Taxpayers have voted to give San Diego Unified School District $11.5 billion over the last 16 years with the express purpose of bringing working air conditioning to every classroom in the district. But nearly two decades in, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, some students are still dealing with dangerous heat.
This summer, several San Diego Unified schools were hit hard by high temperatures. Hoover students complained last month that some classrooms reached 100 degrees. Henry High last week also dealt with soaring temperatures in classrooms.
And at Garfield Elementary, a 9-year-old who was having trouble breathing due to the heat was taken to the hospital.
Hoover, Henry and Garfield all technically have air conditioning in all their classrooms — as do all the other schools in San Diego Unified. It’s the working part that has been the problem.
Since 2008, district officials have asked San Diegans to pass four construction bond measures totalling $11.5 billion. In some cases, district officials made air conditioning a central part of their argument for why voters should pass the bonds.
Pass these bonds, they said, and we will make sure every classroom has working air conditioning.
Even the verbiage from bond to bond looks copied and pasted:
2008: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
2012: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
2018: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
2022: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
But AC problems are still a yearly occurrence at San Diego Unified schools.
As part of the bond programs, district officials promised they would have a working AC in every classroom by 2019. It didn’t happen. In 2022, San Diego High School still didn’t have air conditioning for every class — though district officials said at the time it was the last school to not be fully air conditioned.
That year San Diego High was plagued with heat problems. Students complained that their classrooms reached nearly 90 degrees.
In 2013 only about one-third of district classrooms had air conditioners, according to district spokesperson Samer Naji. By 2019, he wrote, installation of air conditioners at the other two-thirds of schools was “substantially complete.” During that period, officials spent $460 million installing air conditioners.
All told, there are about 15,000 HVAC systems districtwide, Naji wrote.
District officials have received more than 1,100 work orders for heating and cooling problems in the last 30 days. As of last week, it had resolved 468 of the highest priority orders, NBC 7 reported.
“Issues have been reported from throughout the district, however only a few schools have experienced widespread AC issues, like Hoover or Henry,” Naji wrote. He also noted that the district fixed the malfunction that sent a Garfield student to the hospital in a day.
District officials have long gotten heat on their bond spending priorities. Despite talk of the need to remove asbestos when pitching the 2008 and 2012 bond measures, the district prioritized installing new turf fields at campuses that proved to be faulty and needed to be replaced just a few years later. Promises to fix aging plumbing fell by the wayside because, as former school board member Scott Barnett put it, “You can’t do a ribbon-cutting on new plumbing, right? But you can do it on a new stadium.”
It seems that SDUSD is simply to large to manage by govt. Time to break it up into smaller independent districts and time to give parents the right to choose the school of THEIR choice with vouchers.
Its time to end the govt monopoly on our education dollars.
It certainly seems that smaller school districts in the county have been more successful.
Sure sounds like the wheels are coming off the SDUSD bus and the drivers of this bus aka the Board members are derelict in their oversight of what is happening under their noses. Staff responsible for this situation are no doubt sitting in a/c working offices collecting big salaries while the kids are suffering. Sounds to me like we need better stewards of our tax dollars, starting with a complete makeover at the Board level……now!
Lou,
I work in central office and can testify that there is no air conditioning for the majority of 4100 Normal Street. The few spaces that have air are “cool-Zones”
Ann, you do know the superintendents office and I believe the board members offices do have air conditioning…..
Although true, most of the staff at central office do not. During the heat wave it was 90 in the office I work in along with nine other staff members.
Jeff, understood but that is not ok. Those at the top stay cool to do their work but the rest do not? This just adds to the problems SDUSD continues to have. A change of leadership is needed at the top. It can’t happen soon enough.
The issue is mismanagement by the Board. They refuse to hire a superintendent with experience managing a large budget and workforce.
I agree, a new board would be a start.
The good news is that the board is made up of elected officials. The bad news is that voters keep voting for the same type of people and expect a different outcome.
I used to vote for any bond measure that was for education. I certainly voted for a bond to provide air conditioning to the schools. When I found out that the money raised was being used for stadiums at schools I realized that SDUSD and the City could not be trusted to spend money for the purposes outlined in the bond measures. Since then, I have voted “no” on almost all bond issues.
If the problem hasn’t been resolved, choosing not to further fund the schools isn’t going to help these kids. What we need is to vote for people who are more concerned with putting money towards the boring school infrastructure, like HVAC and plumbing, instead of flashy things like Football Fields that they can use to launch a career elsewhere. Don’t vote “No” on Bonds. Vote FOR better representatives.
My students sti have no A/C in their school. Correia Middle School is currently undergoing a full “site modernization” that does not include fixing or replacing the A/C. Explain that one…
That isn’t a fair comment. Schools are funded through tax dollars. The bond sale revenue is for capital improvements. billions of bonds have already been approved but they aren’t old immediately. They are sold over a long period of time. The author is correct that the pitch to get approval for new bond sales is copy and pasted. If the voters keeping voting yes then they will keep copy and pasting the language and write measures with no required accountability. At some point voting no on the measure is necessary to ensure that the next one is written with more specific language. There needs to be legal consequences when the money isn’t used for what the voters wanted. Only voters can ensure that the accountability exists.
This is not a unique situation. I hope the VOSD follows the many other copy/pasted unmet “promises” written in bond after bond.
My kids are now 23 and 25 but when they were in elementary school I tried to secure air conditioning units with a construction company of a local athlete doing the work, pieces donated by Home Depot. San Diego Unified said no because it wasn’t their union workers doing the work. Can you imagine? One thing that the authors of this article did not touch on is the corresponding clothing problems caused by the Heat. When this gets so hot girls will wear tank tops to school and out come all the dress code violations. It is an unfair correlation
Due to financial mismanagement by SDUSD, their standard, why I always vote NO on school bonds. SDUSD doesn’t have a financial problem. It has a serious management problem.