Parts to fix Southwest High's broken auditorium air conditioning are due to ship Monday, district says, with portable coolers coming first

Replacement parts for the broken air conditioning in Southwest High School's auditorium are scheduled to leave the manufacturer on Monday, Oct. 26, Fort Worth ISD said in a statement to CBS News Texas.

The district said the parts had first been expected to arrive Oct. 23, but the manufacturer delayed the shipment. The components are no longer kept as regular stock, so they were out of stock, hard to get or had to be made before they could ship, according to the statement.

The district said it had confirmed the right parts were ordered and that the equipment is still under warranty.

Until the system is fixed, the district said, it plans to bring in portable cooling units for practices and scheduled events next week, with custodians, campus staff and HVAC technicians setting them up and taking them down around those activities. CBS News Texas reported Thursday that there is still no confirmed date for the auditorium's cooling to be restored.

Choir parents push back

The outage has drawn complaints from families of the school's show choir, which practices in the auditorium. Parents told the station the room has been without working air conditioning since before summer break, and rehearsals can run three hours a day, four days a week, with a performance coming up in early November.

Elvia Espino, whose son is in the choir, called the situation "an epic leadership failure" in an interview with the station. She said she gets school messages through the ParentSquare app but was never told about the problem or what was being done to protect students from the heat.

"It took getting a reporter," Espino told the station. "This is a very reactive response, and I find that disheartening."

In its statement, the district said it understood the concerns about the outage and thanked the community for its patience while the repair is completed.

Sources

CBS News