It's not only Blaxland High students who are waiting for the state government to install air conditioning.
Blue Mountains MP Trish Doyle said a number of Mountains schools were frustrated to be on a long waiting list for cooler classrooms and others were still wondering whether their applications from 16 months ago had even been successful.
Previously only schools with an average maximum January temperature of 33 degrees or more were given air conditioning, but under a new state government program in late 2018 that changed to an average maximum January temperature of 30 degrees or more.
The following schools - Warrimoo Public, Blaxland East Public School, Blaxland Public, Glenbrook Public, Lapstone Public, Mt Riverview Public were deemed automatically eligible and did not need to officially apply. But the Department of Education has told the Gazette those schools are only earmarked for the "design" stage of the process between 2022 and 2023.
Springwood High School's P&C president Elaine Tjoelker said they should have been included in that first round, so were forced to apply for the second round in April 2019.
"We did quite a lot of work to show why we do qualify and we have heard nothing," Ms Tjoelker said. "We should have been automatically included in the first round."
Megan Thomas, a P&C member and the parent liaison of the 2Hot2Learn student group, said Western Sydney University scientists volunteered their time to help with that second round application.
"We were excluded from automatic qualification and that was based on the data from the weather station at Valley Heights.
"In collaboration with scientists from Western Sydney University, students and parents over the summer of 2018-2019 placed monitors in 16 locations around the school - we took 87 days worth of data at 10 minute intervals - and what we found was indoor temperatures peaked above 30 degrees on one third of summer days and the maximum classroom temperature peaked at 37.7 degrees.
"The local research demonstrated the school exceeds the weather station by an average of two degrees."
Ms Thomas explained it was the "the micro climate of the school - the building design, what the buildings are made of, the playground, the amount of shading, the northern and western facing classrooms ... the building is 52 years old ... with no eaves - the classrooms are stifling."
- READ MORE: Blaxland High's wait for air conditioning
The school submitted their application in April 2019 and also wrote to the minister who sent a form letter advising that she could not make representations and they needed to wait to be notified.
"It's very frustrating to not have a confirmed plan or timelines and it's frustrating that there seems to be no urgency for students to have access to comfortable and safe classrooms. The temperatures documented are so intolerable," Ms Thomas said.
Year 10 students Ian Tjoelker and India Turbill know they now won't get air conditioning in their student years, but have started advocating nationally for all schools to get equity on this issue.
"They said our school didn't count, our school is really hot," Ian said. "Especially the increasing temperatures due to climate change, it's got hotter since we recorded [that data]," India added.
"Throughout the summer there are weeks we are sitting there sweating, the windows are all open, all the fans are blowing around hot air. It gets insanely hot," Ian said. "That is so wrong, this is a nation-wide issue, this requires action by the federal government, there's an inequality between schools."
"Just because we are an old school we are being ignored," India added.
Their facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/2hot2learn/
According to a NSW Department of Education spokeswoman, delivery of the program occurs in the following order: design, tender and award, construction and completion. The spokeswoman confirmed "a further nine schools in the Blue Mountains have applied to have air conditioning installed as part of round 2 of the Cooler Classroom Fund ... Applications for round 2 are currently being assessed."
Ms Doyle said it took the government "three months to approve the first round of applications, but only around 10 per cent have been completed. The time frame has now blown out to 15 months for the second round, with more than 400 schools still waiting for an outcome, including Springwood High School". She said the "scientific evidence [from Springwood High] has fallen on deaf ears with this government".
