Queens, Brooklyn Students Left Sweating in Underfunded Classrooms

“Nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” This idiom, often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, takes on a broader meaning in New York City: heat. Heat is as certain as taxes in New York. It’s the ritual of taking the 1 in peak traffic; it’s a summer night in a cheap Bed-Stuy walk-up; the beach at Brighton Beach on high noon. And for some of the 1.1 million students across more than 1,800 public schools in New York City, it’s also the scorching heat of their classrooms.

I became interested in A/C availability in N.Y.C. public schools in late June of this year, when Central Park hit its hottest temperature since 2012. At 99 degrees, New York City Emergency Management reported 341 heat-related ER visits during the four-day heat wave lasting from June 22 to 25, 2025. The incident inspired me to ask: what is the history of heat-related illnesses in N.Y.C.?

By plotting the number of ER-related visits in New York between 2017 and 2024, I made a fascinating discovery:

In New York City, emergency visits due to heat appear to rise sharply as temperatures exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Why?

According this interview of Pope Moseley, research professor in Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions, Moseley says that it is “not necessarily how hot it gets” that’s the problem, but “how long it’s hot.” There is evidence of this in Figure A: the two markers that rise above 100-related E.R. visits per day occurred one after the other, July 20 and July 21, 2019.

The problem with prolonged high temperatures is twofold: it makes it more difficult for sweat to evaporate from the skin, and it increases the risk of urban heat gain from the surrounding environment. It’s around the internal temperature of 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit that the body will start to sweat to increase its rate of heat loss—but this process fails if the ambient room temperature exceeds that of its core.

Moseley also reveals that most hospitalizations during a major heat event occur not because of heatstroke or heat illness—he claims they encompass less than 10 percent of illnesses. Instead, chronic heat tends to amplify chronic conditions: “If you tell me 200 peoples got sick, I’m going to say, ‘No, 2,000 people got sick. We just didn’t recognize it.’”

This past April, Chalkbeat alleged that one in five N.Y.C. classrooms still lacked basic air conditioning. Newly informed to the dangers of extreme heat—especially to the very young and the very old—I decided to visualize my findings to understand which neighbourhoods are most vulnerable to heat poverty.

Considering that Queens is among the poorest boroughs in the city, it wasn’t a complete shock to discover that Queens Village contains a city low of only 18 percent of air conditioned classrooms (Figure B). What did surprise me? Both Queens Village, home to New York’s hottest classrooms, and the A/C-rich East Midtown boast similar household income averages. If economic disparity was not a driving force between the two neighborhoods, what might be?

Racial disparity might be one. Queens Village is considered an overwhelmingly Black neighbourhood, according to the N.Y.U. Furman Center, where Murray Hill and the adjoining East Midtown are still majority white.

Ladd Keith, associate professor at the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Arizona, focuses his research on mitigating extreme heat through city planning. Apart from stressing that extreme-heat events are increasingly more intense and longer-lasting, he advocates for increased heat governance in municipalities.

“We really want to convey that it’s a process, not a specific outcome. You don’t become heat resilient and then you’re done with planning; you’re not immune to all future impacts.” He later added: “We need to continue this heat resilience over time.”