At the start of the 2025-26 school year we highlighted an investigation by WRAL which found nearly one in three schools in Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) had issues with HVAC, resulting in a $200 million backlog in HVAC maintenance.

At the time Rep. Erin Paré of Wake County shared how WCPSS had received $172.8 million in federal funding to address the maintenance backlog, a grand total of $0 was spent on HVAC maintenance. Instead the one-time money was primarily spent on salaries and benefits.

A year later and the issues with HVAC maintenance have only grown worse.

WRAL now reports that the number of schools with broken or malfunctioning HVAC systems has grown, with over a third of the 200 WCPSS schools experiencing issues.

On September 1st, 2026 Green Level High School notified parents that one of the school’s chillers had a “major failure” and the other chiller required an “invasive repair.” Students were relocated around the school throughout the day to parts of the building deemed cool enough to continue their courses.

Prior to Green Level High School’s HVAC outage earlier this week, seven other schools in WCPSS experienced HVAC outages since the start of the 2026-27 school year.

The warning we gave at the start of the 2025-26 school year still rings true today:

This mismanagement of designated funds by progressives running Wake County is all too reminiscent of the way tax-and-spend liberals drove North Carolina’s budget over a cliff in the late 2000’s, with budget shortfalls and poor fiscal management that led to layoffs, furloughs and salary freezes. 

Fortunately the 2010s in North Carolina saw a return of fiscally responsible leadership at the North Carolina General Assembly. That conservative leadership brought with it lower taxes and controlled spending that focused on the real needs of the state, rather than the wasteful spending for special interests of the previous administration.