HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) – Jason Bartos has a six-year-old daughter in first grade at Roosevelt Elementary. The family elected to return her to school this year for in-person learning.
“She didn’t do the best with E-learning and she has done a lot better with the face to face,” said Bartos.
Her daughter was excited to return to school, but Monday when she came home Bartos could tell something wasn’t right with his daughter.
“She was hot and sweaty and so just thought, okay you’ve been outside, cool down. So she kind of went to her room to cool down,” said Bartos.
As the evening went on, his daughter was showing signs of heat exhaustion.
“She was tired, talked about taking a nap, and then she didn’t want to eat, she was nauseous and complained of a headache and that continued all through the night,” said Bartos.
He then learned the air conditioning in his daughters classroom had broken.
“Everyday it’s been, the air is still not working. So yesterday, Thursday we picked her up and she was very, very hot and very sweaty,” said Bartos.
A spokesperson for the Hillsborough County School system says the air conditioning system was repaired, but then a different part on it broke the next day. The system was finally repaired on Friday morning.
Hillsborough County voters approved a half-cent sales tax in 2018 to repair school air conditioning systems.
“This past summer we were able to complete 26 major air conditioning projects and the summer before that we were able to complete 29 air conditioning projects. So we’ve already done 55, just for air conditioning,” said Tanya Arja.
The county has spent more than 170 million dollars in the last two years to repair and replace aging airconditioning systems with a ten year plan to replace more
“We look at the age of the system, the number of maintenance requests that have come in, we look ranking different things and where those schools will be over the next ten years,” said Arja.
The classroom at Roosevelt should be back to normal on Monday.