Parents worried about hot schools

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This article was published 08/06/2023 (1240 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some Brandon parents pulled their children from classes this week to escape the sweltering temperatures inside schools that don’t have air conditioning — amid the heat warnings that have persisted in the Westman area.

Of the four parents the Sun spoke with on Wednesday, two had received calls to pick up their children after they experienced heat-related issues, one voluntarily pulled her child out of school, and the last was considering doing the same thing.

During the last three weeks, Brandon has been under a heat warning nine days; two days in May, and seven days in a row since the beginning of June, which means temperatures were above 32 C with a humidex value of 38 C.

On days when the warnings were not in place, temperatures stayed almost 10 C above normal, climbing to the high 30s with no relief in the overnight temperatures, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

École New Era School, which is more than 100 years old, does not have air conditioning. Leanne Vandenbosch said she understands the situation, but was surprised by the lack of air flow in her eight-year-old daughter’s Grade 3 classroom.

“To have my child come home, so exhausted from the heat in her school, being hotter in her classroom than it is outside — that’s hard on a young person,” Vandenbosch said.

Outside Meadows School at noon on Wednesday, a Brandon mom told the Sun she was there to pick up her nine-year-old daughter who was “overheated, not feeling well, and had asked the school to call her dad and I to take her home.”

Renee Favron, a mom of a five-year-old who’s in kindergarten at Valleyview Centennial School, said she received a phone call Monday morning requesting she come to the school because her son was not well.

“They asked me if I could pick him up because he was feeling ill from the heat and was having a hard time focusing and co-operating in class. When I arrived at the school, all the lights were off inside and the thermostat at his classroom door was reading 28.5 C,” said Favron.

Vandenbosch said she was so concerned about the warm temperatures in her daughter’s school that she wrote half a dozen letters to Brandon School Division Supt. Mathew Gustafson, asking what protocols are in place to close schools when it gets hot.

“What’s frustrating for me is that in extreme winter weather and cold conditions, if there’s no heat, the school closes. So, is there no protocol for extreme heat conditions? Shouldn’t schools be closing?” Vandenbosch said.

Of the 24 schools in the division, eight have air conditioning, eight have none, and the other eight have air conditioning in their additions and all portable classrooms have it installed, according to Gustafson.

He said the division follows the advice and guidance of Environment Canada, Public Health and Workplace Safety and Health when it comes to keeping students and staff safe.

Gustafson said the direction he received is to monitor students and staff, encourage them to take rest breaks from strenuous activities, stay hydrated, wear lightweight, light coloured and loose-fitting clothes, and when outside work in the shade or limit exposure times to the sun.

He said he is reluctant to close schools and will leave it to the parents to decide whether to keep their children at home.

“We definitely hear a lot of concerns when schools close,” Gustafson said.

“We realize that for parents, school is important, and they depend on having their children being able to attend because it impacts child care arrangements and things like that. So we are very mindful of the pressures on our families, and we’re trying to be supportive of them.”

In a late Wednesday afternoon email to parents, the school division provided much the same information that Gustafson told the Sun, including limitations they had with installing air conditioning in some of the older schools due to building structure and lack of funding from the province.

Generators were deemed unpractical, Gustafson said, as was moving students to cooler places within a school, or to another school altogether.

“We even looked at relocating students to other areas, but we’re talking about thousands of students. And the logistics of setting up that many classrooms, even if we did have buildings that could handle that number of students, the logistics don’t allow for that. But we know that it’s not a desirable situation by any means, and if we had our desire, we would have air conditioning in all our buildings,” Gustafson said.

Vandenbosch said she also had concerns about the teachers in the school division, and how the heat has affected them.

The president of the Brandon Teachers’ Association, Tammy Tutkaluk, didn’t respond to our request for comment by press time, but the union representing many support staff said working in the heat is top of mind.

CUPE Local 737 president Jamie Rose told the Sun that a health and safety meeting has been called for next week to work out a hot weather policy.

The union represents custodians, maintenance, transportation workers as well as administrative and education assistants working for the division.

“We’ve been working with the division to get information out about (the heat),” Rose said. “In the health and safety act, it talks about heat, but it doesn’t have a high temperature where they have to shut the buildings down.”

Once a safe work procedure is established, Rose said it can be used for future hot-weather scenarios.

In the meantime, Rose said the union is working with the division to get more airflow through buildings. According to him, there were a couple of buildings where it was discovered that air conditioning units weren’t working.

“Some of our buildings, they don’t have air conditioning; New Era, Oxford, Meadows, some of the older parts of Massey are going to be hot,” he said. “We need to educate people to take more breaks.”

Manitoba’s Workplace Safety and Health Act states that when work or a workplace exposes workers to safety or health risks from heat or cold, an employer must implement control measures to limit thermal stress and inform workers about what the symptoms look like.

As Vandenbosch stood outside her daughter’s school, she suggested that during heat spells like the current one, schools could start earlier in the morning, and end by noon.

Her next step, she said, is to start a petition to lobby the provincial government to create a plan to put hot weather protocols in place for schools.

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com and cslark@brandonsun.com

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