Hot classrooms, playgrounds spur K-12 school districts to go beyond AC for cooling

With hotter weather occurring during the school year, school districts are turning to cooling strategies to complement air conditioning.

Reflective playgrounds and roads, cool roofs and window films, shade structures and conversion of asphalt surfaces to a natural state are all being tried in various regions of the country. These measures are particularly important to help children cope with extreme heat because they sweat less and are more prone to dehydration than adults.

Some examples:

A Los Angeles school district has spent $11.4 million to convert asphalt shingle roofs to white cool roofing since 2017.
An Atlanta school received a donation from a roofing manufacturer of a bright blue, solar-reflective coating that reduced the temperature on a basketball court by 10 degrees.
Between 2022 and 2023, California granted more than $121 million for schools to replace asphalt or turf or rubber mats with grass, gardens, mulch, and trees.

More projects like those will be necessary if climate-change-induced heat continues to rise as predicted.

LPA Architects conducted a post-occupancy evaluation, or POE, of the eSTEM Academy, a new high school specializing in health/medical and design/engineering Career Technical Education, in Eastvale, Calif. The POE helped LPA, the Riverside County Office of Education, and the Corona-Norco Unified School District gain a better understanding of which design innovations—such as movable walls, flex furniture, collaborative spaces, indoor-outdoor activity areas, and a student union—enhanced the education program, and how well students and teachers used these innovations.

Resiliency | Jun 24, 2021

Oceanographer John Englander talks resiliency and buildings [new on HorizonTV]

New on HorizonTV, oceanographer John Englander discusses his latest book, which warns that, regardless of resilience efforts, sea levels will rise by meters in the coming decades. Adaptation, he says, is the key to future building design and construction.