Look, there's a real issue heating up in our schools, and California just took a couple of steps to address it. According to CalMatters Housing's reporting on education and heat, Governor Newsom recently signed two new laws aimed at helping students deal with extreme heat. The first one asks the state Board of Education to consider teaching kids about heat illness symptoms, while the second, which the governor signed last year with a deadline coming up soon, requires schools to create safety plans for outdoor activities during extreme weather events like heat waves.
Now, here's the thing these laws do well: they're low-cost measures and they're starting to acknowledge that this isn't some distant problem anymore. Young people in California are already being affected by dangerous heat right now. One middle schooler named Natalie actually brought this issue to legislators after experiencing heat illness symptoms in her cafeteria during a triple-digit heat wave back in 2022. Her experience helped shape Assembly Bill 1653, which is one of the laws that just passed.
The numbers tell you how urgent this is getting. According to the reporting, emergency room visits for heat illness among kids aged five to seventeen jumped about 30 percent in just one year. Schools also lost more than 40,000 hours of instructional time in the 2025-26 school year because of extreme heat closures and disruptions. That's a significant impact on education across the state.
But here's where I see the real gap, and it's something I think about when talking to families about where they want to live. These new laws don't actually require the state to fund the things that would really make schools safer, like updated air conditioning systems, shade structures on playgrounds, or a properly funded health curriculum. The governor's office has indicated it has no current plans to propose funding for an updated health education framework.
The second law, Senate Bill 1248, came about after the tragic death of a twelve-year-old boy who collapsed during P.E. class in the heat. That law does require schools to develop heat-safety plans including weather monitoring and staff training, with those plans supposed to be in place by this month. It's a step toward protecting kids during outdoor activities.
What I am seeing locally is that parents and families are becoming increasingly concerned about school safety, and rightfully so. Here in the Bay Area and the East Bay, we're not immune to these heat waves, and they're becoming more frequent and intense. While these new laws show awareness is growing, real protection for our kids is going to require both policy and investment in school infrastructure. That's something families should be thinking about as they evaluate neighborhoods and schools for their kids.
