Paula Cerqueira-Goncalves has been principal of the James Otis Elementary School in East Boston long enough to remember what the building used to do to popsicles. On the worst days, classrooms in the 121-year-old school pushed into the high 80s. Popsicles handed out to students melted before children could eat them. The building, she told WBUR, "was never designed" for the climate Boston lives in now.
Two blocks from Logan Airport. Between Route 1A and I-90. The neighborhood Massachusetts classifies as an environmental justice community is the same one that has absorbed, generation after generation, what wealthier parts of Boston managed to push east: the airport noise, the highway particulates, the coastal flood risk. Italian-American families first, then Central and South American families, then Southeast Asian families. Each wave inheriting the geography. Otis's majority Latino student body breathes air shaped by jet exhaust and traffic, inside a building that went up when Theodore Roosevelt was president.
Over the past two years, crews worked after students went home each day, pulling out the old systems and installing an all-electric HVAC overhaul: heat pumps for cooling and heating, fresh-air delivery, HEPA filtration units sized to catch the fine particulate matter drifting off runways two blocks away. Improved lighting. Weatherization. Water-saving fixtures. The project finished in spring 2026.
The money tells you something about what it takes. The city invested $5.7 million through Renew Boston Trust, a program launched in 2017 that audits municipal buildings for energy and resilience upgrades. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center added a $1.5 million Green School Works grant. Mass Save incentives contributed $342,000. The Boston City Council approved the grant acceptance in March 2026. Three layers of public funding from three levels of government. Each necessary. None enough on its own.
None of it lined up by accident, either. Renew Boston Trust had to reach its third phase before schools received a majority of the program's $112.5 million budget. The MassCEC grant program had to exist and stay funded. Otis had to be prioritized within the district's capital pipeline, which meant somebody had to keep making the case, year after year, while other aging buildings competed for the same limited dollars.
Cerqueira-Goncalves described the finished project as the result of years of advocacy for students, staff, and families. The outgoing Boston Teachers Union president, Jessica Tang, had framed classroom heat as an equity issue, pointing out that schools with and without air conditioning produced "vastly different" experiences. East Boston's environmental justice designation gave the school a policy foothold that buildings in less burdened neighborhoods might not have had.
The public record shows these pieces clearly. What it doesn't capture is the texture underneath: how parents and teachers organized around the problem before funding arrived, how the school community navigated two years of construction noise after dismissal, what conversations happened at school committee meetings when Otis was one aging building among many. The advocacy Cerqueira-Goncalves describes took years. The documented trail of that advocacy is thinner than the result it produced.
A principal pushing for years. A union naming the disparity. A neighborhood designation that created eligibility. A city program that expanded to include schools. A state grant that covered the gap. Pull any single piece out and the popsicles keep melting.
So what does it feel like, day to day, once the system is in?
Vicky Lynch, a parent with three children at Otis, said the new system meant parents could sit comfortably during September welcome sessions, spring academic meetings, June classroom events. Before, those gatherings happened in the same stifling rooms where children spent their days. The principal reported fewer heat and discomfort complaints, students more comfortable and focused. BPS installed indoor air quality sensors in every classroom, nurse's office, and main office, measuring CO2, carbon monoxide, PM10, PM2.5, temperature, and humidity in real time. Facilities staff use the data to adjust temperatures, catch ventilation problems, make closure decisions during extreme heat.
The building became a maintained system. Not just retrofitted but monitored, adjusted, kept alive by people whose job it is to keep it alive. When a filter needs changing or a heat pump needs service, that's a facilities work order. Not a family's emergency.
I know this sounds obvious. It is the least obvious thing in climate adaptation.
In 2021, only 38 Boston public school buildings had cooling systems. BPS says more than 100 now do, with three additional HVAC projects underway for 2027. But more than half of BPS buildings went up before World War II. As recently as June 2024, ten schools still lacked air conditioning during a heat wave, and a BPS spokesperson said those buildings were too old to support the energy demand.
As of this writing, BPS's Air Quality page still lists "Otis, James Elementary" under "Schools With Steam Heat and No Mechanical Ventilation." The building has heat pumps and HEPA filters.
I looked for evidence that Otis serves as a cooling center or clean-air refuge for the broader East Boston community beyond school hours. I didn't find any. The building has the capacity. It has filtration designed for airport-adjacent air quality. It has real-time monitoring. But turning a school building into a neighborhood climate resource requires staffing, extended hours, operational funding, and a decision nobody has made yet. The infrastructure answers a question the institution hasn't thought to ask.
There's something I keep thinking about: not the retrofit itself but the labor that comes after. The sensor readings. The filter changes. The temperature adjustments. The budget lines that pay for someone to do those things tomorrow and the day after that.
My grandmother used to say a house is only as strong as the people who sweep it. She was talking about daily attention, about how care is work and work is love and love is showing up with the broom. What Otis has now is something she would have recognized immediately: people responsible for keeping the building working, backed by a budget that pays them to do it. Collective ownership. Institutional maintenance. Layered public investment that doesn't vanish when the ribbon-cutting photo runs.
Three more HVAC projects by 2027 is progress. It is nowhere near the pace of the problem. Across the country, school buildings sit at the intersection of aging infrastructure and intensifying heat, and the children inside them are subject to whatever the building allows. What happens when the building isn't collectively owned, isn't publicly maintained, isn't anyone's institutional responsibility? When the machine that stands between a person and the heat belongs to the person alone?
A classroom is a room that gets hot. A home is a place where the air conditioner sits. The difference is who's responsible for making sure it keeps running.
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