The Board of Public Works met Wednesday, September 5 on the second day of class for public schools in Maryland.
The board used to appropriate money for public schools until that power was taken away by the legislature last session, still, Governor Larry Hogan and Comptroller Peter Franchott expressed their displeasure over ten schools in Baltimore County and more than 70 schools in Baltimore City being closed or closing early because classrooms were too hot.
The Governor and the Comptroller have chastised Baltimore County and City school administrators for years for not putting air conditioning in all of their schools and that continued on Wednesday.
"As I speak, 44,468 students are being cheated out of our educational responsibility to give them public school education," said Franchott.
"Comptroller and I have been pushing to fix this problem for 4 years with these two jurisdictions. We provided them with record funding and historic school construction funding and yet the still have not addressed these HVAC issues," said Governor Hogan.
Delegate Eric Leudtke says the Governor needs to fix the problem.
"No teacher, no student should be in a school without air-conditioning. Where's the Governor's proposal to fund air conditioning for every one of these schools," said Delegate Luedtke.
"We were promised by the city schools that cool air would be flowing in the beginning of the last school year. Yesterday the city's school superintendent said that was a false narrative. Well, it's not a false narrative. These are facts and they are on the record in their own words," said Governor Hogan.
Temperatures are supposed to be close to 90 degrees for the rest of the week.
"Guess what would have happened if we would have started school before Labor Day. Where would we be now with canceled days, canceled hours?" said Franchott.
Hogan says on the first day of the next legislative session he will introduce the Accountability in Education Act of 2019. That's a commission that will look into the management of education spending. Last year lawmakers voted down that same commission.
