Cold snap brings renewed facility woes inside some Philly schools

With one of Fitler Elementary’s boilers down and parts of the building freezing for the third straight day, some students worked in coats, scarves and hats Wednesday.

“Kids are complaining, our noses and hands are freezing,” said one Fitler staffer at the Germantown school. “The heater is making noise, but it’s ice cold. The hallways are cold. The cafeteria is cold.”

Fitler, on West Seymour Street, was constructed in the 19th century; the 125-year-old building, by the district’s own internal metric, is in the “should be considered for closing/replacement” category. Systemwide, the district’s facilities needs were estimated at $5 billion in 2017; that number has only grown.

School district officials said that one Fitler boiler had been operational and the other was repaired as of Wednesday afternoon, with the district staff monitoring the situation. The lowest temperature recorded by facilities workers collecting readings was 68 degrees, spokesperson Christina Clark said.

“Our operations team is ready if there are any challenges that pop up, but as of right now, it appears that all schools are adequately heated,” Clark said in a statement.

Even as the school day ended, it was still cold enough to be wearing coats, said the Fitler staffer, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal.

The district begins its winter weather prep months in advance of temperatures dipping, said Oz Hill, the district’s chief operating officer, and all boilers are checked and ready to heat by Nov. 15. But there are only so many workarounds for 100-year-old buildings and systems and a trades workforce that has significant staffing challenges.

“The historic underfunding presents these challenges to us in the wintertime, just as we have the inadequate cooling of our schools in the summertime,” said Hill. Still, he said, the district has emphasized scheduled maintenance and established an emergency response team that deploys in situations like Fitler’s.

In Fitler’s case, Hill said, the district sent not just its own workers, but contract tradespeople to troubleshoot the faulty boiler.

“We began working on this within a half hour of notification,” Hill said.

In a letter to the Fitler community, principal Anthious Boone said the situation developed Wednesday, when a central house fan responsible for heating classrooms failed for about 40 minutes, as did one of the two school boilers.

“Both were repaired, by the boiler going online around 1 p.m. The other boiler remained online throughout the day without interruption,” Boone wrote.

Jerry Jordan, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president, said the state of Philadelphia school buildings means that calls reporting heating and other building issues begin piling up when cold weather hits.

“Unfortunately, it’s something that we deal with every winter,” said Jordan. “It’s because of the old infrastructure — our systems haven’t been maintained in many cases, and as a result, you sometimes ... just don’t have the heat that you need in order to operate the building efficiently. It’s another cost we’re paying for the underfunding of our school system.”

In addition to reports of inadequate heat at Fitler, Jordan said, the PFT has also received word of problems at Shawmont, in Roxborough, where some classrooms were without heat. Lea, in West Philadelphia, had a heating issue that had been resolved, Jordan said, and there were reported issues at Vare-Washington and “ongoing concerns” about Taggart and Penrose, all three in South Philadelphia.

“It’s very, very hard,” Jordan said of coping with heating issues in schools. “I taught in buildings where I had to put on my coat and gloves in order to teach a class, and when that happens, you’re not able to perform as you normally would. Kids are distracted, and understandably so.”