Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | New Haven Public Schools
Teachers David Herndon and Kirk Vamvakides. Lucy Gellman Photos.
On Wednesday afternoon, New Haven Academy science teacher David Herndon was planning to have his 10th grade biology students continue their frog dissections. One floor below, senior Bailie Williams was on her way to AP English Language and Composition, focused on a lit study that she needed to complete. Neither of them were thinking about the thick heat and humidity that had rolled in earlier that week.
That was, until they got the announcement that school would be dismissed two hours early—because it was hot, and getting hotter.
Williams is one of over 18,000 New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students who learned about an early dismissal Wednesday, as the district announced that all schools would get out two hours early due to extreme heat. In New Haven, Wednesday’s temperatures reached a high of 90 degrees. Many schools hold onto that heat, meaning that they remained steamy even as temperatures retreated into the 60s on Thursday.
After the announcement went out at 11:08 a.m. Wednesday, many teachers, students and administrators were left scrambling to get students onto buses, check in with parents, and figure out what an afternoon of disrupted learning looked like for the rest of the week.
“We were hearing reports of temperatures in school buildings that were above the threshold,” said NHPS Spokesperson Justin Harmon in a phone call Wednesday afternoon, adding that the district’s “threshold” is a temperature of 80 degrees or higher in a classroom. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that the optimal classroom temperature is between 69.8 degrees and 73.4 degrees,
As man-made climate change means hotter, longer and more humid summers, “this is a conversation in a lot of districts,” Harmon added. “We have older buildings. We have issues with a number of HVAC systems. There were a number of districts in the middle of the state that were taking the same steps.”
There’s a sort of NHPS domino effect in place too, Harmon confirmed: When more than a few schools dismiss early, all of the district’s bus schedules are affected (the district currently works with the transportation provider First Student, on which it spent nearly $40 million last year). Currently, there’s no workaround that would allow some schools, where the heat had not risen to problem levels, to finish out the school day while others dismissed early.
“Building Safe and Healthy Schools”
A performance for Shrek, Jr. on Thursday, after Wednesday's after-school activities were cancelled, at Hill Central Music Academy. Despite a drop in temperatures outside, the auditorium where students practice still felt like a sauna. Lucy Gellman Photo.
In Wednesday’s phone call and a follow-up email, Harmon said that the district is doing everything it can to avoid dismissals like Wednesday’s—while also keeping students safe in buildings that are, more often than not, way overdue for structural repairs.
Those range from loose and falling ceiling tiles to busted air conditioning systems that sometimes translate to sauna-like classroom conditions. On Monday, for instance, one teacher at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School reported that the first-floor black box was 82 degrees without any stage lighting. With stage lighting, the temperature would likely have pushed 90 degrees.
“In the upper floors it's oppressive,” the teacher added, asking to remain anonymous.
Part of the difficulty is a long list of capital projects in a district that is chronically underfunded. In 2021, NHPS received $79.9 million funds from the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ARP ESSER), $13.4 million of which it focused “explicitly to facilities and infrastructure upgrades, with a heavy emphasis on improving school ventilation and indoor air quality,” Harmon said.
At the time, the district followed a three-pronged approach, under the umbrella of "Building Safe and Healthy Schools." In addition to HVAC and air quality upgrades, the district spent a chunk of funding on security and software, and another on physical parts and equipment that became harder to get as global supply chain issues slowed in the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Much of that—the “largest chunk,” Harmon wrote—went to HVAC work, from systems that the district fully replaced to those it provided updates to (it did not cover $43,000 that the district spent on box fans last June, used as an emergency cooling measure at the end of the 2025 school year). As of Wednesday evening, Harmon said he was working on a list of completed and in-progress HVAC projects.
“It’s Really Not Cool!”
Junior Akinei Burrus Jr. on Wednesday.
For several years now, parents, staff, administrators and students have been raising concerns about hot classrooms (last year, extreme cold was also an issue), which can both impede learning and create unsafe conditions for teachers and students. That’s especially true for those with underlying health issues like asthma and diabetes—which are higher in New Haven, where poor air quality and limited access to fresh and healthy food are more common than wealthier, often whiter towns and cities in the state.
“It’s really frustrating that we’re here again,” said Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT), in a phone call Thursday morning. Blatteau is also the mom of a student at Hill Central Music Academy, where a tech rehearsal for Shrek, Jr. was canceled Wednesday, just two days before opening night.
At the union, “we try to be as proactive as possible knowing the limitations” of a district where need—for building repairs, for classroom supplies, for updated technology—constantly outpaces resources, Blatteau said. “We regularly ask for the status” on HVAC projects, she added. “And then here we were, scrambling with an early dismissal call.”
Blatteau pointed to a petition that NHFT recently started circulating focused on student and staff safety both before and beyond the end of the NHPS school year, which ends on June 23. Entitled “It's Too Hot to Learn,” the petition calls for a “maximum safe temperature for classrooms and schools in New Haven,” as well as a “publicly accessible spreadsheet” that tracks HVAC repairs and status updates in each of the city’s 44 schools.
Williams: Concerned about younger kids.
In addition, the petition calls for an increase in—and more long-term, sustainable source for—capital funding focused on HVAC, ventilation, and air quality issues in the schools. Since launching, it has collected 613 signatures.
“It’s frustrating that we’ve overemphasized high stakes testing, and that’s how we’re spending the month of May,” Blatteau said, pointing to how hard it can be for kids to focus when they are hot and uncomfortable. “So now, kids are languishing while attempting to push through a test … and then that’s not fair.”
“I think every parent, every family member, should be able to count on their child’s school buildings being safe,” she added.
As an aside, there is plenty of peer-reviewed research on how standardized testing, which in this country has become a billion-dollar industry, reinforces deep structural inequities while failing to accurately predict student success—and taking valuable time away from in-classroom learning.
Back at schools across the district Wednesday, some classrooms had already reached well over 80 degrees, while others remained just under the threshold, but hot enough that teachers and students left flushed and sweating by the afternoon. In the library at Nathan Hale School, one teacher said, the temperature remained at 78 degrees, with between 46 and 52 percent humidity, from Monday to Wednesday.
On the second floor of New Haven Academy, history teacher Kirk Vamvakides said he was grateful to be relatively comfortable on Wednesday afternoon, a time he usually reserves for lesson planning for his four sections of 9th grade world history. Sometimes, he said, the room gets up to 85 or 90 degrees. On Monday, at the beginning of a three-day heat wave that ended with a thunderstorm Wednesday night, “it was unbearable.”
“I felt really bad for the kids,” he said. In earlier years—Vamvakides is a 24-year veteran of the school—he might have opened his windows to create some ventilation. But the windows on the second floor no longer open, an issue that teachers across the district have raised in recent past, particularly during a debate over school reopenings and Covid protocols in 2021.
“The problem with the HVAC is its unevenness,” chimed in Herndon, a biology teacher whose afternoon frog dissections would have to wait until Friday. While he wasn’t sweating a rearranged lesson plan (the frogs, which are preserved, can sit out in a hot classroom much more comfortably than humans), Herndon agreed that the temperatures in the school can make it difficult to focus.
College Bound Seminar teacher Fana Hickinson.
In the classroom next door, College Bound Seminar teacher Fana Hickinson echoed that sense of working within an unpredictable and sometimes stiflingly hot environment, which can disrupt learning for everyone involved. On Monday afternoon, as temperatures climbed into the eighties for the first time this month, she made a plan to go shopping after school, so she could buy a pair of linen pants. Even with a new wardrobe staple in place to beat the heat, she was hot during Tuesday’s classes.
“Today is a good day,” she said Wednesday. “Yesterday was unbearable.”
She added that it feels like HVAC “should not be a concern” in one of the wealthiest states in the country. Despite an eleventh-hour influx of dollars from the state and a bump in the —which helped the district narrowly avoid a deficit this year—teachers, students, and schools are constantly in need of more resources, from basic necessities to higher wages.
Downstairs just half an hour earlier, a few lingering students had also worried aloud over hot classrooms, with a particular concern for younger students in the district. On the sidewalk outside, Williams hopped on a call about pick up options before taking a moment to chat with this reporter. Wednesday, she had been on her way to AP Lang, where students are doing a comparative literary analysis to close out the year.
“I feel for schools that don’t have [working] AC,” she said.
Akinei Burrus Jr., who is in the second week of his junior internship program, said that he’d initially been excited to hear about the early dismissal, as many of his peers had been too. Then he remembered how scary it might be to be a young kid in a hot classroom, with less of a sense of what was happening.
“At first, I did a little celebration,” he said with a smile. “But then I paused and I thought, ‘If I’m hot, how is it for a school with no [working] AC whatsoever? How hot does it get?”
“It’s really not cool,” he added. The words were literal: it was now 90 outside, with humidity that made it feel hotter, and it was time for him to head home.