Wednesday will mark one week since Albuquerque students returned to school. But, for many parents, it will mark one week of frustrations with Albuquerque Public Schools.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Wednesday will mark one week since Albuquerque students returned to school. But, for many parents, it will mark one week of frustrations with Albuquerque Public Schools.
KOB 4 has been receiving complaints about unbearably hot classrooms almost every day. Despite the outcry, it seems things aren’t cooling down.
We met with an Albuquerque mom Tuesday who is taking a stand against the district. She is pulling her son out of school until the temperatures in his classroom come down.
It may sound like a drastic decision, but she’s not the only parent taking a stand. She points out this isn’t a new problem for APS.
“It’s not fair that they go to school, come to school to learn, but they have to use one hand to write, and the other one to wipe their sweat off their foreheads,” said Yaneli Escamalla, an Albuquerque mother.
Escamalla is like any other mom, she just wants her children to feel safe and comfortable at school.
“They moved the schedules from 9 to 4, it feels like there’s much more hours, you know, in school. And for that fact, too, they should be even more comfortable,” said Escamalla.
She says it’s hard to be comfortable in a classroom that’s not much cooler than outside.
“I went in there right before 10 a.m. and it was already 86 degrees in his classroom,” Escamalla said.
It’s not a dry 86 degrees.
“Humid, humid hot. You feel it on your skin. It’s hard to breathe,” said Escamalla. “And you start sweating immediately.”
Escamalla says school leaders at Adobe Acres Elementary did try to find a cooler classroom for her first-grader, Elijah, but it seems there’s no escaping the heat until the school’s A/C is fixed.
“They don’t know when that new piece is coming in. It could be a month, it could be weeks. For the meantime, we have to be sending our kids like this? We shouldn’t,” Escamalla said.
She’s not anymore. Escamalla — and another parent — pulled their children out of school Monday, insisting they’re not going back until the hot classrooms are cooled down.
“Because he’s not going to be coming in, pretty much red, super red, and telling me I was hot in class today mom, like, I want to go home and change,” said Escamalla. “I just hope APS hears us out finally.”
This isn’t a one school problem. In fact, KOB 4 has received complaints about hot classrooms from at least 9 APS schools in the past week.
A district spokesperson says crews are working seven days a week to fix those issues, but it seems there’s only so much they can do.
“70% of our systems of roughly 25,000 air conditioners that we have in the district are evaporative coolers. When the weather’s hot, and we’re getting rain, which we greatly appreciate, that humidity level goes up. And we’re really pulling, you know, 10, 15 degrees cooler, in some cases, at best instances 20,” said Gabriel Jacquez, an APS deputy superintendent of operations. “When we talk about converting to refrigerated air, absolutely an option. But there’s, there’s definitely a cost factor involved.”
District officials say they are distributing portable A/Cs to affected schools, but Escamalla also knows this is not a new problem.
“This happens every year. So if APS already knows that this is an issue that happens to them every year, they should already fixed it years ago, years ago, and they should be more prepared,” said Escamalla.
Escamalla says she would consider sending her children to private school if the district does not invest in a long term solution.
As for the district, officials say the best way to report hot classroom problems is through each school’s principal. They assured us Tuesday crews are looking into every complaint.
Despite that, we know a lot of parents out there still feel like their complaints are not being taken seriously. So we took some of those concerns to the Albuquerque school board president Tuesday.
“That’s actually not my territory,” said Danielle Gonzales, president of the Albuquerque School Board. “The school board is really focused on student outcomes and our one employee, which is the superintendent.”
APS leaders added crews worked through the summer to address any issues before the start of the school year.
