A 15-year-old student with autism was hospitalized for severe dehydration after reportedly spending extended periods of heat exposure on board a school bus without air conditioning, reported New York Post.
Temperatures in Chula Vista, California near San Diego reached 97 degrees during the recent heat wave.
Marisol Wojciechowski told local news reporters that her son, Gabriel, is a freshman at Hilltop High School. He released from school about 30 minutes before other students because he receives special education services. She said he was required to wait on the school bus until the other students arrived.
Wojciechowski added that her son’s autism makes it difficult for him to communicate when he is becoming overheated or feeling ill. She first noticed symptoms in early September, when Gabriel began experiencing nosebleeds, severe headaches and lightheadedness after riding the school bus.
“Right away, I would put ice pack on him on his neck and gave him water,” Wojciechowski told local news reporters.
After Gabriel repeatedly displayed the symptoms, his mother took him to an emergency room. She said medical personnel determined that he was severely dehydrated and administered intravenous fluids.
Wojciechowski later boarded the school bus herself and experienced the conditions inside. She said the bus driver told her that Gabriel could not leave the bus after he had been released into the driver’s supervision.
She said that she instructed her son to get off the bus and wait in her air-conditioned vehicle. According to Wojciechowski, the driver told her it was normal for students to remain on the bus during high temperatures.
The mother is now calling on Sweetwater Union High School District officials to implement additional precautions to protect students during periods of extreme heat.
“I want them to put the kids first,” she told local news reporters. “Leaving them on the bus is not safe, not even for five minutes during the heat.”
In Texas, the summer heat is no joke, especially when transporting students. With routine temperatures of 100 degrees or higher, heat indexes that can reach 105 degrees and high humidity that can make it even hotter. Triple digit temperatures are very common. But how does this extreme heat affect school transportation?
It’s not only a summer concern. Temperatures along the Texas Gulf Coast were forecast for the high 80s and low 90s the first weekend of October. Similar temperatures extended east to Florida and north to New York. Fall heat also scorched most of California, especially the Los Angeles area.
Amy Scopac, director of transportation for Temple Independent School District in Central Texas, shedded some much-needed light, on a very hot and ongoing topic.
“During periods of extreme heat, even a properly operating school bus A/C system can be challenged by the conditions we operate in,” Scopac said. “A full passenger load, direct sunlight, frequent stops and repeatedly opening the service door all introduce additional heat into the bus.”
Traditionally, school bus air-conditioning is designed to provide around 30-degree temperature differential from the outside feel, however, with the additional conditions that Scopac noted, such as repeatedly opening the service door, can make the A/C’s job quite difficult. This leaves students and bus drivers having to face extreme heat conditions, even inside the bus.
For the students, this created a problem, particularly when exiting the bus. Scopac noted how parents expressed their concerns as their students got off the bus, covered in sweat and complaining about how hot it was. While most parents understood the situation and how the A/C was doing the best it could, it still led to numerous complaints and a noticeable increase in calls, especially during the first couple weeks of school, which started Aug. 13.
On a recent School Transportation Nation podcast, STN President and Publisher Tony Corpin addressed the climbing temperatures and related conversations between Facebook posters. While many noted there is not much school districts can do, others addressed how the school year in most areas no longer starts after Labor Day, leaving children to start school in the traditionally hottest months of August and even late July. School bus drivers also expressed this concern with many noting how the A/C can only do so much, leaving them and the students in a sweltering state.
“Starting the school year in August means that our students, drivers and buses are operating during one of the hottest periods of the year in Texas,” Scopac added. “From a transportation perspective, extreme heat in August is predictable, and is simply an operating condition we have to plan for.”
Temple ISD has not been the only school district in Texas dealing with the effects of extreme heat. Jennifer Gardella, director of transportation for Rockwall ISD located east of Dallas, shared with School Transportation News how the heat has taken a toll on the district’s buses, knocking out the A/C, one bus at a time.
“I had a brand new 2026 bus out there, and the AC went down,” Gardella said. “It just can’t keep up with the heat outside.”
She noted that the mobile classroom can sometimes feel like a sauna.
However, Temple ISD is doing its best to ensure students, parents and bus drivers understand the effects of extreme temperatures on school transportation. As part of those efforts, the district created an infographic highlighting school bus facts and A/C systems, which it shared on Facebook.
Scopac said the response to the infographic she posted has been positive. “There was a lot of enthusiasm for having something they could share with their communities,” she explained. “It gave them a simple way to help parents understand what a school bus A/C system is actually capable of and why cooling a school bus during extreme heat is very different from cooling a passenger vehicle.”
She also emphasized the importance of helping parents and community members understand how school buses operate in extreme heat. “When people understand how these systems work, the conditions they’re operating under and their practical limitations, they can have more realistic expectations,” Scopac said.
The temperatures in Christina Joann Rainey’s home reached 82 degrees recently. The single mother from rural Carroll County in West Tennessee has paid to repair the 16-year-old home air conditioning system in the house she inherited from her grandparents multiple times, but it’s now beyond saving. She can’t afford the estimated $7,500 price tag to replace it.
As the National Weather Service warned of extreme and major heat risk in Tennessee this month, Rainey began calling any agencies and organizations she could think of to seek help. But she said she struggled to find programs available in her area that she is eligible for, other than loan opportunities that she believes will be too financially burdensome in the long run.
Rainey and her 15-year-old daughter sought relief by sitting in the car or traveling to a nearby Dollar General to get lemonade and temporarily cool off. But Rainey said she worries about being away from home for too long because of her Australian shepherd and 13-year-old cat. Rainey has been trying to keep them cool with cooling pads.
“I’m scared that if I leave, they could have heat stroke,” she said.
As high temperatures and humidity spiked “feels like” temperatures to more than 110 degrees in some areas of Tennessee, the National Weather Service urged people to stay indoors, hydrate and use air conditioning as “fans may not be adequate.”
But for an estimated 49,722 Tennessee households, air conditioning is not an option. Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau in May estimated that about 2% of state households have no access to any kind of air conditioning.
In other parts of the Mississippi River basin, the share is still higher. In Arkansas, almost 3% of homes lack AC. In Minnesota and Ohio, the estimate approaches 4%. And in Wisconsin, over 7% of households do not have air conditioning.
A day after suffering through those extreme temperatures, a local air conditioning technician loaned Rainey a window unit, providing some relief.
“I’m so thankful for that, because he didn’t have to do that, and that was free of charge,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”
Resources and support programs vary at local level
Lack of air conditioning is a growing concern for health officials across the Mississippi River basin.
In the Milwaukee area, where about one in 10 homes lack air conditioning, heat indexes soared over 100 degrees during a recent hot spell. Health officials say many homes without AC are in places that have been identified as most vulnerable to hazards like heat, due to compounding factors such as poverty, lack of transportation and poor housing quality.
“Lack of air conditioning is not an isolated issue — it overlaps with so many other issues. Heat is a multiplier of existing vulnerabilities,” said Dr. Ben Weston, Milwaukee County’s chief health policy adviser. “That’s the reason why individuals living in these communities feel heat so much differently.”
Christopher Uejio, a professor at Florida State University who did his own estimate last year of residential air conditioning in the U.S., said the census estimates may overestimate air conditioning prevalence in rural areas and underestimate it in cities, based on the data that was used. Still, he said, it’s important to have this kind of data available.
“When I lived in Wisconsin, we had one to two extreme heat events per summer. You could just open the windows, put up a box fan, and you’d be fine,” Uejio said. “As these heat events get longer and more protracted, more expensive adaptations have to be considered.”
Resources available to people without access to air conditioning vary at the local level. As temperatures hovered in the 90s in Tennessee in early July, an online tracker published by the Tennessee Emergency Management Authority showed nine cooling centers open across the state.
Programs providing free fans, air conditioning window units or other weatherization assistance also vary. A summer cooling program in Nashville provides free fans or air conditioning units to eligible older county residents, families with children under age 6, and disabled residents with medical conditions affected by extreme heat from May 1 through Aug. 31.
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Home Uplift program helps eligible households make their homes more energy efficient by sealing gaps, insulating ductwork and replacing aging air conditioners. Participants in the program must meet income qualifications, live in a single-family home that meets certain requirements and be a customer of a local power company that participates in the program.
When Rainey checked her eligibility for the Home Uplift program, she received a message that TVA is not accepting applications in her area.
A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Health recommended reaching out to county governments and local emergency management agencies for resources.
A deeper look at the U.S. Census Bureau’s experimental data
The U.S. Census Bureau released its experimental Local Air Conditioning Estimates dataset in response to requests for more detailed information on air conditioning access as an indicator of heat vulnerability, according to the bureau’s website.
The dataset includes information from American Housing Surveys from 2019 through 2023, along with data from the American Community Survey from the same period.
Air conditioning access is not directly measured in the American Community Survey. While the American Housing Survey does ask if a home has an air conditioning unit, this survey wasn’t designed to be used at a granular geographical level. The U.S. Census Bureau used a machine learning model and the American Housing Survey data to “determine if a household in the ACS potentially lacks an air conditioning unit,” according to the bureau’s methodology.
The margin of error for Tennessee’s estimated 49,772 households without air conditioning is plus or minus 3,972 households.
This data may also fail to capture the circumstances of people like Rainey, who may have had working air conditioning at the time that data was collected, but no longer do. It also does not consider other factors that might limit access to air conditioning, like the cost burden of operating window air conditioning units.
Rainey said her mother is in a similar situation — her home air conditioning is no longer in working order and uses window units sparingly because of the electricity cost.
“Before it got this hot, she was trying to avoid (using) it because it gets so bad on electricity … but I think this last week or so, she’s had to use it because she didn’t have a choice. She was using fans and doing everything she could,” Rainey said.
Madeline Heim of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.
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