By Elijah Williams

Reporter

Today, how many blankets have you seen? I know that I have seen way too many. Why does the school get so cold? This question has dawned on me many times as I shiver in the freshman wing in my shorts and shirt, dressing for the weather, when I should have been dressing for the tundra in the halls. I decided to take a deep dive in to the arctic that we call the Blue Springs South High School air conditioning.

The first thing that I had done is taken a survey of the comfortability in the school to make sure my colleagues and I were not an outlier of the school. My findings from the 48-student survey show that a whopping 96% of students found the school cold, 3% found the school comfortable/mild, and 1% found the school to be hot. The study that I made showed me that my opinion on the school climate was not an outrageous ideal, but a common one. This was important to me and even gave motivation to making this story so that I could show the average student that they were not alone, and that they weren’t wrong for wanting to wear their snuggie to school, even though I and the rest of society would be highly against it. But then again, do you.

After getting the general consensus, I thought to myself, I said “self, WHY is it so cold?” To find this answer, I had to go to the man in control of our school’s climate: Mr. Gettings. From our talk, I found many things that were interesting to me concerning the Blue Springs South weather (inside the walls of course).

When asked if the construction for the freshman wing had anything to do with how cold the building would get, he had told The Jag that we are currently working on the H-VAC which controls our heating and cooling. I had also found out that the way our thermostats work is by giving one teacher control over four or so rooms to keep the areas well tempered. They are allowed a five degree range for change.This makes it to where comfortable to one teacher is not exactly the same as another teacher, causing another room to be cold while the other is moderate. To top this all off, the temperatures that the thermostat is allowed to reach is not decided by BSS themselves, but the whole district. The district is told what the building during the time will be used for besides daily school, and the district then decides for our school what range we will be given.

Will we ever have a well tempered school? That question is still up for debate. Hopefully after we are finished working on our H-VAC we will have better control of the reins for our school climate. Until then, I wouldn’t keep your blanket out of the question when packing for school in the morning.