{"id":16957,"date":"2025-08-12T22:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T04:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/lawsuit-prevents-maintenance-of-ac-units-at-kemper-elementary-school\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T22:03:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:03:15","slug":"lawsuit-prevents-maintenance-of-ac-units-at-kemper-elementary-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/lawsuit-prevents-maintenance-of-ac-units-at-kemper-elementary-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawsuit prevents maintenance of AC units at Kemper Elementary School"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An
An individual at Kemper Elementary School tested positive for COVID-19 Thursday, causing the entire kindergarten class to go into quarantine for two weeks.<\/span>The Journal file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

As a new school year kicks off in the Montezuma-Cortez School District, students and teachers at Kemper Elementary are facing a sweltering start. With temperatures soaring into the 90s, many classrooms are without functioning air conditioning.<\/p>\n

Five out of seven HVAC units in the school are reportedly not working. The district does not yet have a count of how many are not working at Mesa Elementary.<\/p>\n

According to the district, a potential lawsuit with the HVAC company called Matthews Electric of Southwest Colorado Inc. prevents the district from repairing nonfunctioning AC units. Superintendent Tom Burris told The<\/em> Journal<\/em> that the district has purchased fans and \u201cportable, evaporative coolers in the past,\u201d but noted that Kemper Principal Paulette Porter has not yet received requests for additional fans or portable coolers, despite an email from a staff member\u2019s spouse alleging that staff were being required to buy their own cooling systems for their classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a big project and the district has had a lot of problems with the units,\u201d Burris said. \u201cThis project involved Mesa, Kemper and Lewis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burris shared that they are waiting on more information from Matthews Electric before the lawsuit can move along.<\/p>\n

\u201cMatthews is working to confirm its insurance carrier will provide a defense to the lawsuit, so we\u2019ve allowed Matthews limited additional time to respond to the district\u2019s complaint,\u201d Burris said. \u201cWe can currently expect Matthews\u2019 response to the complaint by Aug. 22.\u00a0The next step will be talking with the court to establish a trial date, usually nine months to a year out from the date of that conversation (although if the court is available sooner, we can try to push for that).\u00a0Once a trial date is established, we\u2019ll proceed with the discovery process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burris said the legal process can be \u201cfrustratingly slow,\u201d and it seems unlikely that the lawsuit will move quickly enough to fix the AC units this fall.<\/p>\n

Matthews Electric, owned by Dean Matthews, was the general contractor for the HVAC project, working with Bishop Brothers. Both are located in Cortez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

district is in a lawsuit with a HVAC company <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,155,28,689,60,216,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-16957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-education","tag-headlines","tag-kemper-elementary","tag-montezuma-county","tag-montezuma-cortez-school-district-re-1","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16957"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77211,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16957\/revisions\/77211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16957"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=16957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}