AC woes lead to early Kofa dismissal

Kofa High School classes were dismissed at 10:45 a.m. Monday due to an issue with the campus air conditioning.

Yuma Union High School District officials stated that although they are still looking into the problem, it is believed that a combination of high humidity, a possible “sticky valve” in one of the pumps and a weekend energy savings setting overloaded the campus chillers.

“Once classes started at 7:30 a.m., the chillers were not able to cool classrooms quickly enough,” officials added.

Superintendent Toni Badone noted that because students are normally dismissed at 1 p.m. on Mondays due to early release, students missed only their fifth- and sixth-period classes.

“It was too warm to accomplish what we needed to accomplish in the classrooms ... We're trying to rectify that so that it doesn't happen again,” she said about the air conditioning issue.

Badone said their energy savings program raises the temperatures in the classroom when students aren't going to be there. “Normally that would be fine but the humidity has just made the situation really difficult.”

According to senior meteorologist Mike Piggot at AccuWeather.com, the dewpoint remained in the 70s over the weekend. He said the humidity was due to tropical moisture that traveled northward.

The campus was cooled in time for parents to attend the campus open house event on Monday evening and classes will continue as normal Tuesday.

Sarah Womer can be reached at swomer@yumasun.com or 539-6858. Find her on Facebook at Facebook.com/YSSarahWomer or on Twitter at @YSSarahWomer.