This summer, children, families, and educators are feeling the heat—and conditions are only expected to worsen as extreme temperatures become increasingly frequent, intense, and long-lasting. This year’s temperatures are already on track to exceed those of 2023, the hottest year on record in human history.
As global climate change progresses, extreme heat is becoming a pressing concern for the children, teachers, and staff across the country who are left unprotected by aging schools and child care facilities. While excessive heat is dangerous for everyone, children’s bodies are less adept than adults’ at regulating temperature, making them particularly vulnerable to adverse impacts on their health and development. Especially when experienced frequently or for prolonged periods of time, excess heat can disrupt early development and increase children’s risk for short- and long-term health conditions. At the same time, high heat negatively affects students’ learning by decreasing their attendance, engagement, and achievement—particularly for those who lack access to air-conditioned learning environments.
Unfortunately, a history of inequitable and insufficient funding for schools and child care drives disparities in adequate infrastructure, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in health and educational outcomes. The average school building in the United States is nearly 50 years old, and existing funding models make it especially difficult for high-poverty districts to maintain and update their facilities and respond to increased cooling needs. Due to patchwork child care funding structures and decades of underinvestment, child care providers face considerable challenges in affording high upfront costs associated with the necessary renovations or weatherization measures.
Recent federal investments through the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act include a number of funding opportunities for addressing extreme heat through infrastructure upgrades, highlighting the Biden administration’s commitment to protecting communities from the impacts of climate change and extreme heat. However, the Center for American Progress calls on policymakers at all levels of government to take additional steps to protect the well-being of children and educators both now and in the future.
The federal government should provide guidance on heat safety standards for children and state, local policymakers should adopt this guidance to make schools and child care facilities safe, healthy spaces
Despite a body of research demonstrating the impacts of extreme heat on children’s health, learning, and development, there is no evidence-based federal heat standard for heat and humidity levels that are safe for children. While some states, school districts, and local authorities have established guidance or requirements around temperature ranges for child-occupied facilities, these locally defined standards vary widely.
In addition to accelerating the transition toward a clean energy economy to combat planet-warming pollution and slow the progression of climate change, the following actions should be taken:
- The federal government should establish evidence-based, standardized guidance for a temperature and humidity range that is safe for children—both for indoor child-occupied spaces and for outdoor recess, sports, and activities.
- Standardized federal guidance should include clear information about the unique risks of extreme heat for children, provide insight into how to identify signs of heat illness, and outline strategies for reducing children’s exposure to extreme heat.
- State and local policymakers should adopt federal guidance on the threshold after which high temperatures pose a risk to child health, and schools and child care providers should be required to share informational materials directly with families, athletic coaches, and educators at the start of the school year and in advance of extreme heat emergencies.
States should expand data collection and tracking of schools’ infrastructure needs to inform advocacy, funding, and infrastructure updates
Local, state, and federal agencies should expand and better integrate their data collection and tracking, including by creating more comprehensive inventories of school and early learning infrastructure to identify which facilities need and should be prioritized for upgrades.
To improve tracking of child care infrastructure needs related to extreme heat:
- The Office of Head Start (OHS) should update its annual Environmental Health and Safety (EnvHS) baseline tool so that survey and observation questions address facilities’ heat-related needs.
- OHS should conduct more frequent surveys and use these surveys to maintain a database of infrastructure needs and updates.
- State child care licensing agencies should collect and consolidate data on infrastructure needs as part of their onsite inspection and reporting processes.
To improve tracking of K-12 infrastructure needs related to extreme heat:
- States should conduct more frequent facility needs assessments to identify and track infrastructure needs, estimate costs to address those needs, and inform state funding distribution.
- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should update its School Indoor Air Quality Assessment to include heat-related information regarding existing infrastructure and the status of the facilities on days that qualify as reaching extreme temperatures.
- The National Center for Education Statistics should add heat-related questions to the School Pulse Panel survey regarding temperatures in student-occupied spaces, how the school maintains building-wide temperature controls, and the availability of temperature-controlled environments if the school lacks air conditioning.
Federal policymakers should include school and child care facility funding in future infrastructure and early learning bills
Recent research shows considerable gaps in the level of annual funding dedicated to school maintenance, operation, and capital improvements, with estimates indicating that it would cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years to adequately modernize school facilities and systems across the country. A long history of insufficient and inequitable funding for schools and child care facilities, which has disproportionately affected low-income students and students of color, is curtailing efforts to make those necessary upgrades. The federal government is the only entity that can fill that gap and mitigate interstate inequities.
Federal policymakers should include and prioritize schools and child care programs in long-term federal investments to close funding gaps, adapt to new needs related to extreme heat, and ensure children and educators have access to safe and healthy facilities. These efforts could include:
Federal and state agencies should support schools and child care programs in accessing available resources to mitigate the impact of extreme heat
Some federal funding opportunities are already available for schools and child care facilities to use on climate resilience and infrastructure improvement projects. Federal and state agencies must ensure that schools and child care programs are informed of available resources that can be used for heat mitigation infrastructure, have examples of how other communities have adapted to extreme heat, and are supported in accessing those funds.
Specifically, the following steps should be taken:
- Federal agencies should engage in targeted outreach and provide technical assistance to ensure that eligible state agencies, schools, and child care programs are aware of funding opportunities and can access those resources. State governments should engage in similar awareness-raising and support efforts by sharing information between state agencies as well as by offering technical support for local child care providers and schools to navigate the application process.
- State and federal agencies should use lessons from the first round of the Supporting America’s School Infrastructure program to promote strategies for supporting high-needs school districts in understanding, consolidating, and accessing available federal resources for sustainable school infrastructure projects.
Policymakers at all levels of government should prioritize environmental justice by centering community-led solutions and targeting funding and resources to the communities most affected by climate change and pollution
The recommendations listed here are crucial for ensuring that existing child care and school facilities can protect children from the reality of a changing climate and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather. However, these efforts will only provide short-term relief if the country does not also move toward a clean energy economy and prioritize the most vulnerable communities, which face legacy inequities that increase their exposure to climate change.
The Biden administration took action in 2021 through the Justice40 Initiative to not only make climate and clean energy investments but also direct the benefits of those investments to historically disadvantaged communities overburdened by pollution. State, local, and federal policymakers should pursue additional community-centered and child-driven approaches to addressing climate change, grounding these efforts on existing initiatives:
- The EPA’s Community Change Grants program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act, can serve as a model.
- Cross-national think tank Capita has done considerable work with subject matter experts across the globe to develop a collaborative research and policy agenda along with a new model for climate financing that invests in both social and physical infrastructural changes.
Conclusion
The increasing intensity and frequency of extreme heat poses meaningful risks to children’s health, development, and learning. There is an urgent need for leaders at all levels of government to take policy action to protect children from the immediate impacts of extreme heat, while also building on the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda to slow climate change.