JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Some Duval County Public School classrooms were left without air conditioning through the start of the school year according to a local parent organization.
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Parents at Seabreeze Elementary in Jacksonville Beach were concerned after they said it took up to four weeks to get a repair.
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“When we live in Florida, in the summer…it breaks my heart to think what it feels like to them,” Jennifer Feber, a parent, said.
She and others said at least three classrooms were without AC at the start of the school year and the unit in the main office went down in May. The district said it has since been fixed over the weekend.
A representative said in a statement in part, “it’s not uncommon for schools to have intermittent AC issues, which we work to address as quickly as possible.”
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But parents said it wasn’t quick enough. After four weeks of fighting for answers, one parent got an email from School Board Member April Carney that said, “...San Pablo is also having A/C issues and will add this to my request for an update [Friday].”
Carney told Action News Jax, “As soon as I found out from a parent last week about the outage, I made sure the Facilities/Operations team was notified. I am so grateful to that parent reaching out to me and thrilled repairs have been made.”
But some parents said it raises a larger issue.
“There needs to be a timeline that it gets fixed. There needs to be a standard. And it needs to be no more than a day or two,” Megan Tiliakos, a substitute at Seabreeze, said.
Under the half-cent sale tax increase, approved by voters in 2020, Seabreeze is set to be rebuilt in 2025. Thirty other schools are in the design phase for renovations or rebuilds and 95 are under construction.
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A district representative said, “Even if a school has a major reconstruction or renovation project in its future, we still respond quickly to AC or other maintenance issues that would impact student learning as they arise.”
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