Sacramento, California — Proposed rules to protect California workers extreme heat it would extend to schoolchildren, requiring school districts to find ways to keep classrooms cool.
If the standards pass this month, employers in the nation's most populous state will have to relieve workers from indoors in stuffy warehouses, damp kitchens and other dangerously hot work places. The rules will extend to schools, where teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers and other employees can work without air conditioning, like their students.
“Our working conditions are the students' learning conditions,” said Jeffery Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which represents more than 120,000 teachers and other education employees. “We're seeing an unprecedented change in the environment, and we know for a fact that when it's too hot, kids can't learn.”
A state worker safety board is scheduled to vote on the rules on June 20, and they will likely go into effect this summer. The move, which marks Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's latest effort to respond to the growing impacts of climate change and extreme heat, would put California ahead of the federal government and much of the nation in setting heat standards .
The rules would require indoor workplaces to be cooled below 87 degrees Fahrenheit when employees are present and below 82 degrees in places where workers wear protective clothing or are exposed to radiant heat, such as furnaces. Schools and other workplaces without air conditioning could use fans, misters and other methods to reduce room temperature.
The rules allow for workarounds for businesses, including the state's roughly 1,000 school districts, if they can't sufficiently cool their workplaces. In these cases, employers must provide workers with water, breaks, areas where they can cool off, cooling vests or other means to prevent employees from overheating.
“The heat is one mortal danger regardless of the type of work you do,” said Laura Stock, a member of the Occupational Health and Safety Standards Board. “If you have an indoor space that is populated by both workers and the public, or in this case children, they would have the same risks to their health as to the workers”.
Historically, heat waves have occurred outside the school year, but climate change is making them longer, more frequent and more intense. Last year was the hottest on record, and schools across the U.S. closed sporadically during the spring and summer, unable to keep students cool.
Scientists say this year could be even hotter. School officials in Vicksburg, Mississippi, last month ended the school year early when air conditioners malfunctioned. And California's first heat wave of the season is arriving while some schools are still in session, with temperatures reaching 105 in the Central Valley.
Several states, including Arizona and New Mexico, require schools to have working air conditioners, but are not required to operate them. Mississippi requires schools to have air conditioning, but doesn't say at what temperature. Hawaii schools must have classrooms at an “acceptable temperature for student learning,” without specifying the temperature. And Oregon schools must try to cool classrooms, such as with fans, and provide teachers and other employees with ways to cool off, including water and breaks, when the indoor heat index reaches the 80s degrees.
As the sun bakes the library at Bridges Academy in Melrose, a sparsely shaded, tree-lined public school in East Oakland, Christine Schooley closes the curtains and turns off the computers to cool her room. He stopped using a fan after a girl's long hair got caught.
“My library is the hottest place on campus because I have 120 kids in here a day,” Schooley said. “It stays hot in here. So yeah, it makes me cranky and cranky too.”
A 2021 analysis by the Center for Climate Integrity suggests that nearly 14,000 U.S. public schools that did not need air conditioning in 1970 now do, because they experience 32 days of temperatures above 80 degrees annually, improvements that would cost more than 40,000 millions of dollars. The researchers found that the same comparison yields a cost of $2.4 billion to install air conditioning in 678 California schools.
It's unclear how many California schools may need to install air conditioners or other cooling equipment to meet the new standards because the state doesn't track which ones already have them, said V. Kelly Turner, principal associate of the Luskin Center for Innovation. at the University of California-Los Angeles.
And a school district in the far north of the state would not face the same challenges as a district in the desert cities of Needles or Palm Springs, said Naj Alikhan, a spokesman for the Association of School Administrators of California, which has not taken a position. on the proposed rules.
An economic analysis commissioned for the board provided cost estimates for a range of industries, including warehousing, manufacturing and construction, but lacked an estimate for school districts, which make up one of the largest public infrastructure systems of the state and which are already facing a large backlog of necessary upgrades. The state Department of Education has not taken a position on the proposal, and a spokesman, Scott Roark, declined to comment on the potential cost to schools.
Projections of a multibillion-dollar cost to state prisons were the reason the Newsom administration refused to sign the indoor heat rules this year. Since then, tens of thousands of prison and jail employees, and inmates, have been exempted.
It is also unclear whether the regulation will apply to school buses, many of which do not have air conditioning. The Department of Industrial Relations, which oversees the worker safety board, did not respond to inquiries from school officials or KFF Health News.
Libia Garcia worries about her 15-year-old son, who spends at least an hour each school day traveling on a hot, stuffy school bus from his home in the rural Central Valley community of Huron to his high school and back. “Once my son gets home, he's exhausted; he's dehydrated,” Garcia said in Spanish. “He doesn't have energy to do homework or anything else.”
The California Federation of Teachers is pushing state lawmakers to pass a climate-resilient schools bill that would require the state to develop a master plan to upgrade school heating and air conditioning systems. Newsom last year vetoed similar legislation, citing cost.
Campaigns to cool schools in other states have had mixed results. Legislation in Colorado and New Hampshire failed this year, while bills in New Jersey and New York had been pending since June 6. Last month, a New York teachers union brought a portable sauna to the state Capitol to demonstrate how hot it can get inside classrooms. , only a quarter of which have air conditioning, said Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers.
“We have these temperature limits for animal shelters. How come we don't have them for classrooms?” said Assemblyman Chris Eachus, D-New York, the bill would require schools to take relief measures when classrooms and buildings reach 82 degrees. “We must protect the health and safety of children.”
Extreme heat is the #1 weather-related killer in the US, deadlier than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. May cause heat stress heat stroke, cardiac arrest and renal failure. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 1,600 heat-related deaths occurred in 2021, which is likely an undercount because health care providers are not required to report them. It is not clear how many of these deaths are work-related, either indoors or outdoors.
California has had heat standards on the books for outdoor workers since 2005, and rules for indoor workplaces have been in development since 2016, delayed in part by the covid pandemic.
At the federal level, the Biden administration has been slow to release a long-awaited regulation to protect indoor and outdoor workers from heat exposure. While one official said a draft was expected this year, its prospects could hinge on November's presidential election. If former President Donald Trump wins, rules targeting businesses are unlikely to move forward.
The Biden White House held a summit on school sustainability and climate change in April, where top officials encouraged districts to apply an infusion of new federal dollars to improve its aging infrastructure. The administration also released an 18-page guide for school districts to take advantage of federal funds.
“How we invest in our school buildings and our school grounds makes a difference in the lives of our students,” Roberto Rodriguez, assistant secretary of the US Department of Education, said at the summit. “They're on the front lines of feeling those impacts.”
This article was prepared by KFF Health Newsa national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is one of the core operating programs a KFF — the independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism. KFF Health News is the publisher of California Healthlinea service editorially independent of the California Health Care Foundation.
