San Francisco weather: Many schools don't have air conditioning

SAN FRANCISCO - If you live or work in San Francisco, you know having air conditioning is rare. 

A lot of California schools are unprepared for this kind of heat. 

If schools do have A/C, they're often old and outdated. Hot classrooms lead to more student and teacher illnesses and absences, and studies show that they reduce children’s ability to learn.

According to the Associated Press, all or most schools in Long Beach have no air conditioning, affecting 14,000 students.

In Oakland, as many as 2,000 classrooms at 77 schools don't have it. Equipping those schools with air conditioning would be an expensive and complicated task that would cost at least $400 million, said Preston Thomas, Oakland Unified School District’s chief systems and services officer.

On a recent day in Oakland when outdoor temperatures reached 88 degrees, 8th-grader Juliette Sanchez felt sticky and hot in a stuffy room at Melrose Leadership Academy.

"For me it’s a lot harder to focus on what I’m doing," Sanchez told the Associated Press. "Like, right now I’m sticking to the table. It’s uncomfortable to write. My arm is sticky and I’m just hot."

In Fresno, officials have been overwhelmed with more than 5,000 calls for air conditioning repairs in the past 12 months.

"If it’s too hot, just like if you’re too hungry, it’s almost impossible to learn, so the impact on students and teachers is great," said Paul Idsvoog, the Fresno Unified School District’s chief operations officer. "If you have multiple systems that are 20 years old, sooner or later you’re not going to be able to keep up with the tide."

A UC Berkeley and Stanford joint report last year found that between 15% and 20% of K-12 public schools have no A/C at all. And as many as another 10% need major repairs or replacements for their systems to work adequately.  

Advocates say that's likely an underestimate. 

For many schools, the best option is to use fans and open windows.

School officials say they would need tens of billions of dollars to install and repair air conditioning. Many of the worst problems are in hot, inland school districts that serve low-income communities of color, where there are fewer financial resources to replace or repair them.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last month vetoed a bill that would have created a master plan for climate-resilient schools, including an assessment of when air conditioning systems were last modernized. State officials currently do not collect data on air conditioning in schools.

Nationally, 41% of school districts need to update or replace their heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems in at least half of their schools, according to a federal study.

Several Bay Area schools have canceled activities to keep kids out of the heat. In San Francisco, outside sports, including middle school games and some high school practices were canceled on Tuesday.

They're expected to resume on Wednesday. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.