The students at Alcalde Elementary School received a chilly reception upon their return from Christmas vacation.
On. Jan. 6, when students and teachers walked down the long hallways and into their classrooms at the brand-new, $11 million elementary school, the classroom temperature ranged from 57 to 60 degrees.
Alcalde Elementary School Office Manager Teri Medina said Española School District was notified of the problem on Monday. However, the problem persisted and on Thursday, Principal Theresa Flores and District Superintendent Danny Trujillo decided to release students for the day.
At 9:41 a.m. Thursday, Executive Administrative Assistant Eileen Ulibarri sent out an email stating, “Students will be sent home this morning due to heating problems at the school site. There is a possibility that school will be canceled for Alcalde Elementary only tomorrow.”
At the time, Trujillo said all parents were called and notified that students were being released early. Students whose parents did not pick them up were put on two buses. Teachers, as well as Flores, loaded the buses and walked each student, by hand, to their homes. Students whose guardians were not at home, were taken back to the school, where they remained in the slightly warmer office, until their parents could pick them up.
Trujillo said district administration was notified about the problems with heating on Monday. District Director of Facilities Adan Cordova said Alcalde Elementary School has the newest heating system out of any in the District.
Alcalde Elementary School has a geothermal heating system provided and installed by Albuquerque-based Johnson Controls. The geothermal heating system works much differently than the standard heating unit. Water is supplied from a ground source, which runs through heating and cooling pumps. The temperature of the water depends on the temperature at which the thermostat is set. For instance, to keep a room 72 degrees, the water would be heated to 120 degrees.
“Once the water reaches a certain temperature, it creates hot air and is transferred through a federal frequency drive blower that blows a certain amount of hot air where it’s needed,” Cordova said.
All the temperatures are controlled by a computer located in the school’s office. However, the system is a smart system, which means it can detect movement in the school. If the system does not sense movement, it will ignore the manually plugged in setting of 72 degrees and revert to the factory default setting of 60 degrees. Cordova said neither he nor the maintenance department realized what the implications of this setting could be.
“During the holiday break, the system didn’t sense any movement in some of these classrooms. The system automatically went into default and unoccupied mode,” Cordova said.
Some administrators were in the offices and those rooms maintained temperatures of more than 60 degrees.
Without teachers and students rushing through the building, the heating system “assumed” the school was unoccupied and went back to the factory default setting.
Cordova said he was notified on Tuesday the temperature remained low. The same day, a District technician arrived at the school and went through the temperature controls on the computer and classroom temperatures were rising when the technician left, he said.
“Wednesday morning the temperature started to drop again,” Cordova said.
At this point, he contacted Johnson Controls. On Thursday, the company sent out a technician. Cordova said it was discovered that a hard reset needed to be done to get the temperatures back to normal. To perform a hard reset, the technician must go to the computer system and do a default reset. However, when this was done, Cordova said the computer system wasn’t responding properly to all the commands.
“The (company) technician came to find that the heat pumps were still on the unoccupied temperature setting,” Cordova said.
This meant the water used to heat the building had dropped to a temperature of 38 degrees, when it needed to be at 115 degrees to heat the building. The technician from Johnson Controls reset the heat pumps and the water heated to a functioning temperature. The last step was then to reset the default system to prevent a future incident.
Alcalde Elementary School students were able to return to school Jan. 10 to heated classrooms, Trujillo said.