Broken A/C units are closing schools: How Wake schools ended up so far behind on HVAC repairs

Panther Creek High School student Anwita Kaluvakuntla had a message for the people who run the state’s biggest school system. It was on behalf of all the students who shuffle into the 19-year-old Cary school and, on the hottest days, swelter in certain classrooms: "The air conditioning either doesn't work properly or can't keep up with the heat." 

It’s an increasingly common refrain among public school students, teachers and school staff in Wake County: Classes disrupted when they move to cooler rooms on hot days. Teachers turning on fans that offer little relief. Overworked or broken heating and air-conditioning units forcing kids to stay home — or worse: students having to concentrate through a class in a muggy room, assuming they can suffer through it without feeling ill.

"When the weather gets warmer, my skin feels like it's burning," Kaluvakuntla told members of the Wake County Board of Education at a recent meeting in a chilly boardroom. "Every student deserves a classroom that's comfortable and stable."

But that's not what many Wake students and staff say they're getting, particularly when extreme weather hits.

About one-third of Wake County's 200 schools have dismissed early at least once since 2023 because of malfunctioning heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, forcing tens of thousands of students and their families to find another place for the students to be in the middle of what should have been a school day.

School system leaders have identified more than $200 million in deferred maintenance on HVAC systems, delayed over at least the past decade in part because of staffing limitations, new ways buildings are constructed and the allocation of funds to other priorities. The problem has coincided with drastically rising costs of operating and building new schools in the fast-growing county. Now, leaders are focused back on HVAC but without a firm or quick solution to the problem.

"The status quo is not getting it done," Chris Heagarty, the chairman of the Wake school board, told other board members during a meeting in March. "It's like we're paying off the minimum balance on our credit cards."

Government records show that funds were spent on raising employee pay, expanding student services and building new schools in the growing county — but rarely expanding maintenance personnel. And the cost of building a new school or renovating an old one is several times what it was just 15 years ago.

"Dollars that could or should have gone to maintenance and operations were not," said Mark Strickland, the school district’s director of maintenance and operations. "They were spent in other areas."

Several years ago, Wake schools officials tried to start a five-year plan to tackle maintenance issues, but it soon turned into an eight-year plan that's not been funded at the desired level. And Wake County's facility dollars don't stretch nearly as far as they used to; labor and materials costs tied to maintenance are surging.

"Whether you're public or private, everything's getting more expensive," said James Freeman, director of Wake Tech Community College's air conditioning, heating and refrigeration program.

The problems facing the school system didn’t happen overnight, and officials are paying more attention to the problem. Spending has more than doubled to $45 million in the past year for replacing old HVAC units. About two dozen of the schools that have dismissed early are getting new HVAC equipment. "That's an enormous positive," Strickland said.

It’s a start, but the funding won’t cover everything that needs to be repaired. “It's unrealistic to expect us to quickly get those types of things resolved," Strickland said. 

Funding priorities put HVAC on the backburner

County commissioners have increased overall funding for the school system by at least $35 million each of the past four years. But those increases largely covered the cost of major employee raises, the opening of new schools and the expansion of school support staff.

By focusing on those kinds of priorities for more than a decade now, Wake leaders piled up $200 million in deferred HVAC maintenance by the fall of 2024 — and more than $800 million in deferred maintenance total.

Budget records show district officials knew they were creating a backlog of routine maintenance when they opted to open more schools and raise teacher and staff salaries.

While county commissioners approve funding for the county’s schools, the superintendent and the school board advocate for funding — and highlight priorities — through a proposed spending plan. 

Budget documents over the past decade provide evidence of how the county fell behind.

• A decade ago, Superintendent James Merrill deferred asking for nearly 20 new maintenance and operations employees — some of whom would have worked in facilities — at a cost of about $1 million, one of many deferred needs. The next year, Merrill put off asking for more than $600,000 in needed maintenance, then the year after that, deferred another $8.2 million. He lamented in a memo to the board that the funds were needed but not available.
• By 2019, Superintendent Catty Moore pushed for some restoration of maintenance and operations funds, including $25 million to be used over five years. Moore told the school board at the time that salaries in those departments had "eroded to the point where some vacancies now linger for months." She also wrote: “The amount of money spent on maintenance has fallen well below industry standards." Her request, she said, was for "needs that went unaddressed while we chased the rapid enrollment growth of previous years." After some extra funding wasn't approved by county commissioners in 2020, the five-year plan eventually stretched into eight years, and progress kept slowing.
• In 2022, the school board noted its adopted budget funded facility maintenance and operations at 87.5% of the industry standard, $20 million short of what was needed. While county commissioners had approved a budget increase, conditions were worse by 2023, when the board noted the district was operating at 77.6% of the industry standard for "maintenance, operating capital, and capital improvement project funds."
• During the district's most recent budget cycle, the county’s current superintendent, Robert Taylor, and the school board stayed away from major new investments and instead cut more than $18 million worth of the operating budget, as they anticipated operating costs to rise by $60 million with the opening of four new schools and expected employee raises coming down from the General Assembly.

Taylor and Heagarty, the board chairman, are now pushing to cut some other items from facilities funding to help invest in HVAC, such as reducing the number of laptops issued to students. Taylor said he's not sure kindergarten and first-graders need the laptops the district has been issuing to all students since 2020. 

Taylor is also looking at cutting out duplicative services, modifying the district's work order protocols, and identifying what other activities the district can stop doing and stop funding.

Strickland said the district has a long way to go but that "the momentum is turning."

"There's a heightened sense of awareness, which may have not been there in years past,” he said. “But now that it's there, it is good that many other people recognize that we have a problem, that we have challenges, and that we've got to identify resources to fix them."

Wake County has been less focused on maintenance and operations than most school systems across the country, according to the National Center on School Infrastructure. Nationally, maintenance and operations make up more than 9% of districts' total operating expenditures. The share has dropped slightly over the years, from 9.8% of budgets in 1995 to 9.3% in 2022, according to the group.

In North Carolina, the share has gone down from 8.3% in 1995 to 7.8% in 2022. In Wake County, it's decreased from 8.4% in 1995 to 6.0% in 2022.

Still, HVAC maintenance is a problem to varying degrees nationwide, too. A 2020 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that 41% of school systems needed to update or replace HVAC equipment in at least half of their schools. The federal watchdog found that malfunctioning HVAC caused mold and other damage in some schools and caused some schools to temporarily close or adjust schedules. That was the case with Alamance-Burlington Schools, which delayed the start of the 2023 school year after insufficient airflow and high humidity contributed to toxic mold problems.

Surveys conducted by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction have shown a growing — but unfunded — need in school systems for heating and air conditioning work. In 2010, schools reported having $254.2 million in unmet heating and air conditioning needs. In 2020, that figure had grown to $693.6 million.

Changing school buildings

Another complicating factor in the HVAC backlog is architectural: They way new schools are designed can increase the hazards of a non-working air conditioning system.

Before the ubiquity of air conditioning, schools were built with air flow in mind. Most windows could be opened for ventilation, and walls weren't always filled with insulation that keeps heat in.

Schools are now designed to be more efficient — and with the presumption of a working HVAC, according to Freeman, the Wake Tech professor. Most windows are closed or never meant to open because of safety concerns.

"If a system is totally down, and you know it's not doing anything, it's gonna get real uncomfortable real fast," Freeman said. "You'll hear people say, 'Well, when I was a kid, we didn't even have air conditioning.' That's true. They built schools different. They weren't as insulated, they weren't as solidly built to save energy. What happens when we have these well-insulated schools that's built to save energy, and then the A/C shuts down? It's a lot hotter than it was when we were kids. ... It's apples and oranges."

Extreme weather poses another obstacle. Even an HVAC system that is properly maintained and works well won't hit its set points in extreme weather, Freeman said. So if it's 98 degrees outside and supposed to be 74 degrees inside, classrooms may end up being a few degrees warmer than that, he said. At least five of North Carolina’s six warmest years have been since 2016, according to North Carolina’s warmest on record, according to the North Carolina State Climate Office. 

Newer equipment is more efficient and better able to cool in hotter outside weather, but not every school has those systems, because HVAC systems are only replaced every 30 or so years.

Yet research — and ample feedback from Wake County students and staff — suggests classroom temperatures matter.

A review of research by Pennsylvania State University suggests temperatures between 68 degrees and 74 degrees. It also recommends that school-level staff be able to set temperatures for their own classrooms or blocks of rooms.

In Wake County, thermostats are controlled by the central office — 69 degrees in the winter and 74 degrees in the warmer months.

A 2018 Harvard study found that higher outside temperatures can reduce learning, and a 2015 Harvard study found that proper air conditioning can mitigate most, but not all, of those effects.

Class sizes can also make a difference, with more crowded rooms being hotter.

Wake school board members have noted that high schools can be more susceptible to heat sometimes because the students are bigger and placed in third or fourth-floor classrooms where air circulation isn't as good and heat rises.

Costs rising

Staffing is also a problem for the HVAC backlog. And that problem, along with a growing school system, has contributed to increased costs.

For at least a decade, the district has increased the number of school buildings without much of an increase in staffing to help maintain them. In 2015, the district had the equivalent of 280 10-month employees in maintenance, including HVAC, covering 22.3 million square feet. But now the district has 27.5 million square feet — a 23.3% increase — and just the equivalent of 290 10-month employees, or a 3.6% increase. Next year, the district is adding more than a million new square feet when four new schools open but is not adding any new maintenance employees.

Freeman said it's best for commercial organizations to have in-house staff handle day-to-day needs and contractors to handle longer-term planning.

Wake has at times struggled to fill its school HVAC-repair positions, but a new recruiter for maintenance and operations has helped the district fill nearly all of the county’s vacant positions now. 

Even with a full complement of maintenance workers, though, it’s still not enough.  

So the school system relies heavily on contractors for day-to-day work — contractors that often pay their workers much more than Wake pays its own staff. A shortage of qualified HVAC workers has led to rising wages to hire them, which has made the cost of HVAC work much more expensive. 

Strickland said the county needs to focus on having the appropriate manpower, qualified staff, with the adequate compensation to be able to service and maintain the equipment. “That is a huge challenge for us right now," he said.

Private contractors of all kinds are also in demand from commercial and residential developers, riding up costs even more.

School buildings now cost tens of millions more dollars to build and renovate than just 15 years ago.

In 2010, the Wake County Public School System spent $14.9 million to build Walnut Creek Elementary in Raleigh, serving 810 students, according to a state survey. By 2020, it built Fuller Elementary in Raleigh for $30.9 million, serving 528 students. The school board now plans for an elementary school to cost at least $80 million, if started today. Statewide surveys from 2010 to 2021 show the average cost per square foot of a new school have risen every year, from $140.91 per square foot in 2010 to $285.79 in 2021.