With about three weeks left before most Kanawha County students head back to classes, 14 Kanawha public schools currently are undergoing or are in need of work on their heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.
That's according to a report that Terry Hollandsworth, the Kanawha school system's maintenance director, presented to the county school board Thursday.
He said Ben Franklin Career Center, where teachers previously filed a grievance over HVAC issues, has four 20-year-old HVAC units, and the school system has $500,000 budgeted to replace one of them this year.
"The Shoals [Elementary] chiller, we've got a new one on order, it's $34,000 to replace that chiller," Hollandsworth said. "At Cross Lanes [Elementary], the chiller, we're replacing it, it's $14,000."
"At Shoals, going back there, we put in window units in the classrooms to try to help keep it cool because I do not believe this chiller is going to be here in time for school to start. And at Cross Lanes, we rented a chiller on a big trailer last spring ... just before school ended to get us through the end of school, and we might have to rent that again because the chiller has not arrived yet."
"At St. Albans High School, the unit ventilators inside the classrooms, they have valves in there that control the hot water and the cold water going through," he said. "It's got glycol going through it, and those rubber seals start to leak after a while."
He said there's leaking and there are more than 100 of these valves, and replacement will cost about $34,000. He said it's also costing $40,000 to replace two compressors in the school, partly because the needed replacement compressors aren't normally manufactured anymore.
Hollandsworth said the chiller at Capital High is about three decades old and uses a type of freon that's very expensive to replace.
"We have to rebuild the chiller every 10 years," he said. "The gaskets inside of it start leaking. We're in the process of rebuilding 50 percent of it at a cost of $75,000."
He said George Washington High's chiller has a rooftop cooling tower, "for water to go up and then cool off and then come back down."
"And that pipe is rotten through and we've got clamps on it to keep it together," he said, "so we're going to have to replace that pipe."
"The Pinch [Elementary] chiller, it's a mystery to us right at the moment," he said. "We keep working on it, and it runs for six, seven, eight hours and then it shuts off."
He said Piedmont Elementary just got two new compressors, and one - while still under warranty - shorted out and needs to be replaced.
He said that school has two rooftop units that are 26 years old. Near the end of last school year, Piedmont Elementary students faced a lack of AC while taking the annual statewide standardized tests.
Hollandsworth said the school system is getting help from a company called Nitro Mechanical. He declined to provide further information to a reporter Thursday, referring him to the school system's communications director, who wasn't at Thursday's board meeting.
Kanawha's maintenance needs and HVAC issues came under increased scrutiny at the start of last school year.
On the Friday of the first week of last school year, the school system closed seven schools, including four of its eight public high schools, due to AC and power failures, meaning about one in 10 Kanawha public schools was closed that day.
Four of the county's schools closed at the start of the subsequent week due to similar issues, and Kanawha schools Superintendent Ron Duerring said then that the county has old AC systems and not enough money to replace them or make major upgrades.
"If we were to be able to do a big replacement, that would cut down immensely the amount we have to do every year?" board member Ryan White asked Hollandsworth Thursday. Hollandsworth replied that the schools are getting older every year, and "we're doing the best we can with the resources we have available."
"We have to find a more long-term solution than every year investing all this money and these kids being miserable in the classrooms," board member Ric Cavender said. "It'll cost us more money in the long run if we keep on doing what we're doing now - replace, replace, replace, you know, piecemeal here or there."
Cavender said he's "open to any solution to get this fixed long-term."
Board President Jim Crawford said he wouldn't "object to" putting before voters a proposal to remove the cap on the school system's excess levy to fix the HVAC issues. The cap means the property taxes to support the schools aren't as high as they could be - if voters agreed to remove the cap completely, Kanawha's school system would have gotten an extra $22.8 million last fiscal year alone.
Also Thursday, school board members accepted the resignation of Piedmont Elementary's principal, Susan Young, effective July 14. Piedmont is one of two Kanawha public schools on a year-round schedule, and Young's resignation came shortly after the start of Piedmont's school year.
She became principal of the school on Charleston's East End in October, following the mid-school-year departure of Beth Sturgill, who said she was moving closer to her St. Albans home by becoming leader of Central Elementary.
Board member Becky Jordon, whose daughter works at Piedmont, said Young wasn't asked to resign. Jordon said Young had a family issue.
Cavender, who has two kids at the school, said "she was awesome" and "absolutely wonderful" and that he doesn't know why she resigned.
"A huge loss for us," Jordon said of Young's resignation, "but maybe she'll come back at some point."
Reach Ryan Quinn at 304-348-1254, ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.