How Extreme June Heat and Overloaded Power Grids Affect Your Kid’s School (And Small Steps to Prepare)
I pulled up to the elementary school parking lot last Wednesday at 1:15, 20 minutes early for dismissal, and found every kid K-5 sitting cross-legged on the curb, fanning themselves with construction paper turkey cuttings left over from November. My third grader, Lila, was barefoot, her backpack unzipped and sticky with melted cherry popsicle the PTA had dragged out of the deep freezer. “The power went out,” she said, climbing into the car and immediately cranking the AC all the way up. “Mrs. Carter said the whole city’s power grid is full, so it couldn’t handle our AC plus all the ACs on every other street.”
The principal made an announcement to parents later that day, saying it was the third unplanned outage in two weeks. The district had already asked all schools to turn thermostats up 4 degrees to take pressure off the grid, but it still wasn’t enough. I’d been seeing headlines about June heatwaves pushing grids to breaking point all over the world—brownouts in Spain, rolling blackouts in Texas, emergency alerts in the Pacific Northwest—but it hadn’t clicked until that day how much this big infrastructure problem trickles down to ordinary school days and kid routines.
Two days after that, we got a notification on our phones that our neighborhood would have a two-hour rolling blackout that Saturday, right when I was supposed to host my son’s soccer team for post-practice snacks. I moved the whole thing to the shaded playground by the community center, and as the kids ran around chasing each other with water guns, I started thinking about all the small ways this unprepared infrastructure is changing what parenting and teaching looks like right now. It’s not just a grown-up policy problem—it’s a kid problem. It disrupts learning, messes with routines that kids with anxiety and ADHD rely on, and puts kids with asthma or sensory issues at extra risk.
I spent a morning helping with end-of-year math review in my son’s 5th grade class the week before, and it was 103 outside. The AC was running, but the district had ordered all schools to keep it at 78 instead of the usual 72 to cut energy use. Half the kids had their heads down on their desks, and the teacher told me she’d moved the end-of-unit quiz to the next day because no one could focus. Even just a 6-degree jump makes it a lot harder for kids to concentrate, especially younger kids who can’t regulate their body temperature as well as adults can. Lila, who has ADHD, gets even more impulsive and dysregulated when she’s overheated, and her teacher said she’s seen that with a lot of kids this month.
After the first outage, I talked to a few local teachers who’d figured out small, low-cost changes that help, and I’ve started doing most of them at home too. The first thing I did was put a small heat outage kit in both my kids’ backpacks. Ours has a frozen water bottle (I stick it in the freezer before school, and it stays cold for almost four hours), a pack of cooling wipes, a cheap battery-powered hand fan that runs on AA batteries, and a change of cotton clothes. It’s light enough that neither kid minds carrying it, and it means if there’s an outage, they don’t have to walk around sticky and overheated while waiting for pickup.
I also started talking about the grid problem with Lila in simple, concrete terms, instead of brushing off her questions about why the power keeps going out. A lot of parents I know avoid talking about it because they don’t want to scare kids, but Lila was up half the night after the first outage worrying that school would close forever and she’d miss her end-of-year play. Now we just say: “The power lines that bring electricity to school were built a long time ago, when it didn’t get this hot in June. When everyone turns on their AC to stay cool, there’s not enough electricity to go around. If the power goes out, your teacher will take you to the shaded curb, I’ll come get you as soon as I can, and we can stop for slushies on the way home. It’s not an emergency, just an inconvenience we can plan for.” No scary details, just clear expectations, and it cut her anxiety way down.
For teachers, the small, actionable shifts I’ve heard about make a big difference too: keep a bin of pre-frozen water bottles in the school freezer if you can get access, put a simple picture chart up in your classroom that shows what happens step-by-step if the power goes out, so kids know what to expect, and keep a shaded spot near the classroom door reserved for kids who get overheated easily, even if the AC is still on. At home, if you’ve got kids home for summer already, closing all the blinds on the south and west sides of your house before 9 a.m. cuts indoor temperature by 4 to 5 degrees, which means you can turn your thermostat up a couple degrees, take a little pressure off the grid, and still keep your house comfortable. We keep a couple frozen gel packs in the freezer, and if we have an outage, we tuck one in each kid’s pillow case to keep them cool while they wait for power to come back.
Last weekend, our rolling blackout was only an hour and a half, no big deal. Lila’s school got through the rest of the week without any more outages, though we still got an alert yesterday that next week’s projected highs will be even higher, and the grid is still at risk. We haven’t had to deal with anything major, and I know a lot of families are in way worse shape, especially those without AC at home. It’s weird, thinking about how this is just our new normal for now. The people who can fix the grid are working on it, but it’s going to take years, and right now we’ve got kids trying to finish their school years, go to soccer practice, and sleep through the night. The small steps don’t fix the infrastructure problem, but they make the days easier for the kids. We added an extra lollipop to Lila’s outage kit last night, for any friend who gets hungry waiting for pickup. For now, that’s enough.
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