It's been a few years since the meet the teacher night when I wandered through the Sullivan West High School dripping in sweat and fanning myself with the school-supplied map to the classrooms, wondering what it must be like for our kids and their teachers having to bear the heat for hours on end.

So as more and more parents have come out to decry mask mandates for the re-opening of schools, a small part of me has nodded along.

Yes, it must be brutal for kids and school staff in these buildings.

Still, as I send my own (fortunately vaccinated) teenager back into school this September, I’m grateful for the rules that masks stay firmly in place. Grateful as one of the immunocompromised who is vaccinated but fears the Delta variant will break through. I'm grateful for these restrictions and mask mandates because we are seeing more and more kids landing in hospitals.

The latest numbers from the American Academy of Pediatrics are more than a week old – August 12 – but they showed 121,000 children had been diagnosed with COVID in just a week... in states that report on child cases (not all do, skewing the numbers).

That’s a significant increase not just since the pandemic began but even since early summer.

Still, I look at our schools and the lack of air conditioning, and I ponder the reasons the systems don’t exist.

As a taxpayer, I blame us.

Year after year, our school boards and administrators put up budgets and cross their fingers that we will agree to their proposals, that people who have haven’t spent a second inside a school building in 20, 30, sometimes 50 years will say “yes” to what it is they’ve carefully crafted based on intimate knowledge of the school buildings, state and federal requirements, and perhaps most importantly, our kids.

Air conditioning remains a hot topic – no pun intended – in no small part because it’s used for just a small portion of the year in our part of the country.

But solid studies show there’s a serious impact on learning outcomes for students in sweltering classrooms. One Harvard study completed in 2018 estimates 42 percent of U.S. classrooms lack any or adequate air conditioning.

That same study? It found that high school kids who learn in hotter classrooms perform worse on college admissions tests.

Other studies have found that students’ attention span is diminished in hot classrooms as their brains are constantly butting in to remind their bodies they need to do something about the heat.

Yes, masks will be uncomfortable for our children in the heat, and for our school staff, too. But the heat was a problem before the pandemic and will continue to be one long after if we aren’t willing to do something about it.