During a meeting Tuesday, WCPSS officials discussed heating and cooling replacement projects at nearly 20 schools in the district, as well as safety & security updates.
Heating and cooling problems have plagued district facilities for years. ABC11 previously reported how schools sent children home early because the A/C stopped working and it got too hot in classrooms.
Marie Dexter is the president of the Wake County PTA. She and many other parents have the same question.
"Our first question is when is that going to be fixed?" she said. "A little more transparency about what schools are going to be on the list to have HVAC upgrades. What's the timeline for that? Because a lot of times we just feel like we don't know."
Tony Champion is the WCPSS Facility Assessments & LifeCycle Director. He shared promising news about when work could begin at schools across the district.
"All of these projects will be under construction, or at least be in, by March 10 of this year," he said. "Holly Springs Elementary School is a full HVAC replacement. Joyner Elementary School is a full HVAC replacement, as is Wake Field Middle School and Willow Springs Elementary School."
Mark Strickland is the WCPSS Chief of Facilities and Operations. He said hundreds of millions of dollars of additional work have already been identified.
"Recently, within the last six to 12 months, we presented to the board a LifeCycle numbers showing that we were somewhere between $600 and $800 million in the rears of things that needed to be done," he said. "Within that LifeCycle program, it's not just HVAC. It's roofs, and windows, and tracks, and sidewalks, and things like that."
Officials also shared updates to school security, including a change to how they respond to emergency situations.
The district will follow what they're calling a standard response protocol. Officials say it allows for more flexibility when responding to emergencies.
Dexter says while parents are happy about a lot of the work being done, like new standard visitor sign-in protocols across the district, she says some challenges still exist.
"Now it's more things like we have school doors that sometimes don't lock or need to be replaced," she said.
Just last week, the school board reallocated $10 million from land purchases to security projects, leaving more than $20 million set aside for security upgrades.
As far as those HVAC upgrades, officials say crews replaced 21 chillers so far this fiscal year. For context, 160 chillers were replaced over the last 10 years in the district.