Daniela Mendez doesn’t wake up her students if one nods off on a scorching hot school day.
Over the years, she’s grown accustomed to students complaining about being tired, nauseous, or falling asleep during the most stifling stretches of summer.
Mendez, an ESL and history teacher at the Toronto District School Board, said she’s lenient this time of year because she recognizes students are exhausted and under pressure, especially with exams underway.
She’s expecting a challenging week as students and staff brace for a multi-day heat wave during which temperatures are expected to exceed 30 C, starting Sunday and tapering off mid-week.
“When there’s a lot of high-stakes evaluation, it really becomes a problem for students,” she said. “They want to do well and the conditions are just not conducive to that.”
Mendez, who teaches at a school that is more than a century old and has no central air conditioning, said while her administrators try their best to accommodate students, there’s limited flexibility when it comes to exam season.
How are Toronto school boards dealing with the heat?
The TDSB’s guidelines for how teachers in schools without air conditioning should manage the heat is to use fans, turn lights and computers off when possible, keep windows and doors open and rotate staff and students into cooler areas.
Students are also encouraged to stay hydrated and reduce strenuous activities.
While students can go home if they’re not feeling well, some teachers like Mendez are calling for more guidance on how to accommodate students during exams, or consider cancelling or postponing them during extreme heat events.
“It would be good for there to be some guidelines that if it’s past (a certain) temperature and there’s no alternative setting, something has to happen,” Mendez said.
The TDSB has not issued a board-wide directive for how educators should handle the upcoming heat wave and said it’s up to administrators at each school to tailor their approach based on their infrastructure and students’ needs.
There are no current plans to cancel or postpone exams during the heat wave, although recess at elementary schools may be moved indoors, said TDSB spokesperson Zoya McGroarty. She added that where possible, students can write exams in cooling centres, which may be the library or gym.
The Toronto Catholic District School Board provided similar guidelines in a statement and said there are no current plans to change exam schedules.
Ariba Tasnim, an English teacher at a secondary school at the TDSB, also believes school board should consider something akin to snow days during extreme heat events.
“We want to avoid taking away as much instructional time as possible … but we have to think first and foremost about their health and safety,” she said.
Who’s most at risk from the heat?
Young children and kids who are obese, or have diabetes or asthma, are more vulnerable to overheating, said Glen Kenny, a physiology professor and director of the Human and Environmental Physiology Research Unit at the University of Ottawa. Overheating takes a toll on the body and can lead to reduced cognitive function, he added, such as poor alertness, reaction time and concentration.
Michelle Teixeira, president of the Toronto bargaining unit for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, said she’s hearing from teachers that current mitigation measures, such as opening windows or moving students into cooling centres, aren’t sufficient.
“The sad fact of the matter is that many teachers just are used to it at this point and sort of deal with it because they have no other alternative,” she said.
“When we look at these buildings that are in such a state of disrepair, what does that say to our students that these are the kinds of buildings that we send them to every day?”
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