Schools and institutes will be able to have ceiling fans this summer. At least that is the initial plan the Department of Education is working on, and as it has made known these days to different actors in the educational community. The plan, according to what this newspaper has learned, consists of an investment of about 20 million to install these devices during this summer. The question is whether they will arrive before the end of the school year or be installed during the summer break.
Having a climate control plan for the centers is one of the demands of teachers and families in recent years, as episodes of high temperatures are increasingly frequent. The previous ERC Government had to face this when classrooms occasionally reached nearly 40ºC, but the urgency was then resolved with the sending of fans to a few educational centers and the installation of air conditioning in about 200 institutes (because the buildings belong to the Generalitat, while the schools belong to the municipalities), but only in common spaces such as the auditorium or the dining room.
At the same time, a dispute opened between administrations – municipalities and Generalitat – who were passing the ball about the responsibility of climate control in the centers, especially in primary schools, where the line is very fine, since maintenance corresponds to the municipalities, while renovation works correspond to Education.
The new Executive put the development of its own climate control plan for educational centers on its list of priorities. After 20 months since taking office, Education has begun to reveal the cards of this future plan, which should be presented in the not too distant future. One of the most immediate measures included in the plan is the installation of ceiling fans in public schools and institutes that still do not have any type of climate control system. For this, 20 million will be invested this year and the idea is to have the devices installed this summer, but it remains to be seen if the bureaucracy is agile enough to make the purchase of the fans and distribute them to the centers, considering that only two months remain until the end of the school year.
In the medium term, the Government’s goal is to be able to install aerothermal systems in the centers, which would allow climate control of all spaces, from classrooms to dining rooms and offices. Some sources estimate this investment at more than 2 billion euros. In fact, the Education Minister, Esther Niubó, already stated last September that they were working on a public-private model to carry out the project. These sources detail that the idea is to have private operators specialized in these installations to advance the cost that the project entails.
These measures will not reach all centers, because in recent years some municipalities have not waited for the Government’s action and have taken the initiative to climate control the classrooms. The most paradigmatic example is Barcelona, which thanks to its economic power and the income from the tourist tax, started some time ago the Climate Plan, to progressively install air conditioning in educational centers, reaching 170 by 2029. Sabadell also decided to take the initiative and last year announced an investment of 663,000 euros to install a thousand ceiling fans in 30 schools.
Unions also usually demand solutions to this problem. The largest organization, Ustec, criticized this Wednesday that “effective and sustainable measures are not being deployed to face the high temperatures in classrooms” and reproached the Department of Education for not “guaranteeing minimum safety and health conditions” for teachers. In this regard, Ustec has again demanded that teaching activities be suspended when the legal temperature limit – 27º C – is exceeded and recommends that teachers file a complaint with the occupational risk prevention service.
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