Before noon, the board out front reads 112 degrees.

As a heat wave engulfed the region yesterday, LA Unified officials fielded 346 calls to fix air conditioning units. By the end of today, they were expecting at least that many more.

Tacked on to an existing backlog of calls for air conditioner repair since before school began, LA Unified has about 2,600 requests for air conditioning repairs during the current triple-digit heat wave.

“We have a handle on it, we are responding as quickly as we can,” Mark Cho, Deputy Director of Maintenance and Operations at LAUSD told LA School Report. He said the team of more than 80 maintenance worker is completing about 160 repairs a day during this heat spell, in which temperatures are as much as 15 degrees hotter than normal. Yesterday alone, workers repaired 164 air conditioning units throughout the district.

LAUSD has set aside $1 billion for a Critical Repair Fund and over the past three years, about $300 million has been used for air conditioners, Cho said.

An estimated 30,000 LAUSD classrooms and more than 1,000 other public spaces, such as hallways, locker rooms and libraries, use about 68,000 air control venting devices throughout the district, Cho said, but the problem is that most of the units are more than 30 years old. The district cannot always find compressors or parts on units that are no longer manufactured.

“That kind of thing slows us down a bit, but we are working around it,” Cho said. In worse case scenarios, the classrooms are equipped with temporary air conditioner units, or the classes are moved into air conditioned multi-purpose rooms, he added.

For the next few days, all students will remain indoors even during breaks. At noon, for example, the usually bustling school yard and playground at Allesandro Elementary School in Los Feliz was empty during lunchtime. The electronic sign in the front of the school showed that the temperature hit 112 degrees.

Meanwhile, Cho is gearing up for the next wave of repairs that will happen during the expected torrential rains predicted in the upcoming El Niño.

“Next will be the rains, and roof repairs,” he said.

Because of triple digit heat, Santa Ana winds and fire danger expected through the weekend, heat advisories and red flag warnings are in effect in parts of Southern California.

“With extremely dry fuels in place, if fire ignition occurs there could be rapid spread of wildfire that would lead to a threat to life and property,” a National Weather Service statement said.

This is the second time in the last few weeks that LA Unified has cancelled activities due to the weather. In mid-September, the district shut down all athletic activities for two days due to extreme heat that also caused air conditioning units to fail at several schools.

Triple-digit temperatures are hitting parts of Los Angeles with unusually high temps expected to last several days.  Los Angeles County Health officials extended a heat alert issued on Monday to last through Wednesday.

The move to cancel outdoor actives comes as LA Unified has been struggling to keep some students cool indoors as well. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reported record high power demand Monday and is expecting to break the record on Tuesday as well, according to NBCLA. Multiple LA Unified schools are having problems with air conditioning units working properly, according to KPCC.

The problems prompted the district on Tuesday to issue the following statement: “L.A. Unified is aware of the problems with the air conditioning units affecting many of our schools. We take these issues very seriously. Nearly 500 air conditioning service calls have been received since yesterday. When possible, students and staff have been relocated to other classrooms or multipurpose rooms with air conditioning to continue instruction. A crew of workers have been evaluating and fixing every issue.”