Paul Abdou’s hands shook Monday morning as he tried to make his fingers press the buttons on his phone, which made sense given that it was about 25 degrees outside. But Abdou was inside his math classroom at Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus where the temperature was about 58 degrees.
Soon, students came in and sat down for algebra II. Their coats stayed on, and most of them kept their hoods up as Abdou, also in a coat, stood at the whiteboard and taught them about quadratic equations.
Abdou estimated his class was among about half that don’t have working centralized heat at Cardozo as outdoor temperatures stayed below freezing Monday and are expected to ease gradually in the coming days.
Teachers at Cardozo said temperatures in their classrooms have fallen to as low as the mid-40s in recent days, making it hard for them and their students to focus on learning. HVAC problems have plagued the school for years, turning large swaths of classrooms into saunas in the summer and iceboxes in the winter, teachers and parents told The Washington Post. Over the years, their appeals for fixes have largely been ignored by the Department of General Services, they say.
“It makes it much harder to concentrate and learn,” said Abdou, who also serves as the school’s Washington Teachers’ Union representative. “This is an ongoing issue that’s been going on for years and years, and it’s incredibly frustrating.”
When asked about the issue Monday, D.C. Public Schools spokesman Evan Lambert shared a letter that Cardozo Principal Arthur Mola sent parents last week. Lambert directed questions about the HVAC system to the city’s Department of General Services, the agency responsible for maintaining D.C. government property. The agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Dec. 9, Mola sent a message to parents about “heating issues impacting temperatures in parts of the building.” The General Services department had sent contractors to evaluate and repair the system earlier that day, Mola said, and while waiting for a permanent fix, officials were implementing stopgap solutions like installing space and hanging heaters and moving students to warmer rooms.
“I apologize for this inconvenience and assure you that during utility disruptions, our priority is to maintain student safety throughout the repair work while limiting disturbance to instruction,” he wrote in the email.
Abdou said those efforts have fallen far short. His math classroom was the beneficiary of a space heater, which may have the firepower to warm an office worker’s feet under a desk, but did nothing to heat his cavernous 1,000-square-foot classroom with 20-foot ceilings. Plus, it shorted out after 10-15 minutes, he added.
And while he was willing to lug 20 laptops, worksheets and personal whiteboards to move his class upstairs to the second-floor library where it was warmer, the engineering teacher next door had to stay put because she needed immovable equipment to teach her class.
The broken HVAC system makes teaching difficult whenever the temperatures veer toward extremes, said Caity Schneeman, a drama teacher at Cardozo. In the summer, the school brought out a huge fan to cool Schneeman’s classroom, but its roar drowned out her and her students, she said.
“It leads to a lot of behavior problems. It also hurts attendance,” she said. “Students don’t want to come to school if they’re going to be sweating all day or cold. School is supposed to be their safe space.”
It’s also part of a larger problem of equipment breaking and not being repaired in a timely manner, Schneeman and Abdou said. Cardozo administrators and teachers have submitted more than 100 work orders in recent years for broken toilets, sinks and classroom locks designed to thwart a would-be shooter, Abdou said. The General Services department hasn’t responded to some of those for years. Abdou said he met last week with agency employees who admitted they hadn’t done enough but made no promises to get better. They blamed a massive backlog of work and contractors they couldn’t use because they hadn’t paid them, Abdou said.
Parents scolded officials for allowing an “unacceptable” situation to persist and urged them to do right by their children. Antoinette Will, who serves on an advisory board of parents, teachers and others, said her 12th-grade son rides public transportation and gets to school only to keep his coat on as he tries to learn.
Francis Osorio, who’s on Cardozo’s parent teacher organization, echoed that sentiment regarding her daughter, a seventh-grader.
“My child goes to school every day to learn, but they are in classrooms that are too cold,” Osorio wrote in a statement. “This is unacceptable for neglecting this major issue.”
Schneeman said she’s most alarmed by the disparity between what’s happening at Cardozo and what she expects would happen at schools in more affluent neighborhoods a mile away. About 97 percent of Cardozo’s approximately 780 students are either Black or Latino, and almost 60 percent are economically disadvantaged, according to DCPS data.
“It would not be allowed to persist. Asking children to come to school and learn in unheated classrooms during a cold snap like this is unacceptable — and frankly, dangerous,” Schneeman said
Not fixing a broken HVAC system for years and allowing students to alternatively swelter and freeze with the seasons “sends a message to our kids that they don’t matter,” she said.
“We talk a lot about equity in DCPS,” she added. “This is what inequity looks like in practice.”
The post Teachers accuse city officials of neglect as DCPS classrooms grow cold appeared first on Washington Post.
