ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – While Albuquerque Public Schools celebrates the new buses, plenty of questions remain over hot classrooms.

Every day, KOB 4 received viewer emails and messages about A/Cs that don’t work. So, we asked a school board member at the bus ceremony what they were doing about it.

They say the community needs to contact the school first, then the service center for help, but the A/Cs are “not their territory.”

“The school boards work on that was to hire a superintendent who knows what she’s doing, who hired a competent staff to manage this. And so we’re referring all of this work to the administration because we’re not experts in operations, we’re not elected to be experts in operations,” said Danielle Gonzales, an APS board member.

We also met with the deputy superintendent of operations, whose department is directly responsible for dealing with the A/Cs.

He told us crews have been working all summer at every campus to get things going.

“Like any other mechanical piece of equipment, things go down. So what are we doing for that? We’re jumping in as soon as we know of something, whether it’s a parent reaching out, a principal, a teacher,” said Gabriel Jacquez, an APS deputy superintendent of operations. 

In the long term, APS says most of their A/Cs are swamp coolers, and they don’t work as well during the humid monsoon season.

While they would like to convert to refrigerated air, cost factors make it a difficult conversion.