Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent, Brenda Cassellius sees an urgent need for air conditioning in every classroom and is pledging to make that happen by next summer.
The situation came to a head earlier this month when Cassellius took the unprecedented step of canceling classes on the second day of the new school year after she toured classrooms that lacked air conditioning and struggled with what she found.
“It was awful, our buildings are old, some of them have windows that don’t open,” Cassellius told Milwaukee Magazine. “Even when you were able to open them, we were having storms, so it was humid, as well; there was condensation on floors, so people were slipping and falling, it was really awful.”
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Although cooler air has arrived with the official start of fall, Cassellius has her sights set on the arrival of next summer’s school sessions, making sure students and teachers will have a comfortable learning environment.
“I’m looking to put in air conditioning, probably window units, in every single classroom, as well as air quality sensors,” said Cassellius, who arrived at MPS in March 2025, previously serving a three-year stint as superintendent of Boston Public Schools. “I’m committed to trying to find the money this year so that all of our schools are outfitted by next summer.”
Only about 25% of Milwaukee Public Schools classrooms (the district has about 145 schools) have air conditioning, leaving Casellius’ plan with a major hurdle – securing the necessary funding.
“For years (Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association) members have demanded basic updates to our buildings to provide a safe and comfortable working and learning environment for all MPS students and workers,” MTEA President Ingrid Walker-Henry said in a statement sent to Milwaukee Magazine. “Reliable air conditioning in every classroom is a priority, and we are supportive of efforts to make this a reality.”
Aging infrastructure is a key contributor to overheated classrooms, with the average age of schools in the district at around 85 years, Cassellius said.
“Sure, I’d like to do a big fix with HVAC but those are extremely expensive and cost-prohibitive,” she said. “This is more of a band-aid to bring down the heat now so that we can have conducive learning environments for our students and good working environments for our staff.”
Cassellius floated a cost estimate of about $12 million for the MPS project, more if air quality sensors are included. However, previous MPS administrations have estimated that it would cost nearly $100 million to add air conditioning to MPS schools.
“I don’t know where the money is coming from right now,” she said. “I just have to get the proposal from my team and see what kind of cuts we can make to make it happen or see if we can get some funding from the state legislature for this,” she remarked. “But, of course, we’re not the only ones across Wisconsin that are having the problem with air conditioning.”
Cassellius doesn’t want a repeat of this past summer.
“I’m committed so that we can have summer school without people feeling uncomfortable,” she said. “This year for summer school we had to close, and we also had several chillers that went down; it was really a struggle to keep people cool.”
Casellius noted that students attending summer school are often those who aren’t registering proficient scores on literacy exams. “So, closing schools doesn’t help them,” she said.
Improving comfort in classrooms would lead to a multitude of benefits, according to Cassellius.
“Some new data just came out showing that air quality helps with mental health; none of us feel good when we are hot and sweaty,” she said. “When you get young kids or even some of our older kiddos in classrooms and buildings, there ends up being a lot of human bodies that have heat coming off them, it just makes for a really tough learning environment.”
Students aren’t the only ones on Cassellius’ mind.
“It’s also uncomfortable for our employees, making it harder to keep the routines going in classrooms when children are complaining or frustrated,” she said.
While in Boston, Cassellius oversaw the installation of 4,000 air conditioning units in classrooms across 70 different elementary schools. The original cost estimate for that project was around $7.8 million but ended up being closer to $10 million, she said.
“Boston has the oldest schools in the nation,” said Cassellius.
Boston Public Schools used federal pandemic relief funds, including Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, to repair or replace thousands of windows across the district. Window air conditioning units came next, along with air quality sensors to allow for the monitoring of air temperature and carbon dioxide levels, as well as particles that could be problematic for students with asthma.
Cassellius sees no end in sight when it comes to extreme heat and its effect on schools, making the air conditioning effort a priority.
“With climate change it’s not getting any better, we’ve just had the hottest summer on record, and it keeps going up and up and up,” she said. “This summer we also had to close for smoke because of the Canadian wildfires, so these climate nuisances are going to continue to happen; we continue to have heat, smoke, floods and we even had a bus fall into a sinkhole.”
