Poway Unified School District trustees voted unanimously Thursday night to use $10 million of general fund reserves to pay for a new air conditioning system for Rancho Bernardo High School and Bernardo Heights Middle School.

The schools, which share an AC system, have been mostly without cool air since school started on Aug. 17. Two rental chiller units have been brought in the assist with the process. To adjust to the sporadic AC, the two schools have been having minimum days.

Officials said replacement of the system will cost between $8 million and $10 million and will take upwards of a year to complete. Staff also has been exploring funding options, including grants.

“Obviously, we need to do the repairs,” Trustee Darshana Patel said at the meeting.

She added that the district doesn’t receive state funding for facility improvements.

Trustee Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff said the district has already spent $400,000 to mitigate the problem with parts and the two chillers.

For the past several weeks, district officials have been working to come up with solutions for the ongoing problems with the 32-year-old air conditioning system that has left students and teachers sweating in their classrooms. The original system was installed in 1988 with bond funding. In 2010, a major retrofit was performed.

Three years later, 138 air handlers were installed at RB High to increase air flow. In 2017, the system experienced a major electrical failure, and a compressor and internal motor were replaced.

The HVAC system at the high school and middle school is an outdated and unreliable system, Superintendent Marian Kim Phelps wrote in a letter to parents on Aug. 25.

The new chillers, machines that remove heat from a liquid coolant via a vapor-compressor, were delivered and installed last week. In order to install the chillers, the entire system had to be shut down.

“This is the perfect storm,” said T.J. Zane, board president, of the AC failure and heat wave. “I beg the community for additional patience.”

One Rancho Bernardo High student spoke at the meeting about having class outside in the 95-degree weather because it was preferable to being indoors in the sweltering heat.

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Angela Brandt is a staff writer for the Poway News Chieftain and Rancho Bernardo News Journal.

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