The unusually high mid-May temperatures forced two D.C. schools to close Tuesday when their HVAC systems couldn’t keep classrooms cool.
Ballou High School in D.C.’s Ward 8 was closed, and the Cardozo Education Campus in Ward 1 carried out a “heat evacuation” Tuesday morning, sending students home after temperatures soared inside classrooms for the second day in a row.
By mid-morning Tuesday, Cardozo math teacher Paul Abdou told WTOP, “We have many classrooms already in the 80s. Yesterday, it was about as hot as today, and we had classrooms in the 80s and the 90s. My classroom reached a temperatures of 95 degrees yesterday.”
“You can imagine what that’s like for students who are trying to learn and do their best,” he said, adding that it’s “far from ideal conditions” for taking finals, Advanced Placement exams or state tests.
Abdou, a building representative for the Washington Teachers Union Local 6, said the building suffers from heating failures in the winter, as well as air conditioning outages in the spring and into the summer.
“We’ve struggled here at Cardozo for years with HVAC issues and hot classrooms. We got a full refurbishment in 2013, but the whole time I’ve been at Cardozo, which has been five years, we’ve had perennial heating issues,” he said.
Abdou didn’t fault the school’s administrators, who he said do the best they can. Instead, he took issue with the Department of General Services, which has oversight over the physical plants at D.C.’s government buildings.
Abdou compared the problems of heating and cooling to the plot of the movie “Groundhog Day,” where events repeat themselves endlessly.
“Every single time it gets hot or it gets cold, we have the same issues happening over and over again,” Abdou said.
In a statement from DGS, officials told WTOP it was monitoring all school buildings’ HVAC systems and treating cooling issues “as a high priority.”
“Contingency measures, including spot coolers and window units, are being assessed for potential deployment to stabilize temperatures while DGS crews and contractors work around the clock to address impacted areas, complete repairs and restore operations as quickly as possible. Long term solutions are being assessed for both schools to include repairing the cooling tower and pumps at Ballou this summer. We remain committed to ensuring all school environments stay safe, cool, and conducive to learning throughout this period of extreme heat,” the department added.
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