Newspaper crusade helped cool classrooms — in 1997

Eighteen years ago, we dubbed it the "Waianae Solution."

Back then, just like today, the state Department of Education was slowly baking its students in classrooms with triple-digit temperatures.

While the DOE wasn’t cooking the keiki on purpose, a satisfactory solution is still not in sight.

Today, just like in 1997, the way of dealing with Hawaii’s heat was either move the hot air with a fan or chill it with air conditioning.

On Thursday, the Star-Advertiser reported that the DOE is rushing to purchase 1,000 air conditioners to put in some of the state’s hottest classrooms.

Help is needed. On Kauai, school teacher Sue Schott reports her Kekaha Elementary School classroom has been broiling with temperatures between 104 and 113 degrees, according to The Garden Island newspaper.

The crisis, however, is not a new one. It has been around long enough that the old Star-Bulletin, Hawaii’s afternoon statewide daily paper, launched a crusade.

What would it take, the paper asked, to efficiently and economically lower the temperature in the school system’s most dreaded heat boxes, the wooden portables grouped around every school campus?

Former Star-Bulletin journalist Burl Burlingame, who is now a historian for the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor, organized the project.

"With luck, the net result won’t just be cooler classrooms. It will also be a sense of empowerment, that students, educators and administrators can work together for the common good," wrote Burlingame.

"The ‘Waianae Solution’ was initiated by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin a couple of years ago after searing temperatures were recorded in classrooms. The newspaper proposed that students investigate the physical properties of the classrooms, develop and test ‘solutions,’ then install a test unit. The newspaper underwrote and publicized the experiments.

"The primary goals were to alleviate unbearable conditions in a way that was inexpensive, easy to install, and did not substantially alter the original structure."

Lasha-Lynn Salbosa, now a biologist with the federal government, recalled that as a student at Waianae High School in 1997, the classroom heat was "very distracting."

"With today’s rising temperatures, I can’t imagine how the kids are coping. In fact, I can’t remember back then how we were able to cope, but I do recall sometimes one of our teachers would take us outside and hold class under a tree, so we could cool off," Sabosa said in an interview last week.

After investigating seven possible cooling solutions, including air conditioning and fans (too expensive and ineffective), the Waianae Solution finally arrived at a ventilator to let trapped hot air out of the roof, a baffle or dropped ceiling to insulate the classroom and PVC piping in the portable’s floors to allow in cool air.

"The entire apparatus uses convection to create a kind of ‘heat pump’ to push hot air out of the ‘attic,’ while using no moving parts or electricity," Burlingame reported.

The biggest obstacle, according to then-Waianae principal Hazel Sumile, was the "time lag while we struggled with the permits and permissions from the bureaucracy to complete the experiment."

Two portables were retrofitted in a matter of weekends and initial reports showed the outside temperature at 93.8 degrees and the inside temperature at 82.4.

The Waianae kids won engineering awards, the students documenting the project won journalism awards, NASA and Hawaiian Electric helped out with a solar-powered system and the two portables proved that you could make cooler buildings.

You can read about the series at 808ne.ws/1NwSPtO.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.