School Climates
December 18, 2009
It seems as if Neuqua’s temperatures are always to the extreme. As the school year starts out in the middle of the summer, the temperature inside the school feels like winter. Students start to complain and wonder why the heaters do not turn on earlier in the year, as during fall time the school reaches its coldest days. The simple answer is that the school cannot turn off the heater until the end of winter.
Heating and the air conditioning not only take 3 to 4 days to insulate the school, but they require a lot of energy and money to just get started. After the entire school’s temperature has been maintained it becomes fairly easy and cost efficient to keep the school that temperature. Because of this it is hard for the school to constantly change the temperature and if they turn the cooling off all together, the school would instantly feel like a mosh pit. The same holds true for heating. If the heating is started early and suddenly Naperville has a week of sunny weather, the whole school will feel like a heat wave hit the school and the temperatures could get unbearable. To be on the safe side, the school decides when it is safely going to be just cold in order to finally turn the heating on.
Although this is a valid point, Neuqua students feel the cold gets intolerable at times. Senior Sonam Sagger said, “I have to walk from Frontier to the Main campus every day, and during summer and fall I do not have to wear a coat outside walking from campus to campus, but I have to wear it inside because it is always freezing.” Along with that, there is a good chance that the school does it to keep students awake.
In cold temperatures it is always harder to fall asleep versus a warm room. Usually testing rooms for tests like the ACT and SAT are kept at low temperatures to keep test-takers alert and awake since the tests start so early in the morning. Keeping the school cold definitely reduces the amount of sleeping kids in classes and could very well be a reason for the freezing circumstances.
Although the cool temperatures may seem like a punishment at times, in the end it is what is deemed practical by the school and serves ulterior tasks as keeping students awake which all benefit the school.
Kim Mittal, Layout & Design Editor
