Schools are meant to be places where students feel comfortable year-round, and yet, within our local Boothbay Region High School, our students are suffering due to the improper temperature control within our building. We, as a community, need to do something about it.

Throughout the school year, our students and staff have to endure a wide range of weather and temperatures, and our school just isn’t built for them. Unrelenting freezes during the frigid winter months, the heat waves beating down on our poor little building in the early summer, and constant shifting temperatures year-round.

I’m not the first to bring attention to this problem. Two years prior to my own article, Neal Baldwin, a 2025 graduate of BRHS, highlighted this issue in his own writing, and yet very little has been attempted to counteract these issues.

This issue is most prevalent during the change of seasons from spring to summer, as 55 students out of the 84 who responded to my recent Google Form Survey agreed on this matter. During these hot, humid days, our building effectively gets turned into a pressure cooker for our unfortunate students. Out of those respondents from our student body, 90.5% agreed that if our school were to regulate the temperature throughout the building properly, they would feel much more comfortable than they currently are. Many students voiced their own anecdotal complaints in my survey, for example, “When it gets hot in this building, it gets HOT! Since only some classrooms have AC, relief from the temperature is hard to find,” or, “When it is early spring/summer the temperature in the building on the top floors get really hot and drain alot [sic] of energy and make [sic] it hard to pay attention.”

According to David Benner, director of facilities for the CSD schools BRES and BRHS, because this school was built in 1955, the building entirely lacks any form of insulation in its walls. This means that during these sheer and sudden temperature spikes and drops, our students are much less protected from the elements than they deserve to be. Benner has also informed me that there are no plans, to his knowledge, to add insulation. Even with the concerns shown by our school board for the issues present in our building, such as the attempted 2024 referendum to fund a new high school, many issues still remain prevalent. As with the research I have done, I have yet to see any designated protocols for when temperatures in classrooms exceed standard levels. Issues with heating aren't unique to our school, though, as according to the Portland Press Herald, around a quarter of Maine schools lack air conditioning systems. Because of this, just last year, Maine bill LD 11 was passed into law, which requires school boards in the state to establish their own policies regarding proper temperature balance. I think it would be very important for us to properly take note of these issues in our school to better ensure our students' safety.

Another way to view this issue is economically. The fact of the matter is, according to David Benner, it would most likely cost somewhere between $10,000,000-15,000,000 to fully install insulation in our building, and that price includes properly insulating the walls, ceiling, roof, and basement, along with the cost of engineering the entire process, which would take a surplus amount of time. His honest opinion on this matter was that we should revisit the idea of constructing an entirely new high school building. Even if we don’t address this issue in some way, we are still bleeding money down the drain every time winter rolls around. Due to the fact that we are entirely lacking in insulation, we spend thousands of extra dollars just to heat this building. According to an official spreadsheet shared to me by David Benner, in the 2025-26 season alone, we spent 89,299.13$ on fuel to heat our building. Since 2020, we have spent $380,385.97 in total, and an average of $63,397.66 yearly on our fuel.

I understand the gravity of the situation surrounding the issues many have had with the $60,000,000 (now estimated at around $71,000,000 according to David Benner) referendum from 2024 to construct a new high school, but this issue does need to be seriously addressed, no matter what. I am also aware of the $30,000,000 renovation referendum for our Boothbay Region Elementary School and how it has recently taken effect after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court sided in favor of the Community School District.

But if our local taxpayers wish to properly maintain the health and image of our high school–which many might consider to be the “heart” of our community–and keep it running, I would like to appeal to our CSD Board of Trustees to consider properly taking care of this very prevalent issue in our schools, and to ask the voters if they would consider a new bond which could very much make our school building a place where our students can learn safely and comfortably, year-round.