With extreme cold expected to overtake a large swath of the United States in the coming week, school districts are bracing for a fresh round of freezing temperatures, snow, and potential building closures.
Some areas of the Midwest, Great Lakes, and East Coast can expect up to a foot of snow, according to local forecasts.
Even for areas that aren’t blanketed with snow, cold could force students to stay home—an increasingly common phenomenon as aging national school infrastructure meets a changing climate increasingly dominated by extremes.
Meteorologists project some areas can expect “feels-like” temperatures to drop as low as minus 50 degrees in some areas of the eastern United States, and the National Weather Service warned on Wednesday that a “dangerously cold Arctic air front” will settle over most of the East Coast by Sunday.
The winter weather system could affect many schools well into next week.
It’s become commonplace for schools with inadequate or no cooling systems have to close when the weather gets too hot, which is happening both earlier in the spring and later in the fall—particularly interfering with the start and end of the school year.
But the other end of the temperature spectrum can also tax schools’ aging heating infrastructure.
“What we understand about the changing climate is that the highs are going to be higher and the lows are going to be lower,” said Jonathan Klein, founder of UndauntedK12, a national nonprofit that focuses on schools’ response to the climate crisis. “So we should expect that in any given year, school districts are going to need to ensure they have modern HVAC systems to ensure their buildings are adequately heated or cooled so young people have healthy, comfortable indoor air to learn.”
“Otherwise we’re going to keep seeing closures for extreme weather and mounting time out of school.”
Schools across the country are seeing this play out in real time.
This week, schools in the Philadelphia area opened late due to frigid temperatures, and some districts in Ohio canceled classes altogether. In Chicago, students aren’t attending classes on Friday, Jan. 23.
In mid-December, some teachers in the District of Columbia reported the temperatures in their classrooms—in a building without working centralized heat—had dropped well below 60 degrees as temperatures outside fell into the 20s. Kids came to class wearing their winter coats, teachers told The Washington Post.
The school’s principal said in a letter to parents at the time that administrators were implementing temporary solutions like installing space heaters and moving students out of the coldest rooms.
The nation’s capital isn’t alone in trying to combat increasing cold with limited resources and aging infrastructure.
A middle school in Idaho closed for a day the same week because its heat pumps were not working and the building was too cold to hold classes, according to the school’s principal.
And in Montana, Shields Valley Elementary School has been without a working boiler since 2023, according to local media reports. The 114-year-old school had used the boiler for 80 years before it broke and the school has not been able to afford repairs, relying on portable heaters to warm the building from the hallway during stretches of cold weather.
The district has twice tried unsuccessfully to pass bond measures to fund a boiler replacement.
Elsewhere, school leaders in Alabama and Illinois have said amid cold snaps in recent weeks that schools may be closed if temperatures are expected to drop too low to avoid problems with HVAC systems and water pipes.
Klein said the reports across the country—particularly in the South and other areas where winter weather historically hasn’t caused widespread disruptions—is representative of a growing and urgent problem that districts need to take seriously and address now.
“These extreme cold events expose the longstanding underinvestments in school infrastructure long-term, and the real-world consequences of that,” Klein said.
The average school building in the nation is 50 years old, and 41% of them need their HVAC system updated or replaced, Mike Pickens, executive director of the National Council on School Facilities, told EdWeek last year. On average, those schools’ HVAC systems have exceeded their life expectancy by 15-25 years, he said.
One report released in December by organizations that monitor school infrastructure needs estimated there is a $90 billion gap annually in what districts are actually spending on their public school facilities and what’s needed. In other words, districts across the United States need $90 billion more to fund needed infrastructure projects. Without that funding, schools are often delaying work like upgrading HVAC systems that can, in turn, help them keep their doors open in increasingly common extreme weather.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported in 2021 that the effects of climate change—from extreme heat to flooding to severe storms—already disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income communities, and those impacts are projected to worsen.
Children in those communities are also more commonly than their white and higher-income peers enrolled in schools that lack adequate infrastructure to continue operating in severe heat or cold, amid wildfire smoke, and during other extreme weather conditions.
The compounding problems mean districts should prioritize schools in low-income communities when determining how to queue projects to switch to climate-resilient infrastructure, such as solar panels and upgraded HVAC systems, according to the EPA report.
School closures caused by a combination of extreme weather and school buildings not equipped for it “are no longer abnormal,” the report said, and “will only increase as climate change worsens.”
“There are a lot of competing needs for scarce resources,” Klein said. “But we know how important these investments are—there is so much evidence of the value of a modern, healthy facility for student learning, so we need to prioritize these investments.”
