Op-Ed: California makes it too hard for schools to shield kids from extreme heat
The heat has hit our family like a brick wall in the past few days of 90-plus-degree temperatures, and my husband’s team has been in the middle of a game.
With the sun beating down on us, all we want to do is take a nap. I am not a fan of the heat, but sometimes I am required to live with it. This was one of those times.
As I listened to my husband explain to the kids and my 2-year-old daughter what the heat was like on the field, I was reminded of a news story we read last summer where a high school student was taking apart his own high school football locker.
It wasn’t the locker that was so cool and made him proud – it was the fact that the locker was made from recycled soda bottles.
It was cool, but it also showed how much pride and commitment he had to his team. A commitment that may have cost him a college scholarship if the coach hadn’t stepped in and offered him a different path.
Like that young player who made his own locker – we all have our own story that reminds us to stay committed to our dreams and what we want to accomplish in life.
You see, in California, when it comes to having heat-related deaths, we have reached the point where it is so very, very very hard to find a way to cool your kids without it getting dangerously hot.
In fact, in the last 60 years, we have gone from a heatwave in January that can be compared to a blizzard with a chance of death by heatstroke, to where we have gone to the point where kids are going to die because their parents won’t step in and use a natural heat loss mechanism that helps them stay cool without the use of air conditioners.
Here’s why:
When it comes to cool off, you cannot just rely on air conditioners.
Sure, you can run an electric coil around the unit or even put a large fan blowing its air over it. However, there is a reason why no coach in college football allows this in practice: it can be deadly to