Students at Davidson High School got a hot welcome back to class this week, returning for their first day of the new school year to find the building without air conditioning.
Several storms carrying high winds swept through the Mobile area over the weekend, and school officials believe the severe weather likely played a role in the outage. “Our A/C went out due to what we think was lightning,” said Rena Phillips, spokeswoman for Mobile County Public Schools.
More than 1,500 students at the school were left to make the best of the situation, staying in class through the heat rather than being sent home. Phillips described conditions as uncomfortable but manageable. “It’s hot, but it’s not unbearable,” she said.
Maintenance crews were dispatched to the campus and were working to diagnose and repair the system as quickly as possible, though no firm timeline was given for when full air conditioning would be restored.
The timing was especially unwelcome for a school system already contending with Gulf Coast humidity during the first weeks of the academic year, when classrooms can heat up quickly without functioning air conditioning, particularly in buildings with limited natural airflow. Late-summer heat is a routine challenge for schools across coastal Alabama, where daytime temperatures in early August regularly climb into the 90s with high humidity, making equipment failures at the start of the school year especially disruptive for students and staff alike.
Mobile County Public Schools, like many districts along the Gulf Coast, relies on aging HVAC infrastructure at some of its older campuses, which can be vulnerable to storm damage and lightning strikes during Alabama’s active summer thunderstorm season. Outages like the one at Davidson High School underscore the maintenance demands facing school systems that must keep large, decades-old buildings operating smoothly through some of the hottest months of the year.
District officials did not indicate whether other Mobile County schools experienced similar issues following the weekend storms, but said crews were prioritizing the repair given the number of students affected at Davidson. Parents and students were expected to monitor updates from the school as work continued to restore full cooling to the building.