Commentary: Lack of air conditioning is unacceptable

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District is simply not doing enough. Since school began, the average temperature has been suffocating.

More than half the classrooms in the district do not have air conditioning, and the district’s answer to this problem is to promise air conditioning in the far, far future. Being in a classroom with 26 5-year olds with three fans, which have been purchased by the teacher, as well as spraying the kids with water, just makes the promise of air conditioning at some future date a joke.

So the district has proposed that each teacher in a room without air conditioning can buy a fan for $40. But this has not occurred in many of the schools, and anyway one fan will not do it. One principal took the district’s money and purchased box fans for the teachers, a seemingly generous gesture but box fans are cheap and do not work well in classrooms.

Most of us have realized the reality of climate change for a long time, so it is hard to understand why Newport-Mesa has been so slow in making realistic plans.

But that was then and this is now. So, what to do? First, the district administrators should establish offices in vacant classrooms at schools with no AC, not as punishment, but to give them a boots-on-the-ground understanding of the environment, and they should remain there throughout. It’s too easy to drag your feet in 72 degrees.

Next, the district should get together with the trustees right now in emergency meetings and begin purchasing AC units. The trustees should be at the schools as often as they can throughout this emergency, and future emergencies, until it becomes real to them as well.

Money, as always, is the issue. So let’s again start looking seriously at cutting all money that is taken away from students and teachers. The teachers have done what they usually do during emergencies, which is to do their best for their students. They buy the fans with their own money [Editor’s note: The teachers are being reimbursed for the fans], they bring extra water for kids whose parents have not supplied it. They bring the water spray. They move the kids out of overcrowded rooms. They do it all.

SANDY ASPER lives in Newport Beach.