Carver Elementary loses air conditioning, student sent to ER after becoming overheated
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on September 18, 2017 3:10 PM
A student was sent to the emergency room after becoming overheated at Carver Elementary School Thursday.
School officials say the building lost air conditioning when two air compressors malfunctioned.
Brittany Edwards, a parent at Carver, said her son Hayden, a fourth-grade student at Carver, had to leave school after becoming overheated in class.
Edwards said Hayden's stepmother picked him up and took him to the doctor, where they struggled to figure out what was wrong. Hayden was flushed, his heart was racing and he was having difficulty breathing, Edwards said.
At the time, no one had communicated to parents that the air conditioning was out.
"We had him at the doctor, and they ended up suggesting he go to the emergency room because he was saying he was seeing things," Edwards said. "In the ER, they nearly did a psychological evaluation on him, because all of his tests came back negative. If someone had told us the a/c was out, we would have known he was overheated, which would have explained everything."
Dean Sauls, assistant superintendent for support services, said the two machines, which compress Freon into a liquid form which then cools the air, broke down last Thursday. The temperature in the school climbed, with some teachers reportedly having to leave windows open to cool their rooms off during the hot days late last week, according to Carver Elementary parents.
Calls began to flood in to the WCPS central office. Sauls said he spoke with multiple frustrated parents wanting to know when the issue would be fixed.
Crews fixed one compressor the day the two machines broke, he said, and repaired the other Monday morning. The process was not immediate, he said, because the machines are very heavy and they take time to get running.
In the meantime, community members around Carver stepped up to help. Mount Olive charity All the King's Children collected fans to bring to the school while the work progressed, and parents spread news of the air conditioning failure on social media.
Edwards said she was frustrated by the lack of communication from the school system. She only learned that there was an air conditioning issue the day after her son had to leave school, from a Carver teacher. Worried about her son's health, she said she would not send him back to school until the issue had been resolved.
The school system sent out an automated message to parents early Monday afternoon advising them that some classes at Carver were warmer than others.
Sauls said that the new compressors were beginning to blow cool air Monday, and he expects the school to have full air conditioning again by Tuesday morning.