Climate Crisis Is Burning Schools Up. Some School Districts Are Trying To Cool Them Down
a Smart Surfaces Coalition feature
Scores of U.S. schoolyards like are carpeted in heat-absorbing asphalt, with no shade even for play areas. The buildings were often made with wall and roofing materials that radiate heat into indoor spaces. Kids are also more vulnerable to heat illness than adults. Their bodies have a harder time self-regulating in extreme heat in part because they sweat less, so they can become dehydrated faster. Climate change is heightening the risks. School closures related to heat are becoming more frequent, according to a report by the Center for Climate Integrity and the firm Resilient Analytics.
There is also accumulating data on temperature inequality and the effects of heat. Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, which describes Aguilar’s, can be as much as 7 F (3.9 C) hotter than richer and whiter neighborhoods, leaving students and educators to swelter in a warming world. Extreme temperatures also affect learning, performance and concentration.
Yet there are well-known ways to cool down schools and neighborhoods. “When the solutions are so at hand and readily available,” said Joe Allen, associate professor and director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, these conditions are “unacceptable.”
Relying on grant money “can completely exacerbate the haves and the have-nots” when it comes to reducing climate change and adapting to its harms, said UCLA’s Turner, “because it’s going to be the schools that have more resources” that can go after these grants.
Many believe schools shouldn’t be left on their own. Each of these individual solutions makes a difference, said Greg Kats, founder of the Smart Surfaces Coalition. But combining efforts with a local government or neighborhood means “you can add about ten degrees of comfort to a school, which means that the kids can be outside playing. It means that the windows can be open. It means you don’t have the loud grinding of an air conditioning,” he said.
“It’s just sort of integration, right, of different strategies over a larger geographic area,” he added. “You’re really sort of transforming the school environment.”
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