Kids, teachers sweat it out in classrooms without air conditioning
Across San Diego, children and teachers are spending hours a day in classrooms that surpass 90 degrees, apparently unable, until recently, to penetrate the myth that the region’s weather is perfect.
In the second largest school district in the state, San Diego Unified, 33 schools lack even a single air-conditioned classroom.
Some parents who encounter the overheated classrooms for the first time are appalled.
“If you ran into the store and left your dog in the car with the temperature in the 90s, someone would be arresting you,” said Marci Shear, whose daughter just began Mandarin-immersion kindergarten at Barnard Asian Pacific Language Academy. “Yet I’m supposed to send her to school in temperatures like that.”
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- University of California San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest. Leo Castaneda/inewsource
New federal data reveals more about emergency room waits
Hospital emergency departments in San Diego County show enormous variation in how long patients must wait to get pain medication for broken bones, evaluated for a stroke or admitted to a hospital bed, according to new federal data posted on Hospital Compare.
With this quarterly update, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services added three consumer-friendly tools for evaluating an emergency department, or ED.
The speed and efficiency measures have been added to the existing five scoring tools on the website, providing even more ways for patients to decide which hospital they would choose in an emergency.
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New San Diego Opera chief implicated in former company’s shut down
The leadership at New York City’s Gotham Chamber Opera is blaming its former managing director, David Bennett, who has since been hired at the San Diego Opera, for the demise of the 15-year-old company.
According to Gotham staff and a board member, a cache of unpaid bills, invoices and fines totaling $600,000 were never put on the books or reported to the board, and were discovered after Bennett left for San Diego last spring. The Gotham’s annual budget was $1.8 million, according to the company’s most recent tax filings.
“There was one person who had full access to the books. One person. And it was the responsibility of that person to input all of these invoices,” said Edward Barnes, the current executive director at Gotham. He was hired to replace Bennett in May.