By james art This story was originally published online at The 9th Street Journal.
On Sept. 17, Brittany Thomas received a text message from a distressed teacher at Merrick-Moore Elementary School. The air conditioner had broken down at Merrick-Moore, where Thomas is PTA president, and teachers were so uncomfortable that many threatened to walk off the job, the teacher said.
“Can you help us?” Thomas remembers asking him. “It’s 80 degrees and the teachers are sweating through their clothes and the kids can’t study…the front desk staff say they’re sick because they’re so hot.”
Brittany and her husband, Aaron, say they called the district and met with the school’s interim principal. Still, more than a week passed, and the heat did not subside.
Merrick-Moore is just the latest Durham elementary school to grapple with HVAC failures. At other schools, parents have been demanding for months that the school system address broken air conditioning and other maintenance issues. Now some are pushing for long-term solutions, worried that their public schools are becoming unsafe learning environments.
Hot and bothered
For more than a week, the Thomas family’s third- and fifth-graders came home each day drenched in sweat. Frustrated, the couple took matters into their own hands. On September 25, they arrived at the school at 7:30 a.m., carrying two large fans for their children’s classrooms.
“I was really struck by how hot and how humid and how unpleasant it was in the building,” Aaron Thomas said. Students were sent home at noon that day because of the heat.
On September 26, as indoor temperatures remained high, Aaron Thomas contacted Millicent Rogers, who chairs the Durham School Board.
“There are kids with asthma, there are kids with sickle cell anemia, there are teachers who are pregnant, there are teachers who are going through menopause,” he wrote. “It’s not an environment they should be forced to stay in.”
Rogers responded that day, acknowledging his concerns. “This is not the experience we want students and faculty to endure,” she replied. “The administration is working as quickly and diligently as possible to provide long-term solutions.”
Aaron was not pleased. “I think she was doing everything she could to make me feel better,” he said. “But I wanted a timeline and specific next steps, and that’s not what we got.”
On September 27, the air conditioning unit at Merrick-Moore finally returned to life after the 11-day outage.
“The HVAC and chiller issues at Merrick-Moore have been addressed,” Clifton Williams, DPS director of facilities and operations, wrote in an emailed statement in response to an inquiry from The 9th Street Journal. “Renovations were completed on September 27, 2024 and the chiller is now operational and cooling all areas of the school.”
But after the HVAC repair, the temperatures reversed, Brittany Thomas said. “My daughter was shivering at school because the building was now 64 degrees.”
Broader concerns
Meanwhile, parents at other Durham primary schools are raising similar concerns about ongoing maintenance issues.
Teresa Dowell Blackinton, a mother of two at Club Boulevard Elementary and former PTA president, said the school’s HVAC system continues to deteriorate. District leaders delayed planned renovations at Club and three other elementary schools in 2023 to pay for the increased cost of building a new Durham School of the Arts, now budgeted at more than $240 million.
Blackinton first raised concerns about conditions at the club five years ago, she says. Since then, she has met repeatedly with district and school administrators to request a timetable for school repairs. She says the school’s HVAC system is constantly malfunctioning.
The district has taken some action to address maintenance and HVAC issues in its schools. The school system has spent more than $15 million on IAQ (indoor air quality) improvements over the past two years, Williams said in an emailed statement to The 9th Street Journal. In May, Durham school leaders committed an additional $2 million in federal funds for HVAC and building repairs. The district also approved a $1.7 million contract with consulting firm Turner & Townsend Heery to assess the building’s deficiencies.
But Dowell Blackinton worries the county is wasting money on temporary fixes instead of addressing root causes.
“Almost every day they have to call,” she said. “Someone comes in, makes a temporary fix, and then it starts again the next day. But the obvious solution is to replace the HVAC system. They’re just throwing stuff down the road that still needs to be done, but they’re also spending all that money in the meantime.
Temperatures aren’t the only concern — humidity levels are so high that teachers track daily readings on a spreadsheet, Dowell Blackinton said. Classroom roofs are leaking, books and papers are curling and paint is peeling from the walls, she added.
“The kindergarten students were doing a major activity and they couldn’t cut their paper because it was so humid and the paper was so wet,” she said.
Dowell Blackinton, who often volunteers at the school, has observed “fuzzy mold” on bookshelves in the kindergarten and art classroom. In August, she said, a kindergarten teacher had to whitewash chairs and tables because of mold, while a school counselor had to throw out moldy furniture.
“It’s a disaster,” she said. “We cannot continue to send our children to unfavorable environments and expect them to learn.”
Clifton Williams, the school system’s director of facilities, said the district is investigating complaints at Club.
“We are examining areas throughout the building and discussing next steps to deal with any items found,” he said in an emailed statement. “We have engaged a third-party contractor to perform air quality testing and suggest next steps for remediation if necessary.”
“At the moment, the HVAC system is working and provides cooling in all the premises of the school. Our department will continue to liaise with the school to address any repairs that need to be made,” he continued.
But Dowell Blackinton believes it will take much more than temporary HVAC fixes.
“It’s going to continue to get worse,” she said.
“And then what happens when the building is at breaking point here, or at Merrick-Moore or EK Powe?” she asked. “What are they going to do with all these students when the school is unusable and they just left all this basic maintenance?”
Lauren Sartain, former PTA president at EK Powe Elementary School, was a vocal advocate when temperatures at her school exceeded 90 degrees last school year. Now, she says she’s disappointed, but not surprised, that area schools still face similar maintenance challenges.
“It seems unclear what the district’s long-term strategy is to address these persistent construction issues,” she said.
Parents are looking for clearer answers
Conditions at Merrick-Moore have now returned to normal, much to the Thomases’ relief.
Still, they remain frustrated by the continued lack of communication, especially from district leaders. They also wanted a clearer timetable for repairs.
In their three years at Merrick-Moore, they say the air conditioner breaks every year. But they often hear about it from their children and teachers – not from the school.
“We’re both very big supporters of public schools in general,” Brittany said. “But at the same time, it’s hard not to feel the need to go elsewhere when communication is such a consistent problem.”
This story was published through a partnership between the INDY and the 9th Street Journal, which is produced by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. Comment on this story at [email protected].