From rising seas to more intense storms and droughts climate change has brought about

sweeping changes. Now add education to that list. Studies show that in more places in the

country there are more days in the school year hotter than 80 degrees than there were in 1970.

And schools that can't afford air conditioning are left to struggle with overheated classrooms, which researchers say posed both academic and health risks.

Anna Phillips was one of the reporters who looked into this for the Washington Post, where she covers climate change.

Anna, just to be clear, we're not just talking about summer term here, are we?

Oh no, definitely not.

We're talking about a problem that starts in the late spring when kids are taking state exams, for example, and becomes even more of a problem when they

come back in the fall.

When you start to see some really high temperatures setting in that would not typically have happened but are now becoming very common.

You're getting heat waves in September and October in parts of the country that never experienced them before,

or maybe very unusually for those parts of the country,

and they have really no means of dealing with them

because their schools were built with that air conditioning.

And in your story, you talk about the schools in the North

in particular that didn't have to worry about this.

What are some of the examples of what you found?

Yeah, so you can pretty much draw a straight line across the country from New York and

Philadelphia all the way out to the West Coast And you're looking at a part of the country

where most schools were built without air condition.

Many of these schools are very old.

Some of them are on the historic register.

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