JACKSONVILLE, Florida — After Duval County Public Schools logged roughly 1,300 air-conditioning service calls in the first 11 days of school, one district official summed up the frustration surrounding hot classrooms with a blunt acknowledgment.
“Understanding does not cool a classroom,” DCPS Chief Operations Officer Jim Culbert said while discussing the district’s response to widespread HVAC problems.
The staggering number of service requests has put renewed attention on aging school cooling systems, maintenance spending and what students and teachers have been dealing with during the opening weeks of the school year.
According to Action News Jax’s latest report on the HVAC problems, district officials blamed the surge in problems on years of limited maintenance, restricted repair funding and extreme summer temperatures.
The Duval County School Board was scheduled Tuesday to consider an amendment to its HVAC services contract that would establish an annual ceiling of $6 million for contracted work and larger emergency repairs. Public meeting materials say the change is intended to let the district respond faster when major heating and cooling equipment fails.
Parents Say the Heat Was Affecting Their Children
For some Jacksonville families, the problem has been more than an uncomfortable classroom.
Kayla Wiener, whose three children attend Westview K-8, told Action News Jax that her second-grade daughter complained of a headache and stomach pain after dealing with the heat. Wiener also said her autistic son came home flushed.
Her daughter described trying to cool herself with wet paper towels, telling her mother she had them “all over my whole body.”
At Loretto Elementary, another parent previously told Action News Jax that he brought a portable air conditioner into a first-grade special-needs classroom and became soaked with sweat while setting it up.
“It’s not safe for those children,” the parent said.
Other complaints stretched across the district.
News4JAX reported problems at schools including Stanton College Prep, Westview K-8 and Riverside High School. At Crown Point Elementary, a malfunctioning air-handler motor produced smoke and prompted about 20 students who had already arrived to be moved to Mandarin Middle School, according to the district.
A Riverside High student told the station that classrooms could become so hot students relied on electric and folding fans, describing the conditions as “unbearable.”
The problems have also appeared in the district’s own school communications. Crystal Springs Elementary posted updates notifying families about A/C trouble, relocating students into cooled classrooms and later announcing that the system was working again.
District Says the Situation Has Improved
Culbert said the district tried to get ahead of the August heat by switching school air-conditioning systems on about two weeks before students returned.
But the combination of full buildings, aging equipment and extreme outdoor temperatures still produced a flood of maintenance calls.
By Aug. 21, Culbert said only about five or six classrooms remained without working air conditioning and that no school was dealing with a major campus-wide outage at that point. He also said conditions were improving daily.
The district is also preparing to spend substantially more on maintenance. The Florida Times-Union reported that DCPS planned to increase its maintenance budget from $17 million to $40 million for the 2026-27 budget year and completely replace air-conditioning systems at six schools.
That spending comes as the district confronts a backlog officials have described as the product of years of deferred maintenance.
Internet Reaction: Teachers and Parents Question How It Got This Bad
The A/C failures have also spilled into online discussions among Duval school families and employees.
The Florida Times-Union reported that an anonymous participant in a popular Duval schools Facebook group said roughly a dozen teachers at their school were still working without A/C and moving between multiple classrooms every day.
The disruptions were “starting to dramatically impact teaching,” the person wrote.
The reaction has also revived questions about school funding. School Board Chair Charlotte Joyce expressed frustration that the district was still dealing with widespread cooling failures despite voters previously approving a half-penny sales tax intended to support school facilities.
Those comments reflect a broader question likely to linger even as individual air-conditioning units are repaired: Why did so many systems fail at once, and was enough money being spent to prevent it?
What Happens Next
The Sept. 1 School Board agenda included the proposed amendment with Thermaserve Mechanical Inc., setting a $6 million annual not-to-exceed amount for HVAC services and emergency repairs outside the normal contract scope.
As of early Wednesday, publicly searchable reporting reviewed for this story had not yet provided a reliable confirmation of the final vote result.
Meanwhile, the district’s larger challenge remains keeping aging cooling systems running through Florida heat while moving toward more permanent replacements.
For parents whose children have already come home sweaty, sick or struggling to concentrate, the district’s own words may be the standard it is now expected to meet:
Understanding does not cool a classroom.
