Students heading to in Niangua R-V schools Tuesday morning were told to brace for a potentially cold day at school. Temperatures dipped into the twenties and administration sent out an all call stating, “We are replacing the HVAC systems before winter which may cause chilly classrooms as fall temps drop. Please, dress appropriately.”
Parents immediately took to Facebook to voice concerns about why the school would have the heat off on the coldest day of the school year so far.
“It was not an overnight decision, towards the end of August/first of September we (the Niangua School District) had all of our heating units inspected,” shared Josh Hume, Superintendent of Niangua R-V School District. “At that point we discovered that 20 of our 24 units had cracked heat exchangers.”
The HVAC units currently installed at Niangua Schools are on their 17th year and hold a 20 year life span.
“We did have the heat exchangers replaced right at three years ago. We believe that when we had that done last time they were probably not installed correctly. The reason that leads us to believe that is that there were some regulator bypasses that probably caused the exchangers to get too hot and lead to premature cracking,” explained Mr. Hume. “We learned this the very beginning of September and went straight to the board.”
As part of the COVID relief sent out by the Federal government, Niangua received ESSER funds. “We had planned on upgrading our HVAC system with out ESSER funds anyway-just not like this,” shared Mr. Hume.
Bids were opened as soon as the district realized it would need to replace the HVAC unit. Working with the federal government funds, there are rules that require the district to wait 30 days to receive all bids before making a decision on which company to use and move forward.
“We do have several (heating units) that are working, unfortunately in the elementary we do have a cluster that isn’t working…in the ‘old gym’ we have one heater that works and one that is not. So, it’s not awful, but it isn’t ideal,” explained Mr. Hume.
On the bright side, bids have been coming in and part of the requirement in
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