Photos of Baltimore students wearing coats, hats and gloves inside frigid classrooms went viral and ignited criticism of the school system.
About a third of the school system — 60 buildings — were impacted by the cold Wednesday, said Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Dr. Sonja Santelises in a Facebook Live. Problems included leaky windows, outdated heating systems, freezing pipes and water main breaks, according to the school.
As a result, four schools closed Wednesday and two others dismissed students early due to “water main and pipe issues,” according to the Baltimore City Public Schools’ Facebook page.
“Nobody in this city, including me, wants folks sitting around in coats and mittens all day,” Santelises said.
The Baltimore Teachers Union urged for closing all of its schools for the rest of the week, until “facilities crew has had time to properly assess and fix the heating issues within the affected schools.”
“Our educators have been forced to endure teaching in classrooms with dangerously low temperatures, instructing students who have been forced to try to learn bundled up in coats, hats and gloves,” wrote union president Marietta English in a letter to Santelises.
Temperatures have plunged along the East Coast, including Baltimore, and the area is under a winter weather advisory through Thursday 11 a.m. All Baltimore public schools will open two hours late Thursday.
“If you go out on the hallway, you could see your breath,” one student told CNN affiliate WJZ on Wednesday.
A teacher who didn’t want to be named told the Baltimore station that his colleagues were bringing space heaters to classrooms and passing around caulk trying to block out the cold air.
One photo posted on social media showed 62 degrees Fahrenheit inside a classroom. Parents were angry over conditions.
“It’s unbearable, it’s cold,” Chasity Spears, a mother, told WJZ. “There’s icicles in the classroom.”
The teacher’s union received several calls from members, English wrote in the letter.
“Your expectation that our members and the children that they teach endure bursting boilers, drafty windows, frigid temperatures in classrooms, and risk getting sick in these ‘less than ideal’ conditions, is utterly ridiculous,” she wrote to the school CEO.
Santelises stressed unprecedented frigid temperatures on Facebook Live and said the operations teams have been monitoring the situation since the cold weather started. But she said closing all Baltimore schools was not ideal.
“It is overly simplistic to say shut down the system,” she said, adding that it would close schools that aren’t affected.
The decision to close schools isn’t taken lightly for many reasons, including that many students get their meals at schools, she said. And if schools shut, it’s not a given that students will have supervision at home.
“We are balancing the need for young people to connect to meals, the need to connect with caring adults and safe spaces, as well as the fact that we want young people learning,” she said.
The challenge, she said, is that many of the school buildings are very old, and pipes burst and boilers break in the cold weather. She said there is a “history of underfunding of buildings in Baltimore city” compared to other districts.
CNN reached out to Baltimore City Public Schools for further comment, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh and Maryland Governor Lawrence J. Hogan, Jr.