YORKVILLE – Yorkville School District Y115 will replace the chillers at two school buildings next spring at a total cost of slightly more than $1 million.
Director of Facility Operations Heather DiVerde said the 300-ton air-conditioning unit at Yorkville Middle School is failing and needs to be replaced. The new chiller will cost $589,763, DiVerde said.
The Yorkville School Board reviewed plans for purchasing the new unit at a committee-level meeting on Sept. 11 and is expected to give final approval for the purchase at its Sept. 25 meeting.
Meanwhile, plans already have been approved for a new 215-ton chiller to replace the aging unit at Grande Reserve Elementary School, at a cost of $473,600.
The money for the YMS and Grande Reserve chillers will come from different sources.
 

On hot days, fourth-grader Adriana Salas has observed that when the sun beats down on the pavement in her schoolyard it “turns foggy.” There are also days where the slide burns the back of her legs if she is wearing shorts or the monkey bars are too hot to touch. Salas, who attends Roosevelt Elementary School in San Leandro, California, is not alone in feeling the effects of heat on her schoolyard. Across the country, climbing temperatures have led schools to cancel classes and outdoor activities to protect students from the harmful effects of the heat.

This story also appeared in Mind/Shift
Jenny Seydel, an environmental educator and founder of Green Schools National Network, encourages teachers to leverage students’ observations about their schools to make learning come alive. According to Seydel, when teachers use the school grounds as a way to learn about social issues, they’re using their school as a three-dimensional textbook. For example, schools’ energy and water conservation, architecture and lunches are rich with potential for project-based learning. “We can learn from a textbook. We can memorize concepts. We can use formulas, but we don’t incorporate that learning until it is real,” said Seydel.
Against the backdrop of climate change, Roosevelt Elementary School teachers turned to their schoolyards as a way to apply lessons about rising temperatures to the real world. While these issues can seem overwhelming to young students, exploring them within the context of their school can not only make lessons stick, but also encourage students’ sense of civic agency. 
 

CHEYENNE — An inability to clearly defend which schools should be prioritized for state funding has Wyoming lawmakers hesitant to forward the School Facilities Commission’s budget to the chamber floor.

The SFC has two remediation schedules. One is the condition schedule, which lists the physical quality scores of the buildings, and the other is the capacity schedule, which is related to the maximum number of students in a classroom.The condition schedule is reflected by both the facility condition score, which covers the individual components of the facility, and the facility index score, which scores the building as a whole.

Members of the Legislature’s Select Committee on School Facilities, during their meeting Thursday in Casper, expressed concern over not having a consistently prioritized list of school construction needs so that they could explain the budgeting process on the chamber floor. Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, explained that the FCI score failed to address the urgency levels of any specific issue within a school.

LAHAINA, Hawaii – On a hot morning in Lahaina a few weeks after the wildfires, some 500 parents, teachers and students gathered under an outdoor tent, spilling onto the lawn.
Keith Hayashi — superintendent for Hawaii public schools — faced a tough crowd as he tried to reassure parents that the Department of Education (DOE) will make the right calls when it comes to reopening schools.
"I can't imagine what it's like to be in your shoes," he responded to a mother who was pleading to re-open schools in Lahaina. "But know that we will do our best in moving forward to make those decisions to support your students, to support you, and this Lahaina community."
Many kids on Maui missed out on an important ritual this year – going back to school. It's another consequence of the wildfire that destroyed or damaged many homes and buildings, including Lahaina's public schools.
Hayashi hears a lot of concern and anger from parents. "My senior athlete got robbed his freshman year, because of COVID. He got robbed half his sophomore year, because of COVID protocols," says Anela Gordon, whose son is a senior and a football player at Lahainaluna High School. "Now getting robbed his senior year? How fair is that?"
 

Cracked walls, mold, sewage backups, even the risk of electric shock. That's what students at Druid Hills High School outside Atlanta faced for years — and they wanted the world to see.  
Chronic under-investment left school buildings and facilities there in disrepair. The problem got national attention after a video the students posted to social media went viral.  
In the video, one student shows walls peeling from water damage. Another points to holes in the ceiling. One shows a sign warning students not to touch a metal pole in a classroom because of the risk of electrocution.  
"This isn't really normal," said Harley Martz, a senior at Druid Hills who helped produce the video as a sophomore in 2022. "The bottom floor of our main building flooded … [students] had to relocate … and it was just very claustrophobic. I mean, those kids, I don't think they had class that week. I mean, it threw off just everyone's schedule."  
As a new academic year begins, many students, like Martz, face barriers from the very walls of their school buildings, rather than their teachers or textbooks. A CBS News analysis of federal data found school districts with more Black students were able to invest far less money in buildings than majority-White districts — and often-unequal funding practices by state governments can make the problem worse.  
7 miles apart, a world of difference   
Druid Hills High is part of DeKalb County Public Schools, a district where CBS News found one of the starkest examples of unequal school building investment. Between 2015 and 2020, the DeKalb County School District invested about $961 in its buildings for each student enrolled.
Jack Cole, now a senior at Druid Hills, said the impact of under-investment was clear to the students. 
"It's like there's no drive to want to be there and learn if I don't want to be in school in the first place," said Cole. 
But while their school building is crumbling, others nearby are new, modern and innovative.
 

HAMILTON COUNTY, Tenn. — Last month, a task force revealed its specific recommendations designed to improve Hamilton County Schools.
But some school board members raised concerns at a meeting on Thursday and said that these recommendations are just the beginning of a larger conversation.
It can be a big pill to swallow when talking about closing the schools some of your children attend.
"They might not get to do fun stuff because there's too many kids," says Finn, an Alpine Crest student.
What will the Hamilton County Schools district look like in the year 2030?
That's a question Hamilton County leaders want to answer with new recommendations aimed at saving taxpayer dollars and improving the educational experience for students.
"I'm the president of the PTA at Alpine Crest. What I do, we couldn't do at a school that large," says Laura Ellinor.
Alpine Crest Elementary is one of 3 Hamilton County elementary schools that the task force recommended be consolidated into one big school at Dupont Elementary.
"It's not good for the teachers. It's not good for the students. It's not good for the parents sitting in a car line with 1,000 other families," says Ellinor.
Some parents calling the new proposal a ‘mega school.’
 

JERSEY SHORE — Over $6 million — possibly up to $9 million — was the estimated cost for needed repairs and maintenance on some district buildings, the Jersey Shore Area School board heard last month. This month, they want that amount scaled back considerably to fit into available capital projects funds, which are about $1 million.
Board member Wayne Kinley asked Superintendent Dr. Brian Ulmer to meet with Mark Wall, director of maintenance, buildings and grounds, to decide the most critical needs.
“We will take the list we have prioritized and whittle it down to that $1 million amount and come back with our recommendation for the whole board to look at and make decisions of where we go from there,” said Ulmer.
The pushback at last month’s meeting on the possibility of the board floating a bond to finance the estimated cost of all the maintenance and repairs came from board members and the public.
A few members of the public referred to the cost of keeping the buildings open in addressing the board.
 

Fulton County Schools will use sales tax funding for a $9.3 million renovation project at Dunwoody Springs Elementary School.
A total contract of $9.765 million, which includes $465,000 in a project contingency fund held by the school district, is on the Fulton County Board of Education’s consent agenda for its Sept. 21 meeting.
F. .H. Paschen, S.N. Nielsen & Associates LLC of Chicago, with regional offices in Atlanta and Savannah, will be awarded the contract when it is formally approved, according to the district’s Chief Operations Officer Noel Maloof.
The renovation will include new luxury vinyl tile flooring in the corridors and common areas, ceiling replacements, new fire sprinklers, lighting in the corridors and common areas. replacement of the emergency generator, HVAC modifications, and upgrades to portions of the existing building.
 

HAMLET — The Richmond County Schools Board of Education approved a new use agreement for organizations seeking to use school facilities and fields.

Use of the high school gym or athletic fields will be a flat fee of $200, different from a previously posed fee of a $100 hourly rate at the August Board meeting. There is also a $100 maintenance fee for all outdoor facilities.

There is a $100 flat rate for middle school facilities, down from a previously proposed $75 hourly rate.

Superintendent Dr. Joe Ferrell outlined why they decided to revisit and change the existing policy after consulting with their finance department.

“What we realized was that $60 was not covering what we actually had to pay to these custodians and SROS and others,” Ferrell said. “We were having to cover a lot of the costs.”

At their August meeting, overwhelming feedback from the board members regarding the initial policy indicated that a flat fee was more appropriate than an hourly fee. Ferrell said their initial policy may have priced out some organizations and “none of the board members” wanted to do that.

As hundreds of adults and children toured the airy new Union Middle School in Sandy last week, a young student’s voice rose above the chatter.
“This school is too big,” she said. “I miss the old one.”
The original Union Middle School was 55 years old and deteriorating, one of many aging buildings located in the Canyons School District when it was created in 2009. Split off from the Jordan District, Canyons estimated that it had inherited $650 million in deferred maintenance on its buildings.
In Midvale, then-Mayor JoAnn Seghini had initially been reluctant, but she became a convert to the idea of Canyons, the state’s first new school district in nearly a century. And since 2010, Midvale Elementary and Midvale Middle have been rebuilt, along with other schools, including Midvalley Elementary, Peruvian Park and Hillcrest High.
A facilities assessment had shown the district’s maintenance needs were so great it was cheaper to rebuild many schools than to make repairs.
As the latest rebuild, the new Union Middle boasts 230,000 square feet, making it 35,000 square feet — just shy of an acre — larger than its predecessor. The adjacent former school was demolished this summer.
 

Plymouth Community Schools is using the sun to power some of its school buildings.
It’s not the first district to use solar panels but district leaders in Plymouth are showing WSBT22 how they are using the sun to save money.
Solar Powered Schools
At Riverside Intermediate in Plymouth, teachers in every classroom are using the sun to light their classrooms.
Not because the sun is shining through the window, but because the sun is helping power the school building and turn the lightbulbs on.
Plymouth Community Schools is powering some of its classrooms, in part, from solar panels.
On sunny days, solar arrays outside Riverside Intermediate and Washington Discovery Academy are soaking up the sun and converting it into energy.
 

HARRISBURG — An environmental advocacy group and the state’s two largest teachers’ unions are giving the state a failing grade on efforts to eliminate lead in school drinking water.

“School is for learning and playing — not getting a daily dose of lead-tainted water. Lead damages kids’ ability to learn, grow and behave. There is no safe level of lead for children,” Stephanie Wein, clean water advocate for the PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center, said last week. “Protecting our kids’ health requires prevention at every drinking water tap — and our report card gives Pennsylvania a failing grade.”

As more Pennsylvania schools test their water, most schools have found that their drinking water systems contain lead, from the pipes running through school buildings and the soldering used to hold the pipes together, to the components in the drinking fountains themselves. Wherever there is lead, there is a risk of water contamination, the environmental group said in a statement announcing it's giving the state an 'F' for its efforts to eliminate lead in school drinking water. For example, the School District of Philadelphia found that 98% of school buildings had drinking outlets test positive for lead. According to a 2021 report by Women for a Healthy Environment, of 65 Pennsylvania school districts surveyed, 91% of those tested found lead in their water.

The legislative Committee on Education grilled the Guam Department of Education for four hours on Friday in an attempt to ascertain what progress has been reached in school readiness. Projects under the Disaster Local Area Network, or DLAN, system were of particular focus.

Chris Anderson, who serves as GDOE administrator of student support services and point of contact for the Office of Civil Defense and Department of Administration gave status updates on projects being addressed through the DLAN system.

“There are total of 17 tickets that were submitted starting from June 13, all the way through as late as Aug. 25. About 24% of the tickets are complete, 76% are still pending and of those that are still pending, 60% of the tickets require most likely contracts,” Anderson said.

The first ticket deals with a health concern many parents have voiced since Typhoon Mawar — mold mitigation for all 41 schools and the central office. But, according to Anderson, that is still pending.

“Right now, the work is with General Service Agency, working through their contracts they needed some assistance with DOE to put together a scope of work which we’ve done and that’s been submitted to them, so we’re just waiting for the procurement process to finalize,” Anderson said.

Addressing safety at schools, namely perimeter fencing for 29 schools, is also tied up in procurement.

Kansas school districts are warning Evergy’s plan to raise electric rates will saddle them with painful higher costs that harm their ability to recruit and retain teachers. Wichita Public Schools USD 259, the state’s largest district, filed documents with the Kansas Corporation Commission decrying the proposed increases and alleging they could lead to larger class sizes. De Soto USD 232 told The Star that its projected additional electric costs could pay for three or four teachers.
Wichita and De Soto – along with the Shawnee Mission, Olathe and Blue Valley districts – have intervened in the rate case before the KCC, the regulatory agency that will decide whether to allow Evergy to raise electric rates. The company has requested a 25% increase in the revenue it collects from educational customers in its Kansas central region and a roughly 2% net increase among all customers in its Kansas metro region. “The largest area of operating expenditures is personnel, so a likely consequence would be the inability to add and retain teachers and other school staff,” Wichita Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Susan Willis said in written testimony last month. “This would lead to increasingly larger class sizes and continued reduction of student services.”
 

MANCHESTER, CT (WFSB) - Bower Elementary School officially reopened after a year of Net Zero Energy renovations.
The project finished just in time to welcome students back on Tuesday.
Now, all students will be learning in a school that can produce enough renewable energy to meet its own annual energy consumption.
The upgrade also came with enhanced classrooms with high-tech tools and versatile furniture. Teachers say, it takes some of the weight off of their shoulders.
“Having a space like this and having all the resources available really helps me dedicate the time to working with the kids and getting them what they need,” said teacher Ms. Sullivan.
The school also has two STEM labs to help foster an interest in STEM fields.
 

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Public school teacher Ángel Muñiz grabbed a thermometer and thrust it into the camera as someone recorded him inside his classroom this week.
“It is about 99 degrees (37 C),” he said in a video posted on social media as seven fans whirred noisily around him.
It wasn’t even noon yet, and an advisory that day warned of a heat index of up to 111 F (43.8 C).
Students and teachers are sweltering in public schools across Puerto Rico that lack air conditioning and are demanding government action as the U.S. Caribbean territory struggles to respond to climate change effects while it bakes under record heat this year.
Last month was the hottest August on the island since record-keeping began. Puerto Rico broke the record of the daily maximum temperature six times and the highest minimum eight times, according to the National Weather Service in San Juan.
It also was the hottest August worldwide, with 2023 the second hottest year on record so far.
Heat advisories for Puerto Rico became the norm this summer, with the island reporting a record 47 nights with temperatures above 80 F (26 C).
“Records are being broken almost every day,” said Odalys Martínez, National Weather Service forecaster.
Public schools with no air conditioning or whose cooling systems are inoperable due to power outages blamed on a hurricane-battered electric grid are seeking relief, but it’s unlikely they’ll find it soon.
Last month, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi quietly vetoed a bill that called for air conditioning systems for public schools. The move outraged many, with some calling the situation inhumane as students organized protests.
 

Costa Mesans seeking opportunities to recreate, particularly on the city’s west side, will soon be able to find more options, after city officials and Newport-Mesa Unified School District agreed to open certain school fields to the public after hours.

The Costa Mesa City Council Tuesday approved hiring a full-time park ranger and to enhance the city’s contract with Lyons Security Services to allow for public use of lands at Rea, Wilson, Whittier and potentially Pomona elementary schools when classes are not in session.

NMUSD officials have also agreed to remove a temporary fence installed this summer outside its Harper Assessment Center near Harper Park, which serves special education students and houses ISSAC Charter school, as part of a six-month pilot program.

Deputy City Manager Alma Reyes said the two parties have held multiple discussions on how to improve access to open space, particularly in west-side neighborhoods where children have fewer outdoor amenities.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Congressman Bobby Scott toured Booker T. Washington Middle School in Newport News Friday, which he attended when it was an elementary school, to discuss the need to invest in America's school infrastructure.
A June 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the state of school infrastructure — the agency’s first report on the subject since 1996 — found that 54 percent of school districts across the country must replace or update major systems in more than half their buildings.
to discuss improving school infrastructure

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By: Ellen IcePosted at 12:45 PM, Sep 08, 2023 and last updated 8:22 PM, Sep 08, 2023
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Congressman Bobby Scott toured Booker T. Washington Middle School in Newport News Friday, which he attended when it was an elementary school, to discuss the need to invest in America's school infrastructure.
A June 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the state of school infrastructure — the agency’s first report on the subject since 1996 — found that 54 percent of school districts across the country must replace or update major systems in more than half their buildings.
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"We found that there are serious deficits all over the country in terms of maintaining schools and building new schools, there’s too many people being taught in trailers, too many schools dilapidated, many schools are 40, 50, 60 years and older,” said Scott.
At Friday's event, Scott highlighted the Rebuild America's School Act of 2023. The legislation would invest $130 billion in grants and bond authority to help repair, replace and upgrade public school facilities.
"The money we’ll have available if the bill passes will have upgrades in terms of technology, upgrades in terms of ventilation systems, and other upgrades to make sure the children can have a safe and up to date place to learn,” said Scott.
 

As the story map was released this week, schools in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and other localities canceled classes or after-school activities due to extremely high temperatures. In Massachusetts, Lowell Public Schools canceled classes Thursday and Friday because ”the temperatures in many classrooms are expected to be too hot for teachers to teach effectively,” a notice on the district’s website said. 

In the past month, schools in Hawaii closed after wildfires impacted areas in Maui, and several Florida districts shut down in anticipation of Hurricane Idalia.

“Sure, weather has always impacted school closures, but what we are seeing in recent years is more frequent extreme weather events, with more damaging outcomes, driving more school closures and more time away from the classroom for students,” said Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, in a statement. 

Out of options to fund repairs to its decaying buildings, a 400-student school district in one of Washington’s poorest counties launched a legal challenge against the state two years ago. 

On Thursday, the Wahkiakum School District lost in a unanimous ruling from the Washington Supreme Court. Local taxpayers are still expected to share in the costs of maintaining and constructing school buildings, even if, like Wahkiakum, they haven’t approved a bond in 20-plus years. 

But the debate over the state’s investment in school construction funding costs will continue. While the opinion says the state isn’t required to cover 100% of basic school capital construction costs, it offers a legal path for school districts to challenge how much and where the state is currently chipping in. 

“They’ve left the door open,” said Wahkiakum Superintendent Brent Freeman. 

There is little reprieve for school districts that fail to pass a bond in Washington state, which are often the smallest and poorest. Without a bond, these districts are also locked out of qualifying for the state’s largest construction assistance program. Another state grant program, which is more flexible and is aimed at small school districts, hasn’t offered sufficient funds for substantive repairs. It was funded for about $100 million in the last legislative session.