Wellesley Public Schools air conditioning plan moving forward

As the days get warmer, and the climate changes, three of Wellesley’s elementary schools — Fiske, Bates, and Schofield —  as well as Wellesley Middle School remain without air conditioning while the town works to figure out how best to go about a multi-million dollar project to cool the schools.

The School Committee chose to move forward with window units, which had the lowest price with a total of $16 million tag but the highest environmental cost and  are about a third of the cost of the other two options. A hybrid pump system and full-building air conditioning, which were also proposed, would cost $31 million and $39 million respectively. 

Niki Ofenloch, the committee’s chair, said the schools did a small-scale pilot study in a few classrooms with the window units and it went better than expected. However, she said there are additional challenges people tend to overlook when thinking about an installation at this scale, including electrical work and security issues. 

“They have to specialize architectural panels so they’re built into the windows to ensure proper school safety,”  she said.  

However, even after the pilot, the process for this project will be extensive. The committee is currently in the first of three stages in getting it fully approved and completed. Right now, they are in the feasibility stage and have to wait until November’s Special Town Meeting to vote on the request for funding a design, which will take an additional year. At the May 5 School Committee meeting (see Wellesley Media recording), members voted unanimously to move ahead with forwarding the feasibility study to the Permanent Building Committee with updated costs for each option.

After design work is done, approval would be sought for construction funds. The earliest the project could possibly be completed with units in these schools would be fall of 2028, Ofenloch said. 

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For some parents, like Kelly Norris, who has children in the Wellesley Public Schools, safety is their biggest concern. Norris said in an email that she has heard from other families about how children have passed out at school due to the heat. She has heard about parents keeping their kids home out of concern for their wellbeing.

“The health and safety of our children is an urgent must have,” Norris wrote. “The project as currently proposed is the cheapest and simplest option to address this urgent health and safety problem.”

Norris compared Wellesley Public Schools to Boston Public Schools, which she said outfitted 58 schools with air conditioning in one year. 

“There are people who have executed much more complex projects at our peer schools who could quickly get our much smaller, easier job done,” she wrote. “It is urgent that our town leadership prioritizes the health and safety of our youngest and most vulnerable.” 

However, Rachel McGregor, the principal of Fiske Elementary School, said there is no way to speed up the process without omitting important steps or votes. 

“It’s a considerable cost to the town, so you have to take these steps,” she said. “I don’t know what step you could skip, actually, because it’s all about funding, and you have to show that you really need something.”

McGregor said with climate change, hotter days are becoming more frequent, and without air conditioning in the classrooms, the schools become incredibly hot. This impacts the ability for teachers to teach and students to learn.

“On those really hot days, it can get very warm in the classrooms and it’s so hard to learn when you’re so hot,” she said. “They’ve looked across a couple years of when the temperature was 80 and above outside and we found that there were more and more days like that throughout the school year.”

McGregor said they did a trial run in one of the hottest classrooms in Fiske and installed a window unit in the school as part of the pilot study. It went better than they anticipated, and the previous concerns about noise interfering with teaching wasn’t an issue, she said. 

“We’re really excited about the potential of moving this along,” McGregor said. “With the changing environment and with more and more days that are hotter, it’s moved from a ‘nice to have’ to something we need, because we’re losing days of productive teaching.” 

This story was produced through a partnership between Natick Report and Boston University’s Department of Journalism.

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