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Some District Schools Have No Hot Water on Campus
District not legally required to provide hot water, according to state Department of Education

By Allison Jean Eaton
Bulletin Staff Writer

The Compton Bulletin has obtained a copy of a report detailing that six local elementary schools have no hot water anywhere on campus.

Legally, however, the district is doing nothing wrong.

The report, the Compton Unified School District Hot Water Table, lists the district’s 25 elementary schools and two alternative elementaries in an Excel spreadsheet indicating whether or not hot water is available in eight different areas: classrooms, nurses’ offices, cafeterias and staff restrooms, auditoriums, multi-purpose rooms, special education areas, administrative offices and boys and girls restrooms.

The six elementary schools with no hot water, even in the cafeteria kitchens and nurses’ offices, are Caldwell, Jefferson, King, McKinley, Rosecrans, Tibby and Washington.

And only Anderson Elementary has hot water in the boys and girls restrooms.

According to the spreadsheet, there is no hot water in the cafeteria and staff restrooms at Bursch, Longfellow, McNair and Roosevelt elementaries. A kitchen aide at McNair, however, told The Bulletin that they do have hot water in the portable kitchen the school has been using for more than a year after its kitchen was determined to be too substandard to prepare food in any longer.

And according to Alvin Jenkins, the district’s interim chief facilities operator, the three high schools don’t have hot water in their locker rooms, meaning students must take cold showers, if any at all, after physical education classes or athletic practices and events.

Hot water is not a legal requirement for schools, according to the district’s legal counsel, David M. Huff.

Huff has represented the district since 1997 and represents about 30 school districts throughout the state, including neighboring Los Angeles (LAUSD) and Paramount unified school districts.

“There are no state statutes that require schools to have hot water,” he told The Bulletin. “It’s strictly a matter of district policy,” meaning it’s up to the school board to decide whether or not hot water should be provided at a school site, even in kitchens and custodial closets for sanitation purposes.

Sunny Yu, the district’s communications coordinator, told The Bulletin that the district does not have a hot water policy on the books.

According to a 1999 advisory issued by the California Department of Education’s superintendent of Public Instruction, Delaine Eastin, “There are no state statutes that govern provision of hot water and paper supplies in restrooms. These standards are policy set and enforced by the local school board. The only exception is that toilets attached to food service locations come under the provisions of the California Uniform Retail Food Facilities Law, administered by the local health department.”

Huff said he recently inquired with LAUSD as to what its policy is. According to him, LAUSD provides hot water in all staff restrooms, cafeterias/kitchens, custodial closets and warm water in boys and girls high school locker rooms. It does not provide hot or warm water in any of its classrooms.

Compton’s school board, he said, particularly Board Member Satra Zurita, has been discussing the hot water issue as of late. But Huff said he is unaware if parents or staff members have complained.

When many of the schools were built, said Jenkins, they didn’t have hot water “from day one, but all the cafeterias had hot water.”

He said that the schools lacking hot water in their cafeteria/kitchen currently boil water until repairs can be made.

“All the places that need hot water, like special ed., have hot water,” Jenkins assured.

But according to the report generated in September by Jenkins himself, only the district’s brand new school, Clinton Elementary, has hot water in its special education classrooms.

As far as restrooms are concerned, Jenkins said there is no hot water because students tamper with the thermostats and turn the water temperature up too high, risking possible injury. In fact, restrooms haven’t had hot water since he’s been with the district, or 25 years.

“If they ever did have hot water in the restrooms, it’s because they had an old boiler system that was used [to heat classrooms]. So if the restrooms did have hot water, they got it from the boiler room.

“We came in and took out all the boilers because the boilers became unsafe — they were old, they may have malfunctioned, might have blown up or something, so we took all the boilers out,” continued Jenkins. “By doing that, we probably eliminated a lot of the hot water that they might have had in the restrooms.”

The district, he said, is currently entertaining the idea of installing anti-bacterial hand sanitizer dispensers in restrooms.

“It’s not too economical a lot of times to use hot water... With the hand cleaner, you can do the same thing for less money, and it probably cleans hands better.”

But what about the issue of high school students being able to take showers after gym class or sporting events?

“Since I’ve been in the district, what happened is the kids never took showers, for whatever reason, and it kind of, just like, fell off,” said Jenkins. “The kids, you know, are shy, or whatever, and they never have taken showers.”

Cost appears to be a big issue. “It’s a very expensive thing to put in what they call a mixing valve,” to blend cold and hot water for the showers, the interim chief facilities operator said.

Huff, the district’s attorney, pointed out that even when a mixing valve is used, it is not 100 percent fail-proof — there is still the risk of students scalding themselves, which he said is first and foremost a health and safety issue and secondly a liability issue for the district.