The heat wave baking parts of Ontario this week is a look ahead to what the future has in store for us. Climate change will exacerbate heat waves, prolonging them, making them more frequent, and making them more dangerous to humans. That will mean more hot springs and summers to come, including weeks when students across the province are in school.
As temperatures hover in the 30s and peek into the 40s, students are stuck in classrooms without air conditioning, particularly in older schools. High temperatures in classrooms are uncomfortable, but there’s more to the risk than that. Experts say the rising mercury makes learning harder and poses health risks to students, too.
As the heat dome descends, the Ford government seems to be without a plan, which sounds about right. The Green party is calling on the Tories to adopt an extreme-heat preparedness plan — one that would insist on air conditioning in schools.
Advocates and parents are calling for the same as students boil in the classroom — just as they did in 2017 under the Liberals, in 2018 under the Tories, and again and again every time students face extreme heat in schools. To be fair to Doug Ford, the problem predates his government. But he’s been in power long enough to have done something about it.
For its part, the government is passing the buck once again. The education minister’s office says school boards need to sort out the issue for themselves. The province sends them cash — but not enough.
The calculus here is obvious: the government sends money to school boards, and those boards make decisions about how to operate their schools. That’s fine. But the government doesn’t send school boards enough money to afford the investments in fitting out schools to deal with heat waves while, you know, teaching students. So, as the government blames the school boards, students are caught in the middle, sweltering and struggling to learn.
New schools have air conditioning, of course. But the province is full of old schools, and some cities or boards are stuck with a higher proportion of them. I’m willing to hazard a guess that wealthier areas tend to enjoy higher rates of air conditioning and thus less lower rates of suffering. That’s related, though secondary, to the broader point, which is that every school in the province — wherever it is — ought to have air conditioning. And the government ought to pay for it.
Climate change has arrived and so have its effects. In the coming years, those effects will get worse. We are already late in responding to the infrastructure needs that shift will present, including widespread air conditioning to keep people, especially those who are vulnerable, safe. The government needs to catch up — and fast.
The school-temperature neglect is a crisis and a tragedy waiting to happen. What will we say, God forbid, if a student or staff member is seriously injured or dies because of the heat? What, in the meantime, do we say as the province forces students and staff to suffer because it refuses to spend the necessary money to do its job and make people safe and comfortable in a space where some of them (students) are forced to be? It’s cruel and unnecessary — and another instance of a tired, aimless government asleep at the switch.
There are temporary stopgaps that can help deal with hot classrooms; there is, for example, a misting-station pilot at a dozen schools. But that’s not enough. The government must undertake a massive provincewide program of infrastructure development and retrofitting to ensure that every school has air conditioning and is prepared to meet the changing environment that accompanies climate change. The best time to have done this was any time during the past 20 years or so as we saw the problem coming. The next best time to do it is now. But knowing this government, students and staff may be left to sweat out its failure to act promptly in the face of a challenge.
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