MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Wednesday there are questions about the crumbling infrastructure of Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS).
After this week's fiasco with a dozen schools not having air conditioning for the first day of school and several others the next day, ABC24 discovered that the district would need at least $500 million to fix and update a majority of their properties, according to a MSCS study published last year.
In an article published on the Memphis-Shelby County Schools website from October, administrators said that the goal is to create state-of-the-art facilities for students and address district-deferred maintenance costs, which are approximately $500 million.
“That is the debt that it would cost to restore or to redo to repair all of the maintenance we have at hand,” said Keith Williams, the Memphis-Shelby County Education Association executive director.
MSCS said it owns, operates and maintains over 200 properties including 155 school campuses such as Douglas, Trezevant and Sheffield High Schools all of which had issues with their air conditioning units that were so severe, students were released from school early this week.
Williams said that is unacceptable.
"We’ve always had maintenance issues checked out thoroughly before we started school," Williams said.
School Board Commissioner Stephanie Love tells ABC24 the board is well aware of the crumbling infrastructure and routinely asks the county for maintenance money but ads it’s never enough.
“We give a laundry list of deferred maintenance to the county commissioners every year and they give us what they give us," Love said. "That is no excuse for a failure to communicate with our parents and our teachers and the community before the start of school.”
Love said at least one school went partially without air for at least two days due to copper being stolen off of the air conditioner units.
MSCS media relations did not respond to requests for comment sent from ABC24 before publication.