The sixth grade classroom at Ford Elementary stays dark all day. Not dim—dark. Lights off, windows covered with paper to block the sun, fans running constantly to move the hot air around. It's the hottest week of September in Richmond, California, and Juanita Flores-Mejia's room regularly hits 80 degrees with no air conditioning. She's teaching like this now—in the dark, with fans, hoping it helps.
After lunch, her students come back rowdy, their faces red and sweaty from the playground. Getting them to settle takes longer than usual. Getting them to concentrate on anything academic feels nearly impossible. "I get crankier like everybody when I'm hot," Flores-Mejia says. "And I think the kids just look like they're zombies."
When a reporter asks her class to raise their hands if heat affects their ability to focus, 23 out of 25 students raise their hands. The majority say when the classroom is hot, it becomes hard to learn.
A teacher covering her windows with paper, turning off lights to reduce heat, running fans that mostly just circulate warm air. Individual decisions made daily about what's still possible to teach when your students can barely think straight.
Across the country in New York, the state tried to create a framework for this. A new law that took effect September 1, 2025 establishes maximum classroom temperatures:
- At 82°F: Schools must take mitigation actions—turn off overhead lights, lower shades, use fans, provide water breaks
- At 88°F: Classrooms must be evacuated
The protocol exists on paper. The daily reality of who follows it, how it works when buildings have nowhere to evacuate students to—that part remains unrecorded.
New York State United Teachers collected nearly 1,000 testimonies from educators about classroom temperatures in the 90s, students sent home with heat-related illness, teachers getting dizzy and sick. But the published accounts are fragments: a culinary arts teacher whose classroom starts in the high 80s and hits the mid-90s once students start cooking. A Syracuse teacher who spent $350 of her own money on a window AC unit that won't completely work because it's too small for her room—it was all the stores had. Teachers in Patchogue-Medford leaving school with migraines and clothes soaked through with sweat.
A New York City high school student named Wynn described how her teacher "sometimes pivoted to showing YouTube videos or offering online quizzes" on hot days because it was too hot for anyone to think straight.
These adaptations are happening in classrooms across the country, but they're invisible—undocumented, uncoordinated, happening one teacher at a time with no way to share strategies across schools or districts.
Back in Richmond, Flores-Mejia has developed her own protocol through trial and error. Keep the room dark to reduce heat from lights and sun. Run the fans. Watch the students' faces. Adjust what you're teaching based on their capacity to focus. Accept that some days, real learning just isn't going to happen.
Teachers on the second floor at Ford Elementary say heat in classrooms hinders learning and creates unhealthy work conditions. One teacher informally tracked temperatures during a two-week period in September and found they regularly surpassed 82 degrees—the threshold where New York's law would require mitigation measures.
California leaves this to teachers. The state offers no law, no protocol. Teachers develop their own strategies, classroom by classroom.
New York created a framework, yet one in five NYC classrooms still lacks air conditioning despite the city spending roughly $500 million on the problem. Statewide, no one knows what percentage of classrooms have AC—the data is acknowledged as unreliable. The law says schools must relocate students at 88 degrees but doesn't specify what happens when there's nowhere to relocate them to.
So teachers improvise. The Syracuse teacher with the undersized AC unit knows exactly how to position it for maximum airflow. The culinary arts teacher has figured out which lessons can happen on hot days and which ones can't. Wynn's teacher knows when to abandon the lesson plan and switch to something less cognitively demanding. Flores-Mejia knows to keep her classroom dark, to watch her students' faces for signs they've hit their limit, to accept that some days you're just managing heat, not teaching.
These protocols live only in individual practice, scattered across classrooms with no mechanism for sharing strategies between schools or recording them for other teachers to learn from. Each teacher solves the same problem independently, spending their own money, making their own daily decisions about what's still possible when the building is too hot.
In Flores-Mejia's dark classroom, the fans keep running. The paper stays on the windows. She watches her students struggle to focus and adjusts her expectations for what they can accomplish. Her adaptation strategy, developed through experience, refined through the hottest weeks of September.
It works, sort of. The room stays slightly cooler than it would with lights on and windows uncovered. Students manage to get through the day. Learning happens, though not as much as it would in a properly cooled classroom.
Tomorrow, when the heat returns, she'll do it all again. Lights off, paper up, fans running. Teaching in the dark because that's what works in her specific classroom with her specific students in this specific building that doesn't have air conditioning. Anyone who isn't in that room, watching a teacher figure out how to make learning possible when the conditions say it shouldn't be, won't see any of it.
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The infrastructure gap: More than 13,700 schools that didn't require cooling in 1970 will need HVAC systems by 2025 at a total cost of about $40 billion according to the National Center on School Infrastructure.
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Window units create problems: Window-mounted air conditioners need to run alongside unconditioned ventilation units that maintain air quality, resulting in pockets of both warm and cold air and noise that disrupts learning.
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Children absorb heat faster: Kids have a higher ratio of surface area to mass, which means they absorb heat three to five times faster than adults and have a harder time cooling down according to pediatricians.
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The sauna demonstration: In May 2024, NYSUT and lawmakers constructed a portable sauna at the Capitol to recreate reported classroom temperatures and invited state lawmakers to sit inside while taking a quiz.