also are putting levy questions on the ballot this year.

While Cedar Rapids schools did not have any early release days because of the heat during the 2012-13 school year, improved ventilation systems are still a priority as the district prepares to ask voters to double the Physical Plant and Equipment Levy from 67 cents per $1,000 of taxable valuation to $1.34 per $1,000 of taxable valuation for 10 years starting July 1, 2015.

Those dollars, if approved, would allow the district to move forward with an $8.5 million operations and maintenance plan to repair, maintain and upgrade district facilities - including improving heating, ventilation and air conditioning system controls.

The district's middle schools all have geothermal units, as does Kennedy High School, said Buildings and Grounds Manager Rob Kleinsmith. Jefferson and Washington are in different stages of going geothermal.

Kleinsmith said that he'd like to eventually see energy-efficient air-conditioning systems in all district schools. He estimated the cost at $150 million, which would include necessary improvements to windows, many of which are single-pane and original to these older facilities.

“We're ready to take the steps into the elementary schools as our next venture, but there's a lot of competing interest for those dollars, so the direction of the future is really unknown at this time,” Kleinsmith said.

Meanwhile, in Iowa City, projects are under way to fully air-condition both Penn and Twain elementary schools. The district's school board recently adopted a $260.4 million long-term facilities plan that includes heating, ventilation and air conditioning upgrades at many buildings.

“Our goal is to create environments in our classrooms and buildings so the temperatures of the buildings are not a distraction to the learning that's going on,” said Duane Van Hemert, physical plant director for the Iowa City district. “I think the teachers teach better and the students learn better when the temperature is not a distraction.”

He wants to have all schools 100 percent air conditioned within the next 10 years.

“It's possible. And that's our goal,” he said. “I know we will.”