Kids’ Health at Risk, Parents React as Classrooms Swelter in Summer Heat

Parents are capturing their kids’ experiences inside sweltering classrooms, hoping to prompt action on what recent reports call a “growing crisis” of extreme heat due to climate change.

“Our big hope is that these lived experiences can truly jolt communities into action, bringing parents, teachers, and school boards together to collectively demand the funding and forward-thinking policies from their ministries of education,” Areej Riaz, organizer, school actions with the For Our Kids network tells The Energy Mix.

[Disclosure: Energy Mix Community Engagement Lead Lella Blumer also serves on the national council of For Our Kids.]

Calgary parents recently cited incidents of students vomiting from the heat, being unable to focus during activities or exams, and moving into a school basement in search of relief, as high temperatures combined with wildfire smoke. With humidex values reaching the mid-forties across much of southern and eastern Ontario this week, schools and parents in London took what measures they could to get students through the last week of school.

“We’re hearing from parents all across Canada—and increasingly from teachers, too—that those sweltering, smoky classrooms aren’t just uncomfortable; they’re genuinely getting in the way of our kids’ learning and well-being,” Riaz said.

For Our Kids is one of 40 organizations behind a call for urgent government action on heat in schools, led by the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment (CPCHE). The call to action references a set of “Failing the Future” reports released in April by the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA).

“This is an urgent public health priority”, report co-author and CELA Counsel Jacqueline Wilson told The Mix, with the impacts reaching beyond physical and mental health to “undermine learning itself because of the impacts of heat on cognition and memory.”

Children living in homes without access to cooling are more at risk because they’re exposed to high temperatures for extended periods of time, the report states. And without affordable or accessible options, families can find themselves taking measures they know are unsafe, like bypassing safety systems on windows in high-rises in order to fully open them.

“Indigenous children, in particular, face additional layers of vulnerability due to systemic underfunding of infrastructure on First Nations lands, including education and child care facilities” Wilson said.

Research on the impacts of temperatures over 26ºC clearly shows an elevated risk for injury and mortality, the report notes. But that research has not focused on how dangerous heat is for children, although it’s known they are more susceptible to overheating and dehydration than adults. They also have less autonomy to decide where they can go and what they can do to cool down, especially when they’re at school.

While the report recommends specific actions from federal and provincial governments—including setting a maximum indoor temperature for schools, funding for cooling infrastructure and greening outdoor spaces, and introducing province-wide guidelines and building code updates—it acknowledges the coordination of efforts across sectors and jurisdictions is part of the problem.

Federal funding and health standards are needed, but education and health both come under provincial jurisdiction. Municipalities are involved in planning for events such as extreme heat warnings. Meanwhile, schools also fall under school board and district guidelines and protocol.

Helen Doyle, chair of the environmental health work group at the Ontario Public Health Association, and CPCHE coordinating committee chair, said public health units have the opportunity to play a lead role because of their mandate to assess the impacts of climate change on their local populations. In Ontario, the Health Hazard Response Protocol and the Healthy Environments and Climate Change Guideline can both be interpreted to include monitoring school environments for extreme heat, Doyle said.

But the capacity and resources of public health units vary from region to region, and the units fall under different provincial and territorial regulations across the country. That’s where federal and provincial governments need to step up.

“Provincial ministries of health would have an easier time enforcing legislation if there was a set standard” for indoor air quality and temperature, Doyle said. If the federal government were to set that limit, it would fall to local public health units, through provincial standards, to enforce it.

Beyond enforcement, additional resources from provincial governments would give public health more capacity to work with school boards on emergency heat plans—something very few schools have in place, Doyle said. That means if a heat warning is issued by Environment Canada and the local health unit, individual schools and teachers are still left wondering whether to keep students indoors or out, open windows or keep them closed, or cancel activities altogether.

“Without coordinated, pre-emptive planning, most individuals will default to staying indoors during a heat event,” said Dr. Anna Gunz, founding medical director of the Children’s Environmental Health Clinic (ChEHC) in London, Ontario.

“As the climate crisis evolves and extreme heat happens with increased frequency, this generation of children and youth are at risk of missing out on healthy, developmentally important opportunities for participation in activities which can affect their long-term health and well-being.”

The absence of collaboration is frustratingly evident, said Anne Keary, community co-chair of the Toronto District School Board’s environmental and sustainability community advisory committee, and member of For Our Kids Toronto.

She cited two reports from the Ontario office of financial accountability: one on the financial impacts of climate change on public infrastructure and the other on the state of the province’s schools. There is no mention of schools as part of public infrastructure in the first report. And “in the report on the state of our schools, which are crumbling and underfunded and in desperate need of more funds for maintenance and repair, they did not mention the impact of climate change on school buildings,” Keary said.

“The departments who wrote these two reports really have to start talking to each other.”

Riaz said this is where collecting data and experiences directly from classrooms can inform policy and support the push for changes. Sharing first-hand stories of students’ experiences “paints a vivid picture,” she told The Mix.

“These aren’t just abstract ideas; these are the lived realities of our children, making the issue incredibly tangible and urgent for everyone in their local school community, and for the folks making decisions.”

Cover photo:  Cantons-de-l'Est/Wikimedia Commons