School system confronts costly HVAC needs

Officials with the Wake County Public School System discussed how to address the system’s multi-million dollar need for HVAC repairs during a committee meeting Tuesday.

About half of the emergency work orders submitted within the WCPSS were for HCAV repairs.

Schools around the district were forced to close for stretches of last school year while the district’s maintenance and operations team tried to keep up with a growing list of vital repairs.

The problem has had an impact on student learning.

“It’s affecting families,” board member Toshiba Rice said. “These schools and families are deeply affected by having to miss school or coming to pick their children up due to HVAC concerns.”

Superintendent Robert Taylor traces the origin of the problem to a difficulty in filling staff positions, and, with that, a reliance on outside contractors to fix damaged units.

Additionally, he says that the amount of work allocated to the district’s limited staff has resulted in an operational strategy where urgent needs monopolize time and resources that would, if the maintenance team were sufficiently staffed,  be better spent on regular maintenance.

“We have about $140 million in HVAC needs,” Taylor said. “And when things break down unexpectedly, we begin to play whack-a-mole and defer needed regular maintenance in favor of urgent maintenance.”

The district’s maintenance and operations department received 5,800 emergency work orders last year. Of those 2,300 were related to HVAC trouble.

The HVAC shop continues to struggle to hire technicians.Due to staffing difficulties, much of the work is sent to outside contractors. This has an adverse effect on the time it takes to fix broken or malfunctioning units.

For example,  the chiller at Wendell Middle School is operating at partial capacity. While parts have been ordered, they have not yet been received.

“While we wait for parts, we can at least have the unit operating so classes can still be held,” Nate Slavik, the district’s senior director of maintenance and operations, said.

Needed equipment upgrades are underway at a number of schools around the district. But until more operations staff can be hired, and millions of dollars in funding can be found and allocated to the problem, HVAC issues are likely to persist within the WCPSS.

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