With summer bearing down on the southeast with high temperatures, students who are still in class have had to deal with some disruptive heat.

That includes the Estevan Comprehensive School, which had an A/C breakdown earlier and now has its system partially running.

Other schools have no air conditioning, with Southeast Cornerstone Public School Division Director of Education Keith Keating explaining just how many schools go without those cooling systems.

"Approximately half of our schools within the division have air conditioning and the other half don't. In terms of the ones that do, there were a couple of systems that were experiencing some difficulty earlier on in the year. They're at a point now where they're at least functioning or partly functioning in those particular schools." 

For those schools without a cooling system, they employ a variety of solutions to keep students and teachers cool.

"The schools that don't have air conditioning do a number of things to try to help address that heat. Many schools have fans, they try to rotate students through air-conditioned parts of buildings, so we have some buildings that have different classrooms or different parts that are air-conditioned but not the whole thing. Quite often they'll take classes outside to the shade when possible, we'll open up doors and windows, run air exchangers early in the morning or late at night to try to bring cool air into the building, and then shut those off during the day to try to keep it as cool as possible."

Keating says they haven't seen many drops in attendance for schools that didn't have air conditioning at all.

There could have been drops from the systems that broke down, which is why they'll take a look at the figures at the end of the year.

"We haven't in the past seen a decrease in attendance. We haven't had an opportunity to examine the attendance from this year's heat wave yet specifically yet, so that's something we'll be looking at doing towards the end of the year here." 

Keating says that many schools have done well adapting to changes brought on by the heat and are looking forward to the cooler weather soon to come.

"I think that schools, teachers, and students manage the best they can. It'd be great if we had air conditioning to function at all times and in all of our schools, but we're not at the point where that's the case. I know ECS had some concerns this year when the air conditioner went down and some issues with being able to source some parts to be able to get that up and running in a reasonable time frame."

"We were glad to see the temperatures drop at night to allow us to cool some of those buildings off that don't have the air conditioning at night really was really a bit of a struggle to get those buildings cooled down when they don't have the air conditioning or stop functioning, and the temperatures aren't dropping in the evenings."