DeKalb County elementary school parents hot about broken air conditioning
The DeKalb County School District’s headquarters is located on Mountain Industrial Blvd. in Stone Mountain. (Dean Hesse/Decaturish)
Kingsley Elementary parents and their children received a welcome that was a little too warm when they showed up for an open house this week.
The open house events at the Dunwoody school are for parents and their children to meet teachers for the upcoming school year. Christina Dupuis, a mom at the school, said employees were directing everyone to the gymnasium, the only room with air conditioning.
“It was 90 degrees in the hall, and classrooms were 85 to 90 degrees,” Dupuis said. “This is an ongoing problem. This didn’t happen yesterday.”
She said the AC was out as early as July 15, the start of kindergarten camp, but an email from the PTO co-president says the issues began in the spring of this year. With the first day of school approaching on Aug. 5, district officials are scrambling to address the problem.
Spokesperson Donald Porter said that “temporary cooling measures” are needed while the school system waits for the HVAC parts. Dupuis said that Porter’s statement aligns with what other district officials are telling the school’s staff and families.
“The excuse is it’s old, which it is,” Dupuis said. “The building is 50 years old. That’s the original unit. They have a hard time finding parts. A compressor just went out.”
Parents reported that the school was cooler when they showed up for class on Aug. 5. They reported some parts of the building are still stuffy, but the classrooms are comfortable.
Replacing the HVAC at the building has been on the district’s radar since at least 2021, according to a preliminary consultation the district received that year.
Superintendent Devon Horton replied to an email from Kingsley PTO Co-President Lora Roberts on Aug. 1. Roberts’ email noted, “This has been an ongoing issue since spring 2024, at which time temperatures in some classrooms exceeded 80 degrees and forced teachers to move their students to different areas of campus so they could comfortably teach.”
Horton acknowledged the problem and said the district is working on it.
“Kingsley HVAC is one that we continue to address,” Horton wrote. “It is the original system and parts are difficult to find. We are working toward planning a large replacement project, but it was not scheduled for an E-SPLOST project, so funding is the challenge. As you know the last SPLOST decisions were made back in 2019. Apparently, it was discussed that the school would be consolidated back 2019, and therefore funds were not invested. With this being the case, we are working to find parts so that we can repair the two compressors that just went out after we replaced another one early last week. We are placing chillers in the classrooms but these are only temporary.”
Dupuis said the temporary chillers were inconvenient and ineffective.
“The county’s answer is we’re bringing in more cooling units, but the cooling units aren’t working,” she said. “They’re in every classroom now. They can’t stay on overnight because they can overflow. There’s no way to cool it. A lot of it has to be emptied multiple times a day.”
Katy Lucey, another parent at the school, noted Kingsley is a Title 1 school.
“The school is a Title 1 school, which means a certain percentage of students live in lower financial threshold and require meal assistance and always seem to struggle getting assistance from the county,” she said.
Dupuis said lower-income students are suffering the most.
“Most of the students don’t have a lot of means and the school is supposed to be a refuge for them and that’s not a refuge,” she said.
Parents want more accountability from the district.
“Imagine putting 25 bodies in there,” Dupuis said. “It’s not healthy for the kids, and it’s not healthy for the teachers.”
This story was provided by WABE content partner Decaturish.
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