In Flagstaff, students and teachers sweat through a growing need for air conditioning

By Joan Meiners (AzCentral.) and Katie Worth (Climate Central)

This story was produced through a collaboration between The Arizona Republic and Climate Central. Climate Central scientist Jennifer Brady contributed data reporting.

On hot days at Flagstaff High School, Elli d’Oronzio’s students ask if they can sit in the hallway to work on their assignments. Her windowless classroom in the aging building’s basement, nicknamed “the dungeon,” can be 10 degrees warmer than the hallway, which gets more airflow. On a recent afternoon, the room’s thermometer read 95 degrees.

“By my fourth hour, that's right before lunch, we've had three straight hours of bodies in this room,” said d’Oronzio, who is in her third year teaching social studies courses at the school. “It's crowded, it's hot and they're grumpy and tired. And I can't blame them for that. But it's very hard to pull focus back in and get them engaged about the content, when it's like a survival mode at that point.”

The “dungeon” is equipped with a swamp cooler, but d’Oronzio said it doesn’t work well and often just draws in wildfire smoke and dust from outside. Instead, she keeps three fans running to try to maintain a productive learning environment at the beginning and end of the school year. She recently loaned her fourth fan to another teacher struggling to control temperatures in a nearby classroom.

On the second floor, math teacher Julia Wilson brought her own window air-conditioning unit from home this year. She said she’d rather have it there, helping her and her students get through the days, than at home, where she spends fewer of the hottest hours.

“There are days when I’m standing there teaching and I get horrible headaches or feel faint from being in the heat all day,” Wilson said. “One of the teachers across the hall from me actually had a student switch into a different math class that was not the right class for him because he could not function in that classroom because it was so hot.”

Libby Miller, Flagstaff High’s principal, has applied for funding to retrofit classrooms with air conditioning in each of the last three record-hot years, with little luck. Last year she had enough money to purchase air purifiers for the stuffiest classrooms, but they did little for the heat. Installing cooling across the entire building would be a much bigger budget request. And with Arizona ranked 49th in per pupil education funding, she’s unlikely to get it.

“It’s not going to be enough,” Miller said. “The state needs to step up.”

None of Flagstaff Unified School District’s 15 schools were originally built with air-conditioned classrooms because hot days in the forested, high-elevation city have historically been rare and confined to the warmest weeks of summer break. But as northern Arizona’s summers have stretched both longer and hotter, the number and intensity of warm school days have ticked up, making classrooms uncomfortably stuffy and challenging students’ ability to focus and learn.

School safety policies have made matters worse. In decades past, teachers would prop open their doors on hot days to encourage a cross breeze, or leave windows open overnight to fully cool their classroom before morning. Worries about school shootings and break-ins have led the district to forbid such practices.

On Tuesday, thermometers in Flagstaff are expected to read 83 degrees, 14 degrees warmer than the average high temperature recorded for Oct. 1 between 1990 and 2021. It’s another day in a string of abnormally hot weather that has been afflicting Flagstaff schools since classes started on Aug. 7.

This year isn’t a fluke: Heat-trapping climate pollutants in the atmosphere have warmed Flagstaff enough that cooling demand during the school year has nearly doubled since 1970, a Climate Central analysis of weather records shows.

Flagstaff High counts among an estimated 13,700 public schools across the country that once could get away without cooling systems but now need them, according to a 2024 White House report. These schools are largely in northern or high-altitude places, where high temperatures have not historically been a major concern during the school year. Now they find themselves needing new solutions to learning and health problems caused by excess heat.

During the first two weeks of fall semester, Justin DiNardi, the district’s director of operations, fielded calls from multiple school administrators, asking for help with what he already knew and could do little about — that teachers were “not comfortable in their current teaching environment.”

“Schools will call me and say, ‘It’s miserably hot over here,’” he said. “Like there’s a button I can push to go, like, OK, I’ll fix it.”

Elli d'Oronzio completes work during her prep hour inside her classroom at Flagstaff High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Diannie Chavez/The Republic

‘Definitely over the years, it has gotten hotter in our buildings’

The district has done its best to adapt. In 2022, the newly rebuilt Killip Elementary School became the first in district history with central air conditioning in every classroom, and Marshall Elementary will become the second when its rebuild is complete, expected in 2025.

During the last two years, the district used federal funding to upgrade cooling systems in three other elementary schools, though some others still lack a single room where students or staff can go to cool down. The middle and high schools now have air conditioning in high-priority spaces like auditoriums, libraries, computer labs and cafeterias.

By DiNardi’s back-of-the-envelope estimate, outfitting all school facilities with air conditioning would cost tens of millions of dollars, money the district doesn’t have. So officials have implemented a triage system, working on long-term plans to install cooling systems across the district while contriving temporary fixes like portable air conditioners or floor fans for the hottest classrooms, DiNardi said.

His team has looked into retrofitting the ventilation system in “the dungeon” rooms at Flagstaff High, but found the design alone would cost $35,000 to $50,000. Not only does the district lack those funds right now, DiNardi said prioritizing that project could be fiscally irresponsible.

"Flagstaff High School being one of our oldest facilities, we're looking at rebuilding it in a future bond,” he said. “I’m hesitant to say I need $4 million for this retrofit project now and in six years say I need another $120 million to rebuild the whole high school.”

In the meantime, students like Nick Garcia continue to swelter. Garcia is a senior in d’Oronzio’s class and a drum major in the marching band, which also meets in Flagstaff High’s overheated basement when not practicing outside. He said a student recently passed out during practice and didn’t have access to a cooled space to recover. He often finds it hard to focus in band and in class, with “everybody breathing in and out the hot air in the same room.”

"The first day of class it was really noticeable,” Garcia said. “Me and my friend were saying how hot it was and then I remember we turned on a fan and my friend’s papers started blowing away.”

Nick Garcia poses for a portrait in the hallways of Flagstaff High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Diannie Chavez/The Republic

Children are more vulnerable to heat than adults. Physiologically, pre-pubescent kids have less ability to regulate their body temperature and so can swiftly find themselves overheated or dehydrated. Even teenagers are less adept at monitoring how they’re feeling and advocating for what they need. In the extreme, this can lead to seizures, organ failure, and even death.

Such severe cases have not crossed the desk of McKenzie Bevirt, health services coordinator at Flagstaff Unified. She receives reports from school nurses and said she had not seen an increase in heat-related illness. With an elevation nudging 7,000 feet, Flagstaff has never endured the triple-digit temperatures that menace many other cities in Arizona. Sitting around in a 90-degree classroom doesn’t carry the same peril as running around outdoors on a 115-degree day.

But it would be wrong to assume high classroom temperatures carry no health consequences for kids, said Dr. Brian Drummond, an emergency physician and co-founder of the group Arizona Health Professionals for Climate Action.

Moderately high heat can induce headaches, dehydration, lethargy, ailments kids may or may not mention to an adult. It also exacerbates pre-existing conditions linked to dizziness, asthma and nausea. If a child ends up in the nurse’s office with these complaints, their symptoms wouldn’t necessarily be categorized as heat-related, Drummond said.

Heat also does a number on mental health. “As temperatures go up, people have more difficulty with emotional regulation, focus, concentration, suicidal tendencies, mood disorders, depression, anxiety, stress,” Drummond said. “This applies to kids in the classroom.”

At Coconino High School, about 2 miles northeast of Flagstaff High, Principal Tadd Ragan worries about all these consequences as he patrols hallways he describes as “a maze of fans.”

Ragan previously coached football at Coconino High, and did what he could in that position to protect student athletes from heat. He then served as assistant principal at Sinagua Middle School for five years, where he witnessed rising temperatures become a problem there, too. Now, on the larger campus of Coconino High, he makes sure his staff members have radios so they can communicate and respond quickly to medical issues, including increasing incidences of student dizziness.

“Definitely over the years, it has gotten hotter in our buildings,” Ragan said. “I feel like five, six years ago was when we started putting an emphasis on buying fans for classrooms, especially in the August month. So there's definitely been a change from how warm the rooms were in 2000 to now.”

A fan provides relief from the heat inside Kelley Smith's classroom at Coconino High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Dannie Chavez/The Republic

Heat doesn’t need to be dangerous to daze and distract kids

Molly Johnson, who teaches exercise science as well as earth and space science at Coconino High, is grateful for the fans in her classroom staving off the worst health consequences of heat. But she says they are an imperfect solution not only because they don’t cool enough, but because — as with Garcia’s friend’s papers blowing away in d’Oronzio’s classroom at Flagstaff High — these temporary interventions can undermine the primary purpose of the educational system.

“It affects the students quite a lot, because they can’t hear me talk over the fan. It’s just so loud,” Johnson said. “And they’re constantly getting up to refill their water bottles, which just makes it harder to teach.”

Fall temperatures in Flagstaff are on average 2.3 degrees warmer than they were in 1970, a Climate Central analysis of weather records shows. Differences in urban materials also cause cities to warm unevenly, depending on the prevalence of materials like asphalt versus vegetation.

Coconino High and Flagstaff High are both located in especially warm parts of town, meaning students lumber through more days warm enough to daze and distract them than they might in a more rural school. When it comes to what they learn, those days add up.

Climate Central modeled the warming influence of urban development across Flagstaff. Both Coconino High and Flagstaff High are in areas with elevated temperatures, increasing air conditioning needs at those schools. Provided By Climate Central

In a seminal 2020 study titled “Heat and Learning,” U.S. researchers compared PSAT scores from 10 million students with records of the temperatures they experienced at school. Their results suggest a 1% decline in learning with every 1-degree increase in average temperatures during a school year. The effect was less dramatic in school districts with robust air conditioning, they found. Another study found that lowering a classroom’s temperature from 86 to 68 degrees improved children's classroom performance by 20%.

The Heat and Learning researchers also determined the problem doesn’t hit every part of a community equally. Nationwide, poor, Black and Hispanic students are less likely to have air conditioning both at school and at home than their wealthier, white peers. The researchers concluded that heat alone is probably responsible for about 7% of the racial achievement gap in public schools.

Flagstaff is a one- to four-hour drive from parts of the Navajo Nation, and many Indigenous families have relocated to the city or send their teenagers there for school. As a result, about a quarter of students enrolled at Coconino and Flagstaff high schools are of American Indian descent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Another 23 to 35% of students at the two schools are Hispanic, and between 25 and 33% are considered economically disadvantaged.

Liam Wilcox completes school work inside Kelley Smith's classroom at Coconino High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Dannie Chavez/The Republic

There’s a public safety argument to be made for investing in school air conditioning despite the price tag, said Benjamin Ruddell, an environmental engineering professor at Northern Arizona University, whose research has investigated heat and health.

Most of Flagstaff’s older housing stock lacks air conditioning, and those houses tend to be occupied by Flagstaff’s older population and young families, Ruddell said. Schools already act as emergency shelters during disasters like winter storms and fires. Equipping them with air conditioning would allow them to be deployed as cooling centers during Flagstaff’s hottest summer days, which will get even hotter as time goes on. During the school year, cool classrooms would not only create a better learning environment for all students, but also provide children who don’t live in air conditioned homes a degree of respite, he said.

“Of course, that all costs money, but sometimes those expenditures make sense when you bring together public safety and emergency management in addition to education,” Ruddell said.

Until funding for air conditioning in Flagstaff schools catches up with the warming climate, learning outcomes in this city and beyond will depend on educators managing rising heat in whatever ways they can.

Sitting next to a giant teaching thermometer in Coconino High’s overheated second floor science wing, senior Liam Wilcox said the heat doesn’t bother him too much. But he’s spent enough time in the 67-year-old building to know it can be an issue for many of his peers.

“I think a lot of people are affected by it, it’s just an uncomfortable environment,” said Wilcox, who plans to start classes at Flagstaff’s NAU next fall.

His teacher, Kelley Smith, who has taught science at the school for 18 years, seconded that opinion.

“Definitely, the temperatures are warmer every year and it’s affecting our classrooms,” he said.

Recently, Smith watched his oversized teaching thermometer top 85 degrees.

“But given the public school budget, I don’t know what we could do," he said. "I’ve hit my limit of what I can do with the fans.”

Kelley Smith stands inside his classroom at Coconino High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Diannie Chavez/The Republic

‘To get the funds you have to show them your open wounds’

Putting air conditioning into every American school that now needs it would total about $40 billion, according to a 2021 analysis of schools’ cooling needs. In Arizona, the bill would be an estimated $70 million.

Failing to address the problem also carries a cost. A kid’s history of sitting stupefied through class plays out in their earnings potential later in life. An analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded that heat-related learning losses will cost Americans more in lost earnings than outfitting every school with adequate air conditioning.

For the work it’s done so far, Flagstaff Unified has leaned on taxpayer-supported school bonds and COVID-era federal funds to supplement its otherwise modest facilities and maintenance budget.

Whether it can lay hands on money to install air conditioning in more schools depends heavily on the outcome of a lawsuit filed against the state of Arizona by its teachers union, administrators’ association, school board association, and several school districts. The plaintiffs contend that the state has violated its own constitution by inadequately funding school facilities projects.

The defense, which is being led by Republican lawmakers, insists that while the funding system could be improved, the state does approve most projects (though the districts countered by saying they’ve been discouraged from even applying). Arizona’s Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes attempted to negotiate a settlement, but when that effort failed, the case went to trial. The judge’s ruling is expected in early 2025.

Flagstaff Unified did not participate in the lawsuit. But if the ruling favors the school groups, the state could be forced to devote billions of new dollars to school maintenance and improvement projects, a chunk of which would reach Flagstaff.

DiNardi said he hopes that at minimum, the lawsuit forces the state to overhaul the way it awards funds. As it stands, just applying for state facilities money can be so cumbersome that it can thwart a project. He knows of schools operating on half their campus because the rest is unsafe and administrators have been unable to get the state’s attention.

Flagstaff Unified, however, succeeded in navigating the bureaucracy recently: The state provided about $500,000 to replace broken boilers at Coconino High. But DiNardi said that might not have been the case if it wasn’t such an emergency.

“To get the funds you have to show them your open wounds,” he said.

Plants and anatomy models decorate Kelley Smith's classroom at Coconino High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Dannie Chavez/ The Republic

Responding to a request for a statement, a spokesperson for Mayes declined to comment on the case ahead of the ruling, but said she is concerned about schools’ future air-conditioning needs “and will continue to advocate that our public schools receive the funding they need to meet the needs of Arizona’s students.”

While they wait, Flagstaff Unified’s teachers and staff have gotten creative to meet their students’ needs.

Principals have moved afternoon classes out of the hottest room on campus and into the gym. Teachers have spent their own money to try out an ice-filled cooling system off Amazon. Maintenance staff have strategically deployed floor fans. District officials have batted around the idea of pushing the start of the school year back a couple of weeks. Coaches have weighed whether to forfeit games in the Phoenix area, where it’s 25 degrees warmer, to protect their cooler-climate athletes.

Ragan, the Coconino High principal, said he’s even thought about flipping the normal order of a school day when it gets hot. Students would do their homework at their desks, and when they’re home, they could watch recorded lectures from their teachers. This would resolve the noisy fan problem: Students could hear their teachers, and teachers wouldn’t kill their voices trying to be heard.

As a child in the 1980s, NAU’s Ruddell endured his own share of stifling days attending unair-conditioned schools in Michigan. He recalls his teachers adapting on the fly then, too, eschewing any tasks requiring mental acuity or concentration in favor of just keeping cool.

“The doors were open, the fans were on," he said. "We were sitting on our carpet squares.”

Since then, cooling demand during the first weeks of the back-to-school season has grown in almost every American city. Flagstaff’s falls now average 17 more warm days than they did 50 years ago, according to a Climate Central analysis of weather records. The analysis also found that a spike in temperatures between Sept. 4 and 6 of around 7 degrees above average was made five times more likely by the influences of human-caused climate change. By the time Ruddell’s kids send their own children to school, stifling days are projected to become far more routine.

An analysis of weather data by Climate Central found that falls in Flagstaff include, on average, 17 more unseasonably warm days than in 1970. Provided By Climate Central

Installing more air conditioning might help students in the short term, but it won’t protect them from these trends. Home air conditioners account for about 6% of the country’s electricity use, most of which is produced using fossil fuels that emit heat-trapping pollutants into the atmosphere. These cooling units also release refrigerants and other powerful greenhouse gases, while producing operational heat that one Arizona-based studyfound directly warmed surroundings by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Flagstaff’s local government has implemented climate and sustainability programs to reduce the city’s impact, but state lawmakers have done littleto address the problem more broadly and scientists say global action is not on track to address catastrophic warming.

If every classroom cannot be adequately cooled in the face of these increasing challenges, education officials must take the best of their creative adaptations and codify them, Ruddell said. When temperatures hit a certain threshold, for example, the district could require teachers of young children to verbally check in with each of their charges, and cafeteria staff to distribute cold drinks.

Districtwide policies would ensure no students suffer unnecessarily because their teacher hasn’t thought of the right intervention, Ruddell said. And they should be put in place before they’re needed, rather than after. Otherwise, he said, “You wake up one day and something bad has happened, and you realize that you really missed the signals, you didn’t adapt your behavior.”

Flagstaff Unified has yet to make its first formal heat-related policy, though it’s working on one that would require recess monitors to check the surface temperature of playground equipment in warm weather, DiNardi said. He admitted this effort only started after a child burned themselves on a slide.

Molly Johnson stands inside Kelley Smith's classroom at Coconino High School in Flagstaff on Sept. 24, 2024. Diannie Chavez/The Republic

But another recent policy change will likely make the classroom heat problem worse.

Johnson, one of the science teachers at Coconino, shared that the schedule for Flagstaff area high schools is set to shift later next year, in response to research showing teenagers perform better academically when they can sleep an extra hour. Those studies failed to factor in the opposite impact of a warming climate.

“This year was our hottest year on record,” she said. “And next year, we’re going to be going until 3:30 instead of 2:30, so it’s going to be even hotter in the classrooms.”