School districts race to invest in cooling solutions as classrooms and playgrounds heat up
|Ylenia Aguilar raised her sons in Arizona, so they’re no strangers to scorching heat. She remembers “seeing soccer kids and my own children pass out and faint from, you know, heat-related illnesses,” she said. “It was seeing my sons dehydrated.”
Schools across the U.S. are carpeted in heat-absorbing asphalt and lack shade. The buildings were often made with materials that radiated heat into indoor spaces. Kids are more vulnerable to heat illness than adults, and extreme temperatures affect learning, performance and concentration. Heat-related school closures are becoming more frequent.
The burden of extreme heat is not felt equally. Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color can be as much as 7 F (3.9 C) hotter than richer and whiter neighborhoods.
In 2022, students at a school near Atlanta pointed thermometers onto their basketball court and got a reading of 105 F . A roofing manufacturer donated a solar-reflective coating and helped them paint it on. They took another reading. This time it was 95 F (35 C).
Paved surfaces get really hot in the sun. They absorb solar energy and slowly re-radiate it out as heat, increasing air temperatures by as much as 7 F (3.9 C).
Cooling playgrounds and roads by making them more reflective is not new, but interest has been growing along with more understanding of the way the accumulation can affect neighborhoods, known as urban heat islands, said Daniel Metzger, a fellow at Columbia Law School.