Back To School: Keeping students cool in summer heat
MIAMI -- If you've been thinking that this year's heat is more intense, you're not imagining it. Heat indexes have shattered records this summer, and the trend doesn't appear to be slowing down as the new school year begins. CBS News Miami takes a look at how schools are keeping up.
The conditions inside classrooms are scarcely better than the outdoors at present. Staff members at Miami-Dade County Public Schools have been proactively working for weeks to ensure that air conditioning keeps the interiors cool this academic year.
"I was just sitting down and already overheating," Luna Carrera, a 12th grader at Miami Senior High School said.
Carrera, a cheerleader at Miami Senior High School, seeks refuge indoors to cool down when she's not outside. Meanwhile, ensuring suitable indoor temperatures falls to Carl Nicoleau, the district's maintenance operations officers.
"We've made slight adjustments," Nicoleau said.
Specifically, adjustments have been made to the energy management grip which is responsible for controlling air conditioning. The system was programmed to activate earlier this year.
"Three weeks ago we turned them on," he said.
According to data from the National Weather Service for South Florida estimates that Miami-Dade County has encountered 41 days this summer that warranted heat advisories or heat warnings.
"We've put out more of an awareness campaign to let people know we might be experiencing more trouble our systems are working harder obviously. A couple of classrooms have no A/C or perhaps the media center so they're isolated areas."
Nicoleau acknowledges that there are areas awaiting repairs, but there should not be any major school outages.
"Systems are going to fail and our job is to respond to them and get them up as soon as we can."
Failures are not uncommon and are practically a facet of the school experience in Miami.
"The times that there's no A/C we have to deal with it cause you can't really go outside," another high school senior, Angelina Carias said.
CBS News Miami asked what's the best way to get A/C issues fixed if any arise, the M-DCPS told us, the first step is let staff on-site know, but if it requires a complaint, contact the district.