WASHINGTON — The warm days are adding up in Alexa Cacibauda's fourth grade math class.
"We are sweltering up there," said Cacibauda. "They're hot, they're sweaty."
With only a few windows that will only open a little, and the heat rising to her third-floor classroom at the Wheatley Education Campus, Cacibauda says her students are suffering.
"My classroom has been 80 to 85 degrees for going on two weeks now," she said.
"A third grade teacher reported that her students were crying today," Cacibauda said. "Students are very cranky. They're miserable."
Twice a year the building's heating and cooling system has to be switched between hot and cold - just one of 500 buildings the Department of General Services has to switch over.
Last week, DGS told the D.C. Council different mechanical systems in different buildings slow the switch over down.
"Some are a lot easier to switch over than others," Delano Hunter, Director of the Department of General Services told councilmembers.
DGS says this transition from hot to cold is a challenge every year - but not at every school, says Cacibauda.
"I've had teachers in Wards 1 and Wards 3, no surprise, reach out and say, 'Hey, I've always been able to control my HVAC. We can turn the heat, the air on, we control our temperature,'" said Cacibauda who added she, too, could control the temperature in her classroom when she taught at a DCPS school in Ward 2.
DGS says it could be as late as May 15 before the AC in Cacibauda's school is on.
She says her kids need more help from DCPS before then.
"The answers are coming from people sitting in air conditioning, not the people that have to face the children every day who are miserable and crying and begging to go home."