A Jacksonville mother says her 5-year-old non-verbal autistic son came home from Loretto Elementary visibly sweaty after his classroom’s air conditioning broke down, and she’s far from the only parent raising alarms about broken cooling systems inside Duval County classrooms this month. As high-heat advisories remain in effect across the area, complaints have surfaced from families at three different schools, all describing the same scene: kids sitting in overheated rooms while repairs lag behind.
Mia Parker, whose son Myozjh Mason has allergies and is on medication, told News4JAX that she recorded video of her son being pulled from school while visibly sweaty, and that staff did not move students to another room with working air conditioning. Parker said she reached out to the school principal, the district office and teachers, but that a staff member told her it was not hot enough. She said the school had all summer to fix the air conditioning, and she now wants to pull her child from Loretto Elementary, located in the Mandarin area of Jacksonville, according to the station's report.
Loretto Elementary is one of at least three schools where News4JAX received complaints, and the outlet said it is continuing to determine how many schools districtwide have air conditioning issues and how long repairs will take. A message obtained by the News4JAX I-Team from a First Coast High School student indicated that campus operated for two days without air conditioning, per the student's account relayed to the station.
District Says It Takes the Complaints Seriously
Duval County Public Schools sent a district-wide email to families acknowledging intermittent air conditioning outages at some schools across the district, the same report notes. DCPS said it takes air conditioning issues seriously and that student and staff safety and well-being are top priorities, while urging patience from families as crews work through repairs.
The district said its HVAC team is working to make repairs quickly, and that students may be temporarily moved to cooler areas of school buildings while repairs are completed. DCPS also encouraged families with concerns to contact their school principal directly, adding that school principals are committed to working with families and district staff to address concerns quickly and appropriately, per the outlet's account. Parker, for her part, questioned the district's awareness of the scope of the problem.
Decades of Deferred Maintenance Behind the Breakdowns
DCPS identified the age of its buildings as a factor in the ongoing air conditioning challenges, and the numbers behind that admission are staggering. Team Duval has some of the oldest schools in Florida, and back in 2019 the district identified more than $1 billion in deferred facility maintenance across its campuses, which averaged 44 years old, according to Duval County Public Schools.
Duval County voters approved a half-penny sales tax in November 2020 to fund a 15-year, $1 billion Master Facility Plan meant to repair deferred maintenance and replace overaged schools through 2036. That tax revenue is meant to fund deferred maintenance and the rebuilding or modernization of more than 140 schools, and DCPS said it is actively working toward those modernization goals and plans to replace and upgrade aging air conditioning systems. Mass cooling failures at the start of the school year are not new in Duval County — on one previous opening day of classes, nearly 41 DCPS schools experienced cooling malfunctions with more than 119 open AC work orders, according to a report cited by WJXT.
Scale of the Maintenance Job Is Immense
Keeping ahead of failures like the one at Loretto Elementary is a massive undertaking on its own. DCPS's Facilities and Maintenance Department manages and maintains more than 11,000 HVAC units across 156 schools and district sites using a centralized monitoring system meant to flag failures before technicians arrive on site.
That scale of upkeep is now colliding with district finances. DCPS entered the 2025–2026 academic year facing an over $100 million budget deficit, prompting leadership to pursue cost-reduction strategies and school consolidations, according to a report from Action News Jax. The fiscal squeeze complicates efforts to move quickly on repairs even as families like Parker's continue to press the district for answers about how widespread the cooling failures really are.
