Hotter August days push some schools to delay start dates

Owen Driscoll, a 17-year-old senior at Rufus King International High School in Milwaukee, was skeptical about starting school after Labor Day this year, three weeks later than before. But he is beginning to see the advantages.

“Last year when we were on the old schedule, we had a few heat days (off in August) because it was so unbearable,” he said, noting that few classrooms are air-conditioned. That made it hard to get into the rhythm of school, he said.

By delaying the start date and extending the school year into June, heat days are more likely at the end of the year, Driscoll acknowledged. But by then, he said, students are ready to be done and appreciate the unscheduled time off.

Higher summer temperatures, driven by climate change, are pushing more school districts around the country to start the school year later. It’s contrary to a decades-long trend toward moving up start dates. In addition to the change at some schools in Milwaukee, school officials in Philadelphia and in Billings, Montana, also have cited heat as a reason to push back their start dates.

“We see examples all over the country,” said Karen White, deputy executive director of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country.

“I think it’s only gotten worse,” White said. “We are at a point in time (in the school year when) parents and educators and students should be excited. It’s difficult when you are sending your kid to a classroom that’s more like a hot yoga class.”

White said climate change has led some teachers to demand air conditioning in collective bargaining. She pointed to an agreement in Columbus, Ohio, that called for climate-controlled classrooms by the 2025-26 school year.

In Philadelphia, district spokesperson Christina Clark said that beginning school after Labor Day will minimize the number of heat-related school closures, “which exacerbate inequities between schools that have air conditioning and those that do not.”

“Hot temperatures during the first few days of school leads to headaches, lack of attention and general frustration,” Clark wrote in an email to Stateline.

In Billings, Montana, Superintendent Erwin Garcia noted that one of the district’s oldest high schools has no air conditioning and the other has it in only half the building.

“I noticed classrooms can be 90 degrees, 95 degrees, almost 100 degrees. And our students and teachers have to go through that process for two to three weeks,” Garcia told local station KTVQ last December, when the district was discussing changes. The school board voted to push back this year’s start date to Sept. 3. The 2023-24 school year began on Aug. 22.

He estimated that fully air-conditioning the two oldest high schools would cost $24 million — and that the district would have to ask taxpayers for the money, according to KTVQ.

A lawmaker in Texas, where most schools started the week of Aug. 12, plans to file a bill in the next legislative session to delay school openings as a way to reduce stress on the state’s power grid.

“With 1,100 new residents daily and an ever-expanding economy, opening schools before Labor Day is an awfully wasteful stress on our power grid. Cooling thousands of buildings — often the largest buildings in a community — during the hottest months of the year makes no sense,” Texas Republican state Rep. Jared Patterson wrote on the social platform X.

“Schools should be completely closed during July & August, saving taxpayer dollars on cooling expenses and our grid at the same time,” he wrote last month.

In general, schools in the Northeast start later, schools in the Deep South, earlier. In places that are hot for much of the year, such as Arizona, Florida and Texas, the heat is less of a concern because nearly all schools are fully air conditioned. In the six New England states, however, almost no students go back before the end of August, while in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, about three-quarters of students don’t return until after Labor Day, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

Contrary to popular belief, the school calendar has little to do with the agrarian economy, according to historians. If it did, spring planting and fall harvesting seasons would be days off school for farm kids.

What is true is that in recent years, historically hot summers have forced many schools — no matter when their start dates — to temporarily close. Last month, for example, some schools in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin all closed or dismissed students early because of excessive heat.

And last year, schools in nine states — Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — during the first week of September either closed or let kids out before scheduled dismissal, according to a survey by CBS News.

Climate change will “probably hasten a push back to a September start in places that have somewhat temperate Junes,” said Joshua Graff Zivin, an economist and director of the Cowhey Center on Global Transformation at the University of California San Diego.

Zivin said more schools should invest in air conditioning, but even with it, a hot commute to school or home temperatures too high to get a good night’s sleep affect students’ performance and might lead to calls for later school start dates.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office study in 2020 found 41% of school districts across the country need to update or replace heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems in at least half of their schools, amounting to about 36,000 schools.

The federal agency didn’t measure how many schools have no air conditioning at all, according to Jackie Nowicki, a director in GAO’s team that focuses on education.

In Milwaukee, Adria Maddaleni, chief human resources officer for the Milwaukee Public Schools, said the later start was partially the result of a parent survey. Only about a quarter of classrooms in the district have air conditioning.

“I thank the Lord we did not have early start this session,” Maddaleni said in an interview, “and we didn’t have to worry about canceling school.”