Council calls on regional government for a school climate-control plan
Sagunto's city council has asked the regional government (Generalitat) for a nationwide-style plan worth €100 million a year to fix air conditioning in local schools, where classrooms exceed 30°C.
Students and teachers at Sagunto's public schools will keep facing classroom temperatures of up to 34°C unless the regional government installs a full climate-control system, according to a motion approved by the city council's plenary session. The proposal, put forward by the left-wing Valencian party Compromís per Sagunt and defended by councillor Maria Josep Soriano, asks the Consell (the Valencian regional government) to set up a new joint body — a consortium made up of the Generalitat, city councils and provincial authorities — funded with €100 million a year for full school maintenance and air conditioning. The motion echoes, just three days later, the same demand Compromís per Sagunt had already raised on its own on 4 August, this time backed formally by the full council.
The motion passed with votes in favour from PSPV-PSOE (Valencian socialists), IP, Compromís per Sagunt and EU-Unides Podem, a vote against from the PP (conservative party), and an abstention from Vox. Beyond the new joint body, the council is also asking the Generalitat to keep the funding the previous regional government set aside for the Pla Edificant (the region's main school-building programme) — €306 million a year — and to hand back at least 50 building projects a year to city councils, as used to happen.
Among the more specific requests, the council wants the Consell to comply with rulings from the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunitat Valenciana (TSJCV, the region's highest court) that order it to reinstate cancelled Pla Edificant projects that included full air conditioning. The TSJCV, the top judicial body in the Valencian Community, was created in 1985 and formally set up on 23 May 1989 — precisely to resolve disputes of this kind between regional and local government.
The plenary session also backed an agreement the Municipal School Council approved unanimously on 7 July, calling for Sagunto to be named a priority municipality under the Pla EduClima — Pla de Confort Tèrmic 2026-2029 (the region's thermal-comfort plan for schools). The case rests on the size of the town's public school network, the high number of buildings with old facilities, and steady enrolment growth: more than 800 extra pupils registered each year since the 2022/2023 school year. The council also points out that Sagunto is a coastal town, which makes the heat worse, and that most of its schools still lack full air conditioning.
The motion notes that Royal Decree 486/1997, Spain's workplace health and safety law, sets a temperature range of 17-27°C for indoor office-type sedentary work — the kind of setting a classroom resembles. The rule is even stricter for light physical work, where the range drops to 14-25°C, and it also requires relative humidity to stay between 30% and 70%. That detail helps explain just how far Sagunto's classrooms — which the motion says reach between 30°C and 34°C — fall outside the legal limits.
The motion's reasoning warns that prolonged exposure to these temperatures harms both health and academic performance: loss of concentration, physical and mental fatigue, dizziness, headaches, dehydration, heat stress, and worsening of respiratory and heart conditions. It also criticises the Generalitat for not delivering a single full air-conditioning project beyond those already planned, and for even cancelling several of them, adding that after three years without action while temperatures kept breaking records, the regional education department has resorted to improvised fixes.
As structural solutions, the motion proposes planting trees and vertical gardens for shade, installing solar screens or awnings, improving cross-ventilation, and equipping schools with renewable energy and electrical systems able to run heat-pump-based air conditioning. Approving the motion does not oblige the Generalitat to act: it is a formal request from the municipal plenary session, and whether it is met depends on the Consell deciding to include Sagunto in its upcoming budgets. In the meantime, families with children at the town's oldest schools will keep relying, during the hottest months of the school year, on stop-gap measures such as portable fans or adjusted timetables, until it becomes clear whether the Consell takes up any of the requests approved this week at the town hall.
The request comes just days after the Generalitat itself announced the construction or renovation of ten other schools across the Valencian Community — none of them in Sagunto. According to Ajuntament de Sagunt (Sagunto City Council) and elperiodic.com, with additional background from Spain's Official State Gazette (BOE) on Royal Decree 486/1997 and from Wikipedia on the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunitat Valenciana.