Detroit schools pass the halfway mark on full air conditioning, with 81% in sight by 2028

Detroit's public school classrooms are getting cooler, and for the first time most of them stay that way from the first bell to the last.

More than half of Detroit Public Schools Community District buildings now have air conditioning in every room, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told the school board this week, a threshold the district crossed as it settled into the first full month of the 2026-27 year. As first reported by BridgeDetroit, Vitti laid out how far the district has come and how far it still has to go.

The starting point makes the number land. In 2018, only about 34% of DPSCD schools had full air conditioning throughout the building. Getting past 50% means a majority of Detroit students now learn in rooms that hold a steady temperature in a September heat wave.

The engine behind the change is the district's $700 million Facility Master Plan, adopted in 2022 and funded through one-time federal COVID relief money. The plan pairs rebuilds and reopenings with targeted renovations centered on HVAC, roofing, and masonry, the systems that decide whether an old Detroit school building is comfortable or miserable.

Vitti sketched the trajectory. By the 2028-29 school year, 81% of buildings are projected to have full air conditioning, 11% will have partial coverage, and only 8% will have none. "After the FMP investment in the 2028-29 school year, we'll go from 19% of schools having no A/C to only 8% of schools having no A/C," Vitti said.

Closing that last gap is the hard part. Nineteen schools fall outside the current plan, and the district estimates it would need an additional $245 million to bring full air conditioning to all of them.

In the meantime, the district is not waiting on construction. Industrial fans are being delivered this week to every classroom in buildings with partial or no air conditioning, and portable AC units are going to schools whose electrical systems can support them. The urgency is real: Detroit schools issued two early dismissals in September when temperatures climbed past 90 degrees.

For a city whose school buildings average decades of hard use, a comfortable classroom is not a luxury. It is the difference between a full instructional day and a room too hot to think in. Detroiters who want to track the work can read the district's Facility Master Plan, which lays out the 20-year, roughly $2.1 billion picture of what the buildings still need.