Heat breaks records, cuts school day short in Santa Maria

If you can’t take the heat, get out of the classroom—at least, that was the mantra at Santa Maria Joint Union High School District (SMJUHSD) schools on Tuesday, Sept. 27.

According to the National Weather Service, Tuesday hit 99 degrees in Santa Maria, where the average temperature for Sept. 27 is 74 degrees. It doesn’t approach the 2010 record of 105 degrees for that day, though 101-degree heat on Sept. 26 broke Santa Maria’s previous record of 100 degrees for that day.

According to SMJUHSD Public Information Officer Kenny Klein, Santa Maria and Ernest Righetti high schools just aren’t equipped to deal with that kind of weather.

“It interferes with learning,” Klein told the Sun.

The district implemented the minimum day for Pioneer Valley High School as well, even though it is equipped with the proper air conditioning and ventilation technology to withstand the heat. The shortened day affected about 7,700 students between the three schools, according to Klein.

“While this situation does not affect all schools or classrooms, the interdependence between sites of shared staffing and transportation makes dismissing only one or two sites problematic,” Klein said in an emailed statement. “Shortening the periods and dismissing students prior to the daily temperature spike is one way to mitigate this situation.”

Santa Maria and Righetti high schools were built in the 1960s and haven’t been updated with proper ventilation for rising temperatures, former SMJUHSD Superintendent Jeff Hearn told the Sun. Hearn said extreme heat minimum days have been enforced several times that he’s aware of in the past 30 years.

“Having sat in [the superintendent] seat for nine years, I can tell you that because a large number of our classrooms do not have air conditioning or fans or a way to move air, when it gets the way it does, it’s virtually impossible to have anything effective going on in the classroom,” Hearn said.

But a district bond proposal, slated to hit the Santa Barbara County ballot on the Nov. 8 general election, would retrofit the district buildings with modern technology and suitable air conditioning and heating.

The bond—called Measure H2016, or the SMJUHSD facilities improvement initiative—would issue and sell bonds of up to $114 million to finance school facilities projects. A few of those projects include replacing portable classrooms with permanent ones, updating athletic and performance spaces, and retrofitting “classrooms with energy efficient air conditioning, heating, and safety systems to reduce overall costs and improve the classroom learning environment for students and teachers.”

Measure H2016 will require a 55 percent approval vote to pass.

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