Regina Tafolla said there wasn’t enough heat in her children’s elementary school classrooms during last week’s freezing temperatures.
Volta Elementary School’s boiler had been having issues with a gas-like odor since November, so she wasn’t surprised, she said.
“If you go near the school, you’ll notice that it smells a lot like gas. The principal said he called the gas company. The firefighters also came,” she said. “Their solution was to turn off the heat.”
Only part of the school building in Albany Park didn’t have heat, parents said, so it is not clear how many of Volta’s 738 students were affected. But parents said their kids told them they had to wear jackets and it lasted for several days.
Like many in the district, Volta is an old building. The three-story, 86,000-square-foot elementary school was constructed in 1931, according to records, with several additions in the ‘90s.
CPS has acknowledged the challenges of having older facilities — saying in a 2023 building plan that over $3 billion in “critical repairs” are needed. The district is required by law to produce a plan every five years, and the cost for critical repairs is part of the $14.4 billion total in facility updates CPS identified.
Critical repairs, according to the plan, include updates to windows, roofs and heating and cooling systems at schools across the district. The Chicago Teachers Union has also included language in its proposals for a new contract to address dangerous or toxic conditions that students face in school buildings.
With a large budget deficit and the cost of a new four-year teachers contract still up in the air, it is unclear how CPS will be able to prioritize those union asks for building repairs, like fixing the boiler at Volta.
Volta is 89% low-income, according to district data. It has a majority Latino population, and about a quarter of its students are of Asian descent, data shows.
Tafolla and her kids — Issac, 7 and Marazan, 9 — live on the same block as Volta. The 28-year-old mother, originally from Mexico, said she got an email from the school’s principal Eduardo J. Yáñez, last Thursday acknowledging the school had been having “issues” with the “building’s heating system.”
“We have installed temporary heaters in impacted classrooms, and we are doing everything we can to make sure our students and staff are comfortable,” the email said.
According to a 2022 facilities assessment at the school documenting concerns such as peeling paint and roof and water damage, CPS had seemingly known about the issues with the boiler for years. Tubing for a boiler in the building was marked as showing “corrosion and leaks,” with a recommended replacement of 2-5 years.
Chicago Public Schools said in a statement that the heating issues were “in a portion” of the school and “at no point was the entire school without heating.” The district spokesman was not specific about where or how much of the building was without heat.
“School day activities continued as normal while facilities staff identified the necessary repairs on one of the two boilers in the building that was not operating. The school administration kept Volta families updated about the issue and the work to resolve it,” the statement said.
“CPS prioritizes the safety and well-being of our staff and students and all concerns are treated with the utmost seriousness.”
It took several days for an email to be sent out to families after the heating issues first started, according to Tafolla. And the smell of gas is yet to be resolved, she said.
Tafolla said her friend pointed out the smell of gas in late fall of last year near the wing of the building where students in pre-kindergarten through second grade attend classes. Her kids didn’t recognize the smell at first, she said.
Back then, she went to the wing to see for herself. She said the smell was strong, coming up across the street and the school’s community garden. It concerned her and other parents, who alerted Principal Yáñez. Tafolla started noticing the effect on her youngest kid.
“(My son) came home extremely exhausted from school, with stomach pain and strained eyes,” she said.
She took her son to an express health clinic for a check-up but said she got no immediate answers.
In an email dated Nov. 21, Yáñez wrote in an email to Volta parents that the school had called Peoples Gas and “the cause of the smell was determined to be a ventilation issue with one of our boilers.” The email said that the broken boiler was turned off “for the time being.”
“Since another boiler is currently being run, doing so does not impact our school’s operations or pose any safety concerns, and our building continues to be safe to occupy,” Yáñez said in the email.
At the time, Tafolla was worried.
“This is a temporary solution,” she said.
Tafolla is still worried. The smell of gas persists near the elementary wing and in the area where her kids play at recess, she said.
Other parents echo her concerns. They wonder if the gas smell is actually being caused by a gas leak on the street, not the boiler.
According to CPS officials, Peoples Gas conducted an inspection at the school on Monday and confirmed there were no gas leaks. Peoples Gas has been onsite multiple times over the winter and identified the boiler exhaust flue as a potential source of the sporadic smell, district officials said. They said an extension for the flue is currently being delivered.
Peoples Gas confirmed it had technicians at the building twice in November and twice this week.
“There was an issue … with at least one of the building’s boilers. The building has been working with contractors to fix the boiler issues,” said David Schwartz, a spokesperson for the organization.
Experts say Volta’s boiler issue provides a case study for the well-proven link between physical environment and academic performance.
It is important to build opportunities in both the social and physical educational environment for children to be successful — particularly in low-income, Black and brown communities, said Lorraine Maxwell, an environmental psychologist and professor emerita at Cornell University.
Even if young children don’t know how to express when something in their environment is affecting them, they can feel it intuitively, Maxwell said. They might not be able to pay attention or complete tasks, though they can’t fully understand the outside forces that are contributing, she said.
“A 7-year-old and 9-year-old can tell when their school is cold. They can tell when things smell bad,” she said. “If this has been intermittently going on for a while, then it begins to erode on everyone — on staff, as well as students.”
CPS officials said Volta’s in-house engineers and a mechanical contractor are on the scene to make repairs and monitor the situation. The district employs roving engineers, hub engineers and outside contractors to provide additional resources when needed, they said.
But Tafolla said none of that information had been communicated to her. It feels more urgent because her 9-year-old daughter Marazan has asthma.
“That makes the gas smell more complicated for us,” she said.
She knows her child is not the only one at Volta with underlying conditions.
