After 10 days of air-conditioning breakdowns and sweltering heat, the man in charge of Duval County's school buildings said Aug. 21 that things will get better soon.
"What our students and staff have been going through for the last two weeks is unacceptable," Jim Culbert, the school district's chief of operations and technology services, told reporters.
Since classes started Aug. 10, the school district logged about 1,300 requests for air conditioning repairs, which can range from fixing broken pumps to replacing chillers, a school district fact sheet said.
But Culbert said he thought that Aug. 21 started with only five or six classrooms with no air conditioning, although new problems can still arise.
He said the district is moving forward on plans to reduce chronic breakdowns by proactively spending more on major maintenance projects.
The maintenance budget, which had stood at $17 million, will be $40 million for the 2026-27 budget year, he said.
He said the district plans to completely replace the air conditioning systems in six schools during that year and continue or increase that rate of replacement in subsequent years to get a handle on problems of long-deferred maintenance.
During a sweltering second week of the school year, HVAC outages have been a topic of concern in online chat groups about Duval schools and in messages to School Board members.
"We have about a dozen teachers at my school still without AC and are still having to relocate to 7 different classroom[s] everyday[sic]. It's starting to dramatically impact teaching," an anonymous participant to a popular Facebook group wrote in an August 20 posting.
Added another: "The high today is 95°. The fact that any child has to be in a classroom or cafeteria without AC is ridiculous."
Board member Melody Bolduc said during an Aug. 19 School Board discussion that she's hearing from a parent threatening to simply withdraw her child from the school district and enroll somewhere else because of the lack of air conditioning.
A staffing shortage has hindered the district's efforts to fix failing HVAC systems, Superintendent Christopher Bernier told the board Aug. 19, saying the number of in-house technicians dropped, over a period of years, from 40 to about a dozen.
Temperatures in the mid- to upper-90s are expected Monday, Aug. 24, the National Weather Service said Aug. 21. Above-normal temperatures are forecast to linger through that week, generally with highs in the low 90s.
While apologizing for heat-related disruptions schools experienced since the Aug. 10 opening day, Culbert acknowledged that "understanding does not cool a classroom."
He said the district had taken some steps to address HVAC problems before the school year began, like setting up a maintenance desk to streamline how reports of problems are handled and buying "spot coolers" that could be delivered to a school with a high-priority problem for quick, temporary relief.
Culbert said one of the next steps, starting by next month, will involve steps to fix or replace chillers, which cool water that is pumped to air handlers for air conditioning.
Backlogs of deferred maintenance have been a feature of many district schools for years. Although voters approved new taxation to address that in 2020, much of the work remains uncompleted.
"My frustration is we passed the half-penny sales tax and our air conditioners are still not working," board Chair Charlotte Joyce said Aug. 19. "…We should have done that six years ago, because that is very important."
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: After 1,300 complaints about no A/C, DCPS says things getting better