Students at Federal Way High School sat through cold morning classes, some as cold as 49-50 degrees, Monday morning.
Federal Way Public Schools spokeswoman Debra Stenberg said the culprit was inactive boilers caused by a failure in the electronic messaging system after pipes froze over Sunday evening.
“When the pipes broke, it triggered a fire alarm, which sent a message [to the boilers] to avoid fueling a potential fire,” Stenberg said, noting South King Fire and Rescue responded to the Sunday evening incident.
After learning the boilers were down, the temporary custodian called the district’s maintenance crew at 6:45 a.m. on Monday but it was too late. Students were already en route to school, waiting at bus stops and prepared to begin their school week as their first class started at 7:25 a.m.
Cristi Frederickson-Willis, the school’s PTSA president and a concerned parent, said she discovered students were sitting in “freezing temperatures” at around 8:30 a.m.
“Basically, I only found out about it from another parent on Facebook,” she said. “The parent received a text from their son saying that it was freezing cold.”
Frederickson-Willis texted her own daughter, a junior, who confirmed the boilers were down.
She was soon on the phone with the school’s secretary, and then the superintendent’s secretary. Why wasn’t there a late start and why weren’t parents informed of the insufficient heating, she asked in an interview.
“My concern is there was obviously a breakdown in communication between the schools themselves and the district,” Frederickson-Willis said. “There should be a protocol for the custodian or whoever’s there first.”
After the maintenance crews came, they determined the problem and had the boilers up and running by 9 a.m.
“On these really cold mornings, it’s not unusual for the bigger schools to take a while to heat up,” Stenberg said. “It’s understandable that it was not really necessarily catching his attention of heating up quickly.”
In an ideal situation, the district would have had “a heads up that the heat wasn’t coming on earlier” and they would have made a decision to either impose a late start, move school along or cancel it entirely.
“We do our best in these situations and would have preferred to message parents about what was going on earlier for sure,” Stenberg said.
But Frederickson-Willis said she feels like the district could have responded better to her concerns and those of other parents.
“I’m most astounded at the lack of response at the district level,” she said, noting that she asked for a call back but hadn’t received one at the time of the Mirror’s interview. “If there had been any grade learning or testing, that’s not conducive for kids to perform at their best.”
Stenberg said the district plans to send out a notice to parents to encourage students to dress appropriately for the weather, noting that many are still coming to school in shorts.
