The Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning system (HVAC) at Oregon City High School has become dysregulated throughout the school. This has caused classroom by classroom, wing by wing, and floor by floor to have varying temperatures. Students and Teachers alike have been affected by the instability.
Students have a hard time with this because of the cold temperatures outside and the different temperatures for each classroom. Temperature can affect someone’s mood drastically. Students have spoken out about the struggles drastic temperature changes have caused them.
“It is very overstimulating to go from a cold classroom to a hot classroom, or vice versa,” sophomore Molly Brennan said, “ and it is very hard to focus when I’m not feeling my best self.”
This problem has been so consistent that students can map out which classes are the coldest and which are the warmest. This can be helpful for choosing what outfits a student should wear to navigate this odd time.
“Today in Spanish the whole class was so cold and we were all shivering and [AP] Lang[uage and composition] in lower B is pretty warm,” Khloe McKenzie, a junior at Oregon City High School said, “I guess upper classrooms seem to be overall colder than the lower ones.”
Teachers may not change classrooms like students have to but that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t affect them. To be successful in teaching students the environment has to be comfortable or it is basically impossible to teach.
An AP Social Science teacher, Mr. Thygeson said, “ My classroom seems to be much warmer when most other teachers are experiencing cold classes. I have to open windows and the heat in general causes a disruption in my teaching time.”
The most knowledgeable person in the building on this subject is the head custodian. He does have some answers but only so much is available to him since it is the system that is the main issue.
“The program hasn’t been updated in 25 years with the computer being 10 years old. The program gets reset every power glitch but about 2 years ago it stopped being able to reconnect,” The Custodian Jeff Marcoe said, “There is a meeting coming up and it’ll probably be a lot of money but hopefully it’ll be done by summer. Today we found the roof units aren’t connected to the system and fixed that so upper D should be warmer now.”
