When Chelsea Silbereis’ son came home from school last week, he was nauseous, fatigued, and suffering from a headache. He was not alone.
Parents and educators gathered at the School Committee meeting on June 16 to raise concerns over excessive heat in elementary schools across the school district. During last week’s heat wave and into early this week, classroom temperatures at Burbank Elementary School and Winn Brook Elementary School reached nearly 90 degrees.
“It’s not just that you need to be cooling the building, you need to be giving education about heat stroke and heat exhaustion, and what to do about this, because our teachers can’t be the ones that are standing between the students and a life-threatening…urgent condition,” Silbereis said during the meeting.
Teachers told the School Committee that children are frequently sent to the nurse and endure “unnecessary suffering and stress.” The heat poses a health concern, but it also interferes with teaching and leading a classroom, they said.
“Getting [students] to really attend to a lesson, and be engaged is…so hard to do in June, regardless, but then to add in an 85-plus degree classroom, it’s near impossible,” Meghan McGovern, a second-grade teacher at Winn Brook, told The Voice.
Silbereis told The Voice that her son, currently in third grade at Burbank, has faced issues with the heat since September 2023. He’s gone to the nurse and been pulled out of school on multiple occasions. Though Silbereis said she wants him in school and that his teacher makes sure to communicate temperatures to parents, she sees the effects of the heat firsthand and worries about his health.
Meteorologists say 2026 could be the hottest year on record, the Weather Channel reported. According to The Boston Globe, June has seen temperatures 10 degrees above normal — making it the third-hottest June on record.
At the June 2 School Committee meeting, committee members raised concerns over classroom temperatures at Burbank. According to Facilities Director Dave Blazon, fans have been installed at other buildings, including Winn Brook, in previous years. However, when it comes to Burbank, he said that “there’s not much we can do.”
To mitigate the heat and humidity, industrial air conditioning units are installed in the hallway, and custodians “leave windows open as much as possible overnight,” according to Superintendent Jill Geiser.
“Health and safety continue to be a priority for the district,” Geiser said at Tuesday’s meeting.
However, according to Jennifer Karigianis, an English language learner educator at Burbank, the cool air from the units often doesn’t reach classrooms. Karigianis was one of the educators who spoke at the School Committee meeting, where she called Burbank an “excessively hot working environment.”
Teachers at Burbank are also given the option to move their classroom to an air-conditioned room, such as a conference room, or to a modular classroom separate from the school building. The four modular units are air-conditioned, though only one has a usable smart board, Karigianis said.
However, with more than 10 classrooms of students at Burbank, not everyone can move into the modular classrooms, and the disruption can throw off learning as a whole, she added.
“It takes teachers all summer to set up their classroom for an effective learning environment, and to say that you could just uproot your classroom and bring it into a modular classroom, and deliver that same effective learning is unfair to say, and it’s just not accurate,” Karigianis told The Voice.
According to Karigianis and Belmont Education Association President John Sullivan, facilities tickets regarding heat in classrooms have been closed almost automatically, with little communication from district leadership.
“It was very shocking to hear that something was permanently resolved when we haven’t been able to sit down and address it as a team with all the stakeholders to collaboratively come up with solutions to this problem,” Karigianis said. “It was defeating.”
According to Geiser, it would cost the district “multiple millions of dollars” to install air conditioning at schools where no system exists. She added that many of the windows are not built to support air conditioning units.
Committee members urged educators to use the available cooling options, though Chair Meghan Moriarty noted the committee should raise the concern with the town to explore funding for an air-conditioning or cooling project.
“It’s something we can explore another time, but if students are really in danger, and I don’t know enough to know if this is true, but if this is a health and safety issue, then it’s just not optional; teachers just have to move,” committee member Amy Zuccarello said.
But for many educators, being told that discussions may happen at a higher level in the future doesn’t help solve temperatures in the high 80s for the first and last weeks of school.
“I think it’s just very disappointing to work in these conditions and not even have it be acknowledged,” McGovern said. “…It doesn’t really feel like anybody cares about us, but for the kids, it’s really brutal.”
