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Tag: extreme temperatures

  • How to protect US students from heat in schools – and is it time to rethink summer break?

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    As schools are returning to session following one of the hottest summers ever recorded, districts are faced with a new problem: how to handle increasingly extreme heatwaves, both in and outside the classroom.

    Unbearably hot days are no longer just a summer problem. In the US districts from the north-east to the mountain west to the deep south are shortening days, delaying openings, and reworking calendars as temperatures spike during August and September, the typical back-to-school months.

    A handful of potential methods for protecting students from extreme temperatures have been put forward, including modernizing HVAC systems, creating more shade on playgrounds, swapping their blacktop surfaces for grass and, perhaps most provocatively, reworking school calendars. There’s even some talk of replacing summer vacation with a spring or fall break, if schools can be kept cool enough, when homes for some students may be hotter.

    School schedules are already beginning to shift. New York City recently urged schools to move end-of-year activities indoors during a June 2025 heatwave. Philadelphia dismissed students early at more than 60 campuses during late August 2024 because buildings lacked adequate cooling.

    Related: ‘It happened so fast’: the shocking reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona

    Detroit also cut days short in the first week of the 2024–25 school year as heat indices climbed. In Colorado’s Poudre school district, most schools announced two-hour early releases for 14 and 15 August due to high temperatures. In June, the notoriously cold state of Alaska had their first statewide heat advisory.

    As the climate crisis is already shaping the way we discuss the future of education in the US, rearranging the calendar has become one tactic for school districts to tackle the issue.

    “It’s definitely one technique that you could take to address the extreme temperature events, and especially since we’re already seeing school get postponed and the days canceled or moved around,” said Grace Wickerson, the senior manager of the climate and health team at the Federation of American Scientists.

    “But even with some of the major legislation of the last administration, the climate risk to schools is still a major gap in our strategy around climate action,” said Wickerson. “And so I think this definitely needs to be a part of the conversation of what things we need to do differently in the age of extreme heat.”

    Last summer, 22 organizations, including the Federation of American Scientists, sent a letter to the US Department of Education urging them to take swift action to protect students from the increasingly hot weather.

    The Center for Green Schools at the US Green Building Council is another name on the letter. The center is a non-profit known for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (Leed) rating system, a framework for designing climate-ready buildings that has so far been adopted by more than 5,000 US schools.

    The average number of days hitting 87 degrees is increasing every year, and we estimate it will reach 120 days a year sometime in the 2030s

    Andra Yeghoian, Ten Strands

    Though Leed has become a popular strategy for schools to prepare against hotter temperatures, the policy aspect can be difficult to navigate due to a lack of governmental guidelines.

    “The main issue is we have very little data about school buildings across the country because they’re all managed locally,” said Anisa Heming, the director of the Center for Green Schools. “There’s no data collection on the federal level, and in most states actually there’s no data collection, so we have very little data on the buildings themselves.

    “And then there’s no real threshold established for when a school has actually done a good job on being heat-resilient,” she added. “So we have a bunch of strategies that schools can adopt, but we don’t have a real sense of if we’ve done enough because there’s no standard to follow.”

    Most American schools were built for a cooler climate that no longer exists. A Government Accountability Office survey from 2020 estimated that 41% of districts needed to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, about 36,000 buildings.

    Despite a need and emphasis on air conditioning, it’s not the only thing a school would need to be heat-resilient. Decreasing black pavement on playgrounds and increasing shade through planting trees are also common requirements.

    Green Schoolyards America, a non-profit aiming to create greener schoolyards, and Ten Strands, a California-based non-profit working to increase environmental literacy, recently collaborated on a tree canopy project to measure the amount of trees across the state’s schools.

    Related: How the US lets hot school days sabotage learning

    Climate experts recommend that urban areas, including school districts, have at least 30% tree canopy coverage. The study found that California schools had only a median of 6.4% tree canopy coverage, with less than half of the existing amount being accessible to children during their school day.

    “The average number of days hitting 87 degrees is increasing every year, and we estimate it will reach 120 days a year sometime in the 2030s,” said Andra Yeghoian, chief information officer of Ten Strands.

    “Some people look at that and they’re like: ‘87, that’s just a nice day.’ And well, it’s a nice day if you are in air conditioning. But if you’re in a community that doesn’t have air conditioning, and you’re in a building trying to learn, that’s not a nice day,” Yeghoian added. “And if you’re going out to the playground and you have no shade and it’s just a blacktop, 87 degrees is actually more like 100 degrees.”

    The health stakes of rising temperatures are real, with children being especially vulnerable during heatwaves. Federal heat guidance lists children among the demographics at highest risk during extreme heat, and public health agencies advise schools to limit exertion, ensure hydration and adjust activities as temperatures rise.

    Data collected by UndauntedK12, another non-profit advocating for more heat-resistant facilities and a cosigner of the letter, suggests that more than 1,000 schools were affected by extreme heat during the 2024-2025 school year.

    “We see these headlines all the time now. It feels like every summer and even in the fall, schools are closing early,” said Kristen Hengtgen, the program director at UndauntedK12. “After-school activities are being canceled. We can see that so many of our schools are underprepared for extreme heat.”

    The hotter temperatures also contribute to higher rates of school absences, particularly for Black, Hispanic and lower-income students. Because children from low-income households are more likely to be enrolled in schools with inadequate air conditioning, these children often opt to stay home during the hottest days rather than take the risk of being stuck in a sweltering classroom.

    “One of my biggest concerns is that many kids who lack AC in their schools also don’t have it at home,” said Hengtgen. “I’m especially thinking of kids who may attend schools that are in low-income communities. We wouldn’t want them to be spending more of the hottest days in a hot home.”

    You can’t satisfactorily, in any way, shape or form, actually teach if it’s above 90 degrees in a classroom, never mind learn

    James Skoufis, New York state senator

    But just a year prior, it wasn’t only local non-profits spearheading ways to combat the increasing heat. The National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) was a collaboration of 29 federal health agencies established during the Obama administration to consolidate heat expertise.

    In early summer 2025, the Trump administration purged many of these experts, leaving the NIHHS severely understaffed.

    But there has been some progress on the state level. New York recently became the first state to pass legislation establishing guidelines for extreme heat conditions in school buildings. The law, which takes effect on 1 September, sets 88F (31C) as the maximum temperature for occupied spaces in school buildings. It also requires that schools take action, such as relocating students, when temperatures reach 82F.

    “For as long as people could remember here in New York, we had a minimum classroom and school building temperature of 65 degrees,” state senator James Skoufis, who championed the legislation, said in a recent presentation with the Center for American Progress. “But until this bill passed, we did not have a maximum temperature.”

    He added: “You can’t satisfactorily, in any way, shape or form, actually teach if it’s above 90 degrees in a classroom, never mind learn.”

    But one glaring problem still persists; even if schools across the country are successfully modified to be heat-resilient, most children are not in classrooms during the summer months. And summer vacation, the prime time for children to play outside without the stress of academia, is quickly becoming intolerable for outdoor play.

    Related: The ‘silent killer’: what you need to know about heatwaves

    So it raises the question: is it safer to keep kids in adequately cooled schools during extreme heat, or let them stay home to mitigate risk of heat exposure? And, as blasphemous as it might be to suggest, could there be a future where summer vacation becomes fall or spring vacation as a way to keep kids in air-conditioned classrooms during summer?

    “It’s definitely a needed conversation,” said Wickerson. “I’m not quite sure right now that we’re ready to have school in July, just because they’re not built for that operationally. But if there was a concerted effort to increase the cooling capabilities of these buildings, they probably would be some of the safer places for kids to go in the summer months.”

    Yeghoian also agrees that she could picture that future, but adds that simply moving the summer break wouldn’t do much to change the reality of kids needing year-round outdoor play.

    “What would be most ideal is children should have a balance of learning inside and learning outside, playing indoors and playing outdoors,” said Yeghoian, emphasizing the need for greener educational institutions.

    “If people are making the assumption that kids should only play outside during the summer, then yes, you’d have to really readjust the school calendar,” she said. “But our goal for the future should be that kids will have access to outdoor play every single day.”

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  • You Really Don’t Want to Be Thirsty in a Heat Wave

    You Really Don’t Want to Be Thirsty in a Heat Wave

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    The heat—miserable and oppressive—is not abating. Today, a third of Americans are under a heat alert as temperatures keep breaking records: Phoenix has hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks straight, while this weekend Death Valley in California could surpass the all-time high of 130 degrees.

    Even less extreme heat than that can be dangerous. Recently, in Texas, Louisiana, part of Arizona, and Florida, there have been reports of deaths from heat, and many more hospitalizations. The toll of a heat wave is not always clear in the moment: A new report suggests that last summer’s historic heat wave in Europe killed more than 60,000 people.

    Ideally, you’d stay in the air-conditioned indoors as much as possible. That’s not an option for everyone. The other thing to do is stay hydrated. The importance of getting enough fluid is hard to overstate—and often underappreciated: Last month, the Texas state legislature banned local governments from mandating water breaks for construction workers. In the heat, hydration “impacts everything,” Stavros Kavouras, the director of the Hydration Science Lab at Arizona State University, in Phoenix, told me. And with temperatures continuing to rise, it’s essential to get it right.

    Serious dehydration is really, really bad for you. Your blood volume decreases, which makes your heart work less effectively. “Your ability to thermoregulate declines,” Kavouras told me, “so your body temperature is getting higher and higher.” You might feel weak or dizzy. Your heart rate rises; it gets harder to focus. The worst-case scenario is heatstroke, when your body stops being able to cool itself—a  potentially fatal medical emergency.

    In extreme temperatures, heat injuries can happen quicker than you might think. Given that the human body is mostly water, you might assume that there is some to spare, but inconveniently, this is not the case. “If you lose even 10 percent of [the water] your body has, you are entering the zone of serious clinical dehydration,” Kavouras said. “And if you look at optimal health, even losing just 1 percent of your body weight impacts your ability to function.” There are two basic ways your body cools itself when it gets hot. One is to send more blood to the skin, which releases heat from the core of your body, and is the reason you turn red when you’re overheated. The other is to sweat. It evaporates off your body, and in the process, your body loses excess heat. You can’t cool yourself as effectively if you’re not properly hydrated. At the same time, one of your main cooling mechanisms is actively dehydrating, which means the goal is not just to be hydrated, but to stay that way.

    What that takes depends on many factors rather than a single universal rule, but in general, the danger zone is “high humidity with anything above 90 degrees,” Kavouras said, at which point, “it’s actually dangerous” just to be outside. The more active you are in the heat, and the hotter and more humid it is, the greater the risk—and the more important proper hydration becomes. The standard water target in the U.S. during non-heat-wave times is 3.7 liters a day for men and 2.7 liters for women. When it’s very, very hot out, you need more. Even if you spend most of the day in the bliss of AC, you are almost certainly leaving the house at some point.

    Instead of trying to figure out what that precise amount should be, Kavouras recommends you focus on two things instead. “No. 1, keep water close to you. If you have water close to you, or whatever healthy beverage, you’ll end up drinking more, just because it’s closer,” he said. And second: Keep an eye on how often you pee—pale urine, six to seven times a day, or every two to three hours, is good. You want it to be “basically like a Chablis, a Riesling, Pinot Grigio, or champagne-colored,” John Higgins, a sports cardiologist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, in Houston, told me. “If you notice the urine is getting darker, like a Chardonnay- or Sauvignon Blanc–type of thing, that generally means you are dehydrated.”

    Certain groups are especially at risk. Older adults are more prone to dehydration, as are young children, people who are pregnant, and people taking certain medications—blood-pressure medications, for example. None of this requires you to take in extra fluids per se, just that you need to be even more careful that you’re getting enough.

    As for what to drink, as a go-to beverage, straight water is hard to beat. Water with fruit slices floating in it has the benefit of feeling like something from a luxury hotel. Carbonated water is also good—you might not be able to drink quite as much of it, which is a potential drawback, but “there is no mechanism in your GI system that will make sparkling water less effective at hydrating you,” Kavouras said. You probably want to avoid downing giant buckets of coffee—caffeine is a diuretic in large quantities and Higgins warns against sugary drinks for the same reason. (A daily iced coffee is fine.) If you’re doing hours of heavy sweating, then you might work in some (less sugary) sports drinks. But for the majority of people, water remains the ideal. Food can also be a fluid source: “Make sure you’re eating a diet that’s rich in vegetables and fruits that have water content,” William Adams, the director of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Hydration, Environment and Thermal (H.E.A.T) Stress Lab, advised. Alcohol, which causes you to lose fluid, is definitively unhelpful.

    There are lots of water myths out there. Can you go too hard? Technically, it’s possible to over-hydrate, causing an electrolyte imbalance, but all three experts agreed that for most people, this isn’t really a concern. You can find arguments for drinking hot drinks in the summer—the idea being that they increase the amount you sweat, thereby promoting cooling. But Kavouras is emphatic that you’re better off with cold drinks, which cool your body, he said. In the moments before a race, marathon runners will sometimes take it one step further, slurping ice slurries to lower their body temperature. For good old-fashioned drinking water, about 50 degrees Fahrenheit is best—roughly the temperature of cool water from the tap.

    One final key to staying hydrated: Start early. A lot of people, Higgins said, are lightly dehydrated all the time, heat wave or not. “So particularly when you first wake up in the morning, typically you are in a dehydrated state.” Accordingly, he recommends that people drink about a standard water bottle’s worth—roughly 17 ounces—as soon as they wake up. The other thing people forget about, he said, is what happens when they come back inside after enduring the outdoors. “You keep sweating,” he pointed out. In other words: hydrate, and then keep hydrating.

    As crucial as hydration is, it is not a miracle. “It doesn’t mean that you can say, ‘I hydrate well, so I’ll go out for a run in the 120-degree weather, and I’ll be fine because I’m drinking a lot,’” Kavouras said. “It doesn’t work this way.” Still, it is a simple but effective tool. As heat waves like this one become even more frequent, many more people will need to learn how to become attuned to their hydration. And perhaps adequate water can be a perverse sort of comfort: You can’t control the unrelenting heat, but you likely can control your water intake. In a heat wave, it helps to have a glass-half-full attitude—and an emptied glass of water.

    This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

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    Rachel Sugar

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