One moment you’re freezing, huddling together in order to try and scrape together a sense, even just a memory, or warmth. The next moment you are sweating through your clothes, thinking that you’re going to die here, overheating and thoroughly cooked like a baked potato.

I’m sure that all of you know where this article is heading as soon as I bring up the words ‘air conditioning’, mostly because we have all had to deal with it. There doesn’t even seem to be a definitive pattern to the crazy temperature swings of the school.

On the one end of the spectrum is the intense heat of some classes — when you cross the threshold of the doorway into the room itself and just feel the heat wash over you. Brigham Skarda, a Bingham senior, also lamented that specifically, the language arts rooms seem to be extremely bipolar, describing how some of the rooms get all of the a/c and heating while the others seem to get none leading to the imbalance of temperatures. You know it’s bad when you have teachers that actually keep blankets in their room.

This crazy temperature problem leads to another problem — what do you wear to school? Hayley Hurd, a senior of Bingham, described the challenge of clothing. How you have to agonize over whether you dress for the weather or for the possibility of what your class will feel like today. For instance, in winter it seems natural to bundle up when it’s snowing outside, complete with a nice cozy sweater, giant coats, and mittens. However, you then run the risk of having an extremely hot classroom. In fact, in several of my classes, the beginning of the period will be a frigid classroom that makes me glad that I’m wearing a hoodie, but by the end of the class it’s so hot I’ve had to take it off in order to work with the temperature.

While it’s easy to complain, it’s not a problem we can blame on the current administration or anything. Everyone here is just working with what they have. Schools have budgets, or age with time and systems become outdated eventually. That is exactly the case with our building.

You see, our building is old that sections of the heating and air conditioning are simply broken. To find out more on the topic I talked to Bingham’s Head Custodian Mr. Morgan about the heating and cooling systems. There are places that the air temperature can’t be controlled, partially due to the outdated system we use, and partially because the school is just not allowed to change the temperature in a majority of the classrooms without first going through the district. Mr. Morgan explained that it makes sense that Jordan School District wants to save money, but he wants to make sure that kids are comfortable at school to provide a good and quality environment to learn. The more recent additions to the school, anything east of the vending hall, have a better amount of control, but everything west of that is mostly out of anyone’s hand. Mr. Morgan said that he’s constantly working the air conditioning and heating system of the school, ‘…it keeps you on your toes.’

There is good news, however. In the next few months, we’re getting new chillers for the school to help deal with the summer heat. Those will get put up in the next handful of months, bringing a welcome breath of fresh air to Bingham High School.