Scattered air-conditioning outages at two of the largest city high schools required quick fixes Monday as the school year opened to temperatures that reached 97 by early afternoon.
At the new $24.1 million Riverwood Elementary in Cordova, the air was cool and charged as 800 children found their places in classrooms furnished with computers, Wi-Fi and gleaming hallways.
“They let me enter the building July 12. There was still a lot to do then,” said Rita White, Riverwood principal, in the running shoes and crew socks she intends to wear the rest of the year.
The perimeter of the first-floor hallway is 1,500 feet, which she has already measured with a pedometer and plugged into her workout routine.
The student body speaks 12 languages, including African dialects, Chinese and Japanese.
“This the model,” Supt. Kriner Cash said. “This is what we want for all Memphis City Schools.”
School buses ran into the usual first-day issues, said Terry Lovan, president and business manager of the Teamsters Local 984.
“All the buses were late getting back, due to changes in routes and traffic,” Lovan said. “This is not the best week to be starting something when it’s Elvis week and you have a bunch of tourists out there who don’t know which way to turn.”
At least the buses were cool. Under a new contract, the district received more than 300 new, air-conditioned vehicles this summer.
Elsewhere, air conditioning was working sporadically at Whitehaven High and not at all in the central wing at White Station High, where computer foul-ups meant two systems couldn’t interface.
The schools are among the largest high schools in the city. Students were shuffled to other classrooms and makeshift quarters in the auditorium.
“Fifty classrooms did have heat issues,” said district spokesman Staci Franklin. “That’s 50 classrooms out of 7,000 total classrooms.”
Crews were on the scene early, and the problems were under control by the time the day ended, she said.
Keith Williams, president of the Memphis Education Association, says district administrators changed schedules in July, allowing more flexibility in the 90-minute block-schedule format it adopted last year.
“Principals are given great latitude,” he said. “Some classes are blocked and some are not.”
Cash adopted block scheduling last year to give students a chance to take more classes, and at the same time, make up classes they failed without getting behind.
Under last year’s model, students earn eight credits a year or 32 for their high school careers, nine credits more than the state requires for graduation. But the change set off a firestorm among teachers because the extra classes took away their daily preparation period.
Cash felt the heat all last year; in April, he announced a modification that returned the daily prep time.
But, “Some teachers have been told because they have prep period every day, they may be doing some lunch duty,” Williams said.
At Riverwood, the mood was serene as Cash greeted students and shook hands on a tour guided by White.
In October, the principal will be honored in Washington as a National Distinguished Principal, one of only two in Tennessee, largely for improving school culture.
“When I started at Egypt Elementary in 1998, we had 11,000 discipline referrals. Last year, we had less than 200,” she said.
– Jane Roberts: 529-2512
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