America's Schools Weren't Built For the Climate Era. Now, Some Are Adapting

It’s been 10 days since the official start of fall in North America, and a month since the school year began. It’s a time that conjures cozy sweaters and crisp, sunny days. But that’s not been the case in recent years. As the number of extreme heat days stretches later into the fall, back-to-school season isn’t the same as it once was. Last year, at least 242 million students in 85 countries had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events, with the most frequent climate-induced disruptions occurring in September—the start of the school year for much of the world. And looking ahead, the U.S. National Weather Service forecasts much of the country to likely continue experiencing above average temperatures during October.   Only 21% of schools in the U.S. were built after 2000, meaning many school districts lack climate-proofed infrastructure that might protect students and staff from climate disasters and heat waves that are only becoming more common. While some school districts are taking steps to adapt, cuts to federal programs may make it more challenging. The challenges schools face While there is no federal data on how many public schools have air conditioning, many schools were built for cooler temperatures, and are unprepared for how our changing climate is making extreme heat days stretch further into the fall. “Most people think of heat as a summer problem,” says V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies urban design and the environment. Failing to address heat can lead to problems in the classroom. Heat slows down children’s cognitive functions, along with their ability to concentrate. “The best learning environment is when the thermal conditions are conducive to that,” says Turner. “So if it’s too cold or it’s too hot, children can’t learn, and then you start to get behavioral issues associated with heat.” Natural disasters are also presenting their own set of challenges for schools—causing long term losses for both learning and infrastructure. New Orleans, for example, completed its last Katrina-related school restoration in March 2023, 18 years after the hurricane first made landfall in 2005—and severely damaged or destroyed 110 of the city’s 126 public schools. And in 2018, the Camp fires in California closed schools for almost a million students and impacted more than 1,500 schools.  Earlier this year, more than 750,000 kids at over 1,000 schools missed anywhere from two to more than ten days when wildfires broke out in Southern California in January, according to a report from UndauntedK12, a nonprofit working to make public schools resilient to climate change. The researchers also found that Latino and low-income students were hit hardest by school disruptions.  But the disruption from natural disasters and extreme weather can last far beyond the initial catastrophe. It was only this month that one school in the Pacific Palisades was able to welcome students back to their main campus in portable classrooms after the January fires—it could take years to build back permanent structures.  Read More: The L.A. Wildfires Redefined Senior Year for These Students What adaptation looks like Many schools, including some of the biggest districts in the country, are taking steps to adapt.  In Los Angeles, the decision for how to respond to a natural disaster was often left up to the school’s principal—but the January wildfires proved that that strategy wasn’t the most effective. To change that, in September, the district’s teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), negotiated climate action plans into their contracts with the Los Angeles Unified School District to streamline disaster response protocols across the district. This follows a similar push in Chicago earlier this year. “We have over 800 schools, but there were maybe around 10 that were in the mandatory evacuation route,” says Julie Van Winkle, vice president of UTLA. “But even schools that were really far away from the fires were experiencing pieces of ash falling from the sky, smoke, and [poor] air quality.” Now, in the event of a natural disaster, schools will remain remote until they are “clean, safe, and ready for instruction,” says Van Winkle. L.A. voters also approved a $9 billion bond measure last November to repair and update school buildings—funding that will in part go towards adding green spaces and replacing roughly 50,000 HVAC units.  Meanwhile, Align, an environmental nonprofit in New York City, recently published its Green, Healthy Schools report, which lays out changes that need to be made to the largest public school system in the country. The heavy smoke that came from wildfires in Canada in 2023, along with the pandemic, underscored the district’s lack of preparedness for natural disasters, says executive director Theodore Moore. The report calls for retrofits and upgrades, like making schools fully electric and fossil fuel-free, installing clean solar power, and upgrading heating, cooling, and ventilation systems. They determined that the upgrades would cut the state’s Department of Education’s annual energy cost by almost half each year.  In New York, making climate upgrades would impact not just students, but entire neighborhoods. “It’s by far the biggest public school district in the entire country, and the schools themselves serve a unique purpose, because not only are they places of education and places of work, but they’re really the pillars of a lot of the community,” says Moore.  Treating schools as community centers is a strategy that could be beneficial around the country. “If it’s really hot, some schools just send kids home, but what if a child is going home to a home that has no air conditioning? Now we’ve sent them to a place that’s maybe just as unsafe,” says Turner. “But if schools are seen as more like community centers and resource hubs, then we can provide all day long air conditioning to 25% of the population in one site in the community.” Outdoors, schools could also benefit from a transition away from asphalt and towards green spaces and shade.  “Schools have basically been designed so that they are some of the hottest areas in our communities. When we take a look at the data on tree canopy cover and asphalt and shade, what we find is by and large, schools have less of all of the above,” says Turner. “Well meaning policies combined with the practical realities of costs of maintenance, have created this preference towards large expanses of asphalt with no trees or shade infrastructure, and a lot of single story buildings which are not contributing to shade.” Making upgrades to outdoor spaces, however, is a process riddled with red tape, and can be costly for many schools that are already facing underinvestment, says Turner. Many schools were able to use funding from the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to make climate upgrades—but President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” passed on July 4, discontinued many of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for things like solar panels and electric vehicles. It points to a glaring catch-22. “A lot of our schools are older and probably in need of modernization,” says Turner, “and climate change is casting some light on the fact that they really are underfunded to do that.”