Summer school students left in building with broken A/C

It’s a bad time for your air conditioner to break. But at one Baltimore County summer school program, kids were kept in the building even after the A/C stopped working, and parents weren’t notified for days.

Tyler Smith was one of the 40-some kids he counted who were picked up early by their parents on Friday. The students are taking classes at Deep Creek Middle School in Essex.

Mary Smith got a text from her son, who has asthma, that it was hard to breathe.

"I went up there. As soon as I walked into the school building, it was like an oven. It instantly - the heat smacked you in the face. It was terrible,” she told WMAR-2 News’ Elizabeth Worthington.

The A/C wasn’t working on Thursday, Friday, or Monday morning. Mary says parents weren’t informed. School staff confirmed the issue when she arrived at the school to pick up her son early Friday. Then, after hearing from her son again on Monday that it still wasn’t fixed, she called the school.

"I said, 'are you guys closing the school? What's going on?' She said she wasn't sure. I said, 'well I've already called Baltimore County. I've called the Superintendent. My next step is I'm gonna reach out to the news because this isn't acceptable. You're gonna have kids passing out, staff passing out. This isn't a good environment for anyone."

It wasn’t until after that phone call that the kids were sent home early and the school was closed for the rest of the day. Mary was worried about Tyler falling behind again.

"It's only a certain amount of weeks for the program. They're already in summer school because they need a little bit of a help or they need to catch up on their work. So they're already playing catch-up in this program, and now they have to miss days because of the heat."

We reached out to Baltimore County Public Schools about the issue. A spokesperson said the A/C was repaired over the weekend, but it did go down again on Monday. The spokesperson said it was fixed again today, and students will not be penalized for missing classes.