The systems cooling and cleaning air inside Cesar Batalla School in Bridgeport are on the verge of complete failure, with temperatures sometimes getting so hot they're considered unsafe and students must be sent home.

At Bethel High School, classrooms have no air ventilation system at all. Teachers rely on open windows and fans.

And in Brownwin Lakowski's third grade classroom at Newfield Elementary School in Stamford, the HVAC system regularly breaks, leaving students and staff, particularly those with asthma, to suffer.

Just this past month, temperatures in Lakowski's classroom reached 85 degrees one day. At other times, she said the school's air ventilation system was unable to filter smoke from wildfires in Canada that made its way into the building, causing some schoolchildren to cough.

"Part of having good air quality is having the windows open, but if the windows are open, the rooms get hotter — so it becomes a vicious cycle," said Lakowski.

Yet each of those three communities were among dozens of school districts across Connecticut desperately in need of air quality system upgrades that were recently denied funding from new state grants set aside for that very purpose.

The denials have left many school leaders puzzled.

Despite pledges from Gov. Ned Lamont over a year ago to spend $150 million on the initiative, the state has only approved grants totaling $56 million, or about one-third of the money available.

Even if the state approved all of the applications, the total cost would have been under budget at $146 million, records obtained by CT Insider show.

Instead, most applications — 80 out of 130 — were denied.

Low-income districts received less funding and those applications were rejected at a much higher rate than affluent communities, even though the grant program was established in response to the COVID-19 pandemic which most acutely affected poorer districts.

State officials claim all 80 applications they denied were "incomplete," but school officials in 11 districts who spoke with CT Insider either disputed that claim or said their applications were rejected for trivial reasons.

Bethel, for example, was turned away because one document out of hundreds of pages in the application was missing a signature. The application never spelled out the document — board minutes approving the project's design — needed a signature.

"Because there wasn't a signature on minutes to a meeting. Really?" said Bethel Public Schools superintendent Christine Carver. The middle-income district asked the state to cover about half of a $4.2 million air quality overhaul for the town's high school. "I don't know how I would have even known that it needed a signature."

Several districts declined to be interviewed for this article, worried it would impact their chances of winning state grants going forward.

"A lot of people won't speak out publicly because they've probably dealt with the ramifications of doing that in the past," said Joe Delong, the executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, which lobbies on behalf of city and town governments.

Now, state officials say they plan to launch a process in the coming months for districts to apply for school air quality improvement grants again, while lawmakers recently approved $300 million more in funding for the program and eased some rules that were vexing districts.

A spokesperson for Lamont said in a statement the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), which oversees the distribution of school construction grants, has "been willing to meet with districts whose applications were not initially approved in order to provide guidance for resubmission."

'Incomplete' applications

DAS officials declined to be interviewed. But department spokesman John McKay in emails wrote that every "complete" application received funding.

As for the rest: "80 of the 130 applications were incomplete," wrote McKay.

DAS typically works with districts to help them through grant application processes.

But for the air quality upgrade grants, the state did not offer any help for school officials after it was determined their application was missing certain components.

"Participants were not asked for follow-up info because this is a competitive grant program," McKay wrote.

So why did the agency consider it a competitive grant when more than enough funding was available?

Even though DAS previously estimated the total cost of all applications would be $146 million, the agency spokesman in a statement this week said some of the applications did not include a complete cost estimate, "so it was not possible to estimate what the full state's share could have been had all of the applications been complete."

Each rejected district received a letter from the state saying their application was denied because it was "incomplete." Many district officials were surprised.

Wayne Donaldson, the facilities director for schools in Ledyard, said the letter the state sent to his district claimed their application was missing details that "were definitely part of the application."

"It was not accurate," said Donaldson, whose district asked for $1.3 million for an elementary school to install an HVAC system to replace its reliance on windows and fans to ventilate classrooms. "I did call the state on that, and they said, 'Well, it's just a form letter that goes out to everybody.'"

School officials lamented how the state did not give them a chance to point out where in their application the documents existed or to fix minor deficiencies.

"It is not an easy process. I mean, they really make it hard for districts to apply," said Chris Everone, West Haven Public Schools' facilities director.

His district, which the state ranks as the eleventh poorest in Connecticut, was rejected for $705,000 to replace "aging and failing" equipment in two elementary schools.

School officials said they wished the state would have worked with districts to shepherd applications across the finish line, like they do for other construction grants.

"It's unfortunate that didn't happen because it's silly. It's going to delay us," said Thompson superintendent Melinda Smith.

Thompson, a lower-income district, requested $8.9 million to replace the 45-year-old HVAC system in their three-school complex and to build a ventilation system in parts of the complex where one does not exist.

Grant program's slow start

The grant program was created last year after Lamont spent over a year resisting calls from municipal leaders for the state to help cover the cost of school air quality improvements.

Lamont has focused on reining in state borrowing for construction and other capital projects, including for new schools or major renovations. This year, he proposed giving his budget office the ability to reject funding for new school projects that historically have been guaranteed to districts that qualify.

He also blamed municipal leaders for not properly maintaining HVAC equipment and said districts had received enough federal COVID funding to cover needed air-quality improvements.

Indeed, Connecticut received $1.7 billion in federal COVID aid, the bulk of which went directly to school districts. The main purpose of the funding was to help schools transition to remote education during the pandemic's onset and later to help them reopen and make up for lost learning time.

Districts reported spending $128 million on air quality improvements and another $77 million on efforts to prevent disease spread within school facilities, according to an analysis by the School and State Finance Project.

But districts insisted there remained significant need for funding HVAC improvements.

A survey by the Office of School Construction, released in January 2022 after significant delay and resistance from state officials, showed one-third of schools in the state reported not having "sufficient funding" to maintain or improve air quality in schools, while one in five did not have a program in place to evaluate air quality.

The survey also stood out for what it lacked. The state had previously surveyed schools every two years about air quality conditions in schools — including whether classrooms have ventilation systems, air intake systems need improvements, radon or asbestos is present and water-damaged materials with mold need removing — and published those results online.

That, however, stopped under Lamont's tenure. The survey questions were significantly scaled back.

Amid concern over the information void, legislators last year passed legislation requiring local districts to have school air quality inspected once every five years. The first inspections are due Jan. 1.

"The failure of this [grant], to some degree, is by design... These are grants that the governor did not want to do," said DeLong

Poorer towns struggle

In many ways, Connecticut's poorest school districts have the greatest need for air quality improvements. They often have old and under-maintained buildings, as shown in the state's 2021 survey. They also typically lack funds to complete projects on their own. And they tend to have higher rates of asthma than their wealthier neighbors.

Yet an analysis by CT Insider shows the state awarded a disproportionate amount of air quality grant funding to districts in wealthier communities.

Of the 50 grants awarded through the program, 26 went to districts in the top quartile of wealth, as determined by the state's wealth rankings. These communities received $23.5 million in total, or about 42% of the funding distributed, despite enrolling only about 23% of the state's public school students.

Meanwhile, the poorest quartile of districts, which enroll more than 40% of the state's public school students, received 12 grants totaling $17.6 million, or about 31% of the funding distributed.

"I would have liked to have seen this targeted to those that needed the help the most," said Paula Schenk, who previously led UConn's Center for Indoor Environments and Health and now advises clinicians on environmental contributors to illness. "There needed to be a little more thought given to that."

Among wealthy towns, particularly large beneficiaries included schools in Fairfield ($6.2 million) and Lyme and Old Lyme ($12 million).

Among the $17.6 million in grants awarded to the poorest districts, 88% went to a single city: Waterbury.

In Waterbury, the money will go toward installing air conditioning in each school, an upgrade that superintendent Verna Ruffin describes as "absolutely life-changing" — a project the district could not have afforded on its own.

"Improved air quality makes a huge difference, and if you haven't experienced it, sometimes you're not aware of how it affects your state of being," Ruffin said.

But for cities like Waterbury, financing projects isn't easy, even with state grants. That's because the program requires districts to cover a portion of project costs and does not allow them to use federal COVID aid as part of their contributions.

"Sometimes that is the missing piece that you need to be able to move some major work and major projects," said Ruffin.

At least one lower-income district, New Haven, didn't apply for grants because officials there said they lacked funding to cover their portion of the project.

"The program requires us to have to make capital investments ourselves that we lack the resources to make," said Justin Harmon, a spokesman for New Haven schools.

The need for upgrades in New Haven is significant. Schools there returned in-person long after every other district in the state largely because of concerns around air quality. In 2021, two New Haven schools closed permanently because of poor air conditions.

Leslie Blatteau, a New Haven educator and teacher's union leader, said she frequently hears from members about broken air conditioning in their buildings. Recently, when wildfires in Canada caused unhealthy outdoor air quality in Connecticut, some New Haven teachers reported smoke seeping into buildings with poor ventilation.

"If we want our students to be set up for success and we want to be able to support our students' success, then we know more time and attention and money needs to be spent doing the ongoing maintenance so that we're not always responding to broken things but rather doing the maintenance all along the way," Blatteau said.

Among the nine other school districts the state has ranked as the poorest, seven did not apply for grants. Officials in Norwich and Hartford said major renovation projects are already either approved or underway, making the grants unnecessary, while requests for comment from the remaining seven districts were not returned.

Help on the way?

The state is planning to open another round of applications for school air quality improvement grants in August and announce winners sometime in 2024.

The state has not yet announced how much it plans to award during that second round.

Last month, DAS' commissioner, Michelle Gilman, told legislators the agency believes it may still use the $94 million left of the $150 million initially promised, though "It is difficult to predict whether we would utilize all of that."

She said interest from districts has been and remains high and they expect more districts will apply in round two.

"We do see that the need is there," Gilman said.

Meanwhile, state legislators recently passed legislation providing another $300 million for the program over the next two years. They also tweaked the grant process to allow districts to use federal COVID funds when they apply for the grants in the future. Those federal funds, however, must be spent by fall 2024, and it is unclear how much money districts have remaining.

While many districts rejected the first time said they plan to apply again, the handling of the grants has left local officials with skepticism.

DeLong from the municipalities conference said he "wouldn't bet the farm on" the state fully spending the money allocated for school air quality upgrades. "Our past history on this issue, and seeing a collaborative approach to doing these things, has not been particularly positive."