As the school year starts again for the students and staff of Centennial High, the uncertainty of the building’s temperature returns as well. 

Students and staff never know if they should come to school wearing shorts or sweatpants, a t-shirt or hoodie. Look in one classroom and one might see a student fanning themselves with their math worksheet, and look in the other classroom and there will be students layering up with multiple jackets.

Not only are the temperatures physically uncomfortable for everyone in the building, but they are also detrimental to the teacher’s ability to teach and the student’s ability to learn. 

English teacher John Sharbaugh explained, “When it’s hot and I know that kids aren’t gonna be focused, it throws off my lesson planning a little bit and we just have to adjust.” Students struggle to concentrate in such uncomfortable environments, diminishing their potential in school.

In regard to the students, heat affects their moods, leaving them sleepy, irritable, and unable to focus. Learning in an overheated classroom can also impact a student’s outlook on a class.

Sharbaugh said, “The last thing I want them to do is walk in here and have a negative feeling the moment they walk into my room.” The heat bodes poorly for students’ work ethics. 

On the other side of the coin, where the classrooms in the center of the building are comparable to the desert, the classrooms on the edges are tundras.

Even the ninth grade wing added to Centennial in 2001 is not safe from extreme temperatures. The classrooms that have an outside wall “usually are freezing all winter,” according to social studies teacher Bethany Cunha.

“When we returned to school, the room temperature was stagnant and pretty much boiling hot, and then they sent someone to come fix it, and they fixed it, and it is now the opposite, it is the frigid arctic,” Cunha said.

The polarity between temperatures is not only limited to individual classrooms, but there are also drastic differences from classroom to classroom. Most Centennial students have experienced these changes as they go throughout their day around the building.

“If air is blasting in one room, it means a mystery room around the building is not getting the air they need,” said Cunha.

The gymnasium and locker room’s infamous heat is another one of Centennial’s staples. “The gym has always been hot, we don’t have air conditioning in the gym. They say they’re going to put air conditioning in the gym; that was supposed to be this year but they didn’t do that,” Jarrett Emery, a teacher of physical education said.

Many of Centennial’s students are participants in the school’s sports; those students also participate in the act of storing their equipment in the locker rooms. “I know the girls’ locker room gets a bit hotter than the boys’ locker room but they’re both pretty warm and stinky,” Emery said.

The portables beyond the building have fared far better temperature wise. “[The students] have always enjoyed this classroom because it’s comfortable. They’re not freezing, or sweating in this classroom,”  Statistics teacher Stephen Lee said, who has resided in the portables for six years.

The portables, being a smaller space, are easier to control the temperatures of. 

Centennial High School’s principal, Joelle Miller, shed light on why the temperatures are so inconsistent. 

“So the chiller goes off, which means that cold air isn’t pushing out. Like, when you come in and it’s hot and wet in the morning, that’s because the chiller tripped off. So the reason the temperatures have been getting so hot is because the system isn’t communicating to the chiller.”

Renovation for Centennial is currently scheduled for 2036. The HVAC system currently managing the temperatures in our building is the same one originally installed in 1977, when Centennial was first built.

Despite maintenance to the HVAC system over the summer in which the school was closed for a month, the temperature issue is still nowhere near solved. Classrooms that were reported to be cold last school year are now hot, and vice versa.

“We want something consistent,” said Sharbaugh. “We want something that we can rely on, and we can’t.”