Hotter days hit some more than others
Your kid’s school closes early because it is too hot, and they have no air conditioning. None of your coworkers – whose kids go to a better school district – are asking to leave.
You
Arrange for a neighbor to bring your kid home, and plan to keep track of them until you get home. (You will have to hide your phone because you are not allowed to have personal calls or texts at work.)
Ask to leave early. (You will lose income immediately, and possibly again in the future since your schedule seems to be “unreliable”.)
With more hot days, air conditioning is becoming a necessity. Schools in poor neighborhoods lack many things including air conditioning because they have less money. They have less money because almost half of school funding comes from local taxes.
There is a forehead thump logic to property values and property taxes being tightly linked. Real estate has lower value when it is located nearer sources of air and noise pollution, further from natural open space. Where property values are low, local infrastructure (pot holes anyone?) including schools also suffers.
By tying a school’s resources to the local property values and people’s ability to pay, we have doomed low-income neighborhoods to having poor schools.
Jonathan Kozol calls it “Apartheid education” in his 2024 book, An End to Inequality: Breaking down the walls of apartheid education in America (The New Press).
Just looking at the school building itself is illuminating. Kozol gives an example in the book: CBS news picked up the story when Baltimore school “teachers posted pictures of children bundled up in freezing rooms” because the heating system had failed. A teacher in Viriginia rearranges the students’ desks to avoid the leaks from the ceiling. This would be considered unacceptable and an infringement on the children’s ability to learn in a middle- or upper-income school; it happens every day in poor schools.
Does it interfere with learning? You bet.
A study of an elementary school in New Haven found that the sixth graders whose classroom was closer to train tracks were a full school year level behind their peers who were on the other side of the building. (Good news: noise-control pads were installed and the learning difference disappeared.) That was within the same building. The difference between lower-resourced school students and generously resourced school students is even more dramatic. But we already knew that . . .
To me, this is an interesting example of how the same weather (made more impactful by climate change) has different effects on people. The Bible says the rain falls on the just and the unjust. This is true but nowadays, it does not fall equally.
