Let’s clear the air: Indoor air quality affects students and staff
By:
Scott LaFee
These days, it’s alarming enough to see vistas and skies turned dark, dreary and possibly dangerous by inverted layers of smog, particulates and other forms of air pollution. It’s a problem we’ve battled for decades, with some success. When conditions get too unhealthy, we’re advised to retreat indoors until things get better.
But what if air quality is worse inside?
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, levels of human exposure to indoor pollutants can be two to five times higher than outdoor levels—in some cases, up to 100 times higher or more. Now factor in this: The average American spends more than 90 percent of his or her time indoors.
That’s particularly worrisome for schools. Approximately 56 million people—roughly one-sixth of the nation’s population—spend their days inside elementary and secondary schools and classrooms. Outside of home, there is no place children spend more time.
For many students—and teachers, administrators and staff—the quality of indoor air in schools is a matter of life and breath. Roughly 20 million Americans have asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, and one-fourth of them are under the age of 18. Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Incidence rates have more than doubled since 1980, say researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. If that trend continues unchecked, a child born 20 years from now will be twice as likely to develop asthma as a child born
this year.
The impact of asthma on schools is measurable. It’s the single leading cause of student absenteeism. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology estimates 41 percent of children with asthma experience up to three attacks at school each month. Children with asthma miss roughly 14 million total school days annually, according to the AAFA. They spend 8 million of them restricted to bed.
Yet the quality of indoor air is rarely discussed in most school districts or education venues—at least not until it becomes a major controversy.
In 1999, officials at Saugus Union School District, a suburban K–6 district of 11,000 students located in northern Los Angeles County, received a note from a local doctor asserting that a young patient of his had been “environmentally poisoned” by spending time in one of the district’s portable classrooms. The doctor claimed the student—and later, other students and staff—had suffered dangerous exposure to hazardous substances like arsenic, phenol, formaldehyde and toxigenic mold.
School officials responded by moving the child and ordering independent air quality testing, but panic soon overcame events. Lawsuits and workers’ compensation claims were filed. There were acrimonious public meetings, adverse media coverage and a near-collapse of community trust and confidence in the district and its leaders. The district wound up spending more than $500,000 trying to remedy the situation.
Mark Fulmer, who was assistant superintendent for business services at the time, compares the experience to a racing locomotive plowing into a car stalled on the tracks.
“It got our attention,” Fulmer remembers. “A lot happened. It was very, very stressful. Ironically, an exhaustive study didn’t find any actual problem, but it did reveal very real—and unrecognized—concerns.”
The Saugus saga has a happy ending, as we’ll see, but it remains a cautionary tale for educators everywhere.
Telltale signs
“If you step back and consider buildings in terms of their use and needs, I would say from many years of experience that I have seen no buildings more in need [of repairs, renovations and improvements] than schools in this country and, in fact, around the world,” said Richard Shaughnessy, an internationally recognized air quality expert who runs the Indoor Air Program at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
Many schools are older structures; the average school in the U.S. is 42 years old. Many were improperly designed or built. Shaughnessy blames it primarily on inadequate funding, which he says has long forced districts to trim costs and standards whenever possible. Compounding the problem is a chronic lack of resources for maintenance, repairs and renovations.
“Out of necessity, school construction tends to emphasize the low bid and least expense, whether it’s the choice of land used, the architectural concept, the workmanship or final product,” Shaughnessy notes.
The result can be an unending series of problems and challenges for district boards and administrators, not least of which is poor indoor air quality. Experts say the telltale signs of health effects possibly caused by poor indoor air quality are numerous. Among them:
- health complaints associated with particular times of the day or week
- multiple or similar complaints arising in the same area
- complaints that ease or cease, immediately or gradually, when a person leaves a particular building, but return when the person re-enters that building
- complaints originating from recently renovated or refurbished buildings, or when different materials, equipment or procedures are used—especially for clean-ups or pesticide controls
Certainly no school board member, superintendent, principal or teacher would willingly or happily ignore these signs. But few, said Shaughnessy, have the knowledge or experience to aggressively grapple with them or their source.
“Educators are very concerned about air quality. I have yet to meet a teacher who was not concerned about the indoor environment,” he said. “But at same time there are so many other pressures and constraints that their ability and confidence to address this issue is really a whole other story.”
Taking action
Melanie Driver is the president of the teachers union for Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District, with roughly 23,000 students located midway between San Francisco and Sacramento. She has been a teacher for 29 years.
Indoor air quality—often referred to as IAQ—has long been an issue for Driver, who has asthma.
“For me, it’s aerosols that trigger it, like spraying deodorizers in the girls’ restroom,” Driver says. She also encountered IAQ problems in her own classroom that went unrepaired until she filed a grievance over the issue.
When she became president of the teachers union in 2007, Driver was determined to make indoor air quality a larger topic of discussion, a more urgent issue. She reached out to the district administration, to the maintenance and custodial departments, to teachers. In a series of meetings, the most significant hurdle became obvious: an alarming lack of knowledge and communication.
“A lot of teachers aren’t aware of what they do and how it impacts asthma. They don’t know that they can make a big difference,” Driver says. Even when they spot air quality problems—real or potential—teachers often don’t know whom to see about the issue, where to get help or how to follow up. The result can be frustration and even anger, involving both teachers and the maintenance and custodial personnel who suddenly find themselves confronted with an unexpected mess.
The situation in Fairfield-Suisun was improved by reaching out for help, both locally and nationally. In the case of the former, Driver says, it meant connecting with the Solano Asthma Coalition, a community group that assists local health care providers, policymakers, educators and the public to raise asthma awareness, devise strategies to control the disease and “change institutional, environmental, cultural, and individual factors that influence the incidence, prevalence, and severity of asthma,” as the county Health Department’s Web site puts it.
“Basically, we helped support the district’s efforts,” says SAC coordinator Susan White. “Some people viewed us as just another group demanding something, one more mandate to deal with,” but White reports the coalition overcame that initial skepticism and proved its primary goal was education.
“We wanted to show how air quality affects student performance. My own son has asthma, and he’s missed multiple days of school at a time,” White explains. “We wanted to show that most remedies are low or no cost. And many more actions prevent problems in the first place.”
The bulk of the Fairfield-Suisan district’s efforts was built upon the EPA’s Tools for Schools—TfS, as the government abbreviates it—a free, comprehensive program that provides information about indoor air quality, the effects of asthma and other related health conditions, and ways that different groups within a school district—teachers, students, parents, administrators, maintenance, nurses—can improve the situation quickly and relatively easily.
Simple solutions
Barbara Spark is the indoor air program coordinator for EPA’s Region 9, comprising California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii. She says most people don’t take indoor air quality seriously because, well, it’s never been perceived as a really serious issue. In fact, quite the opposite.
“Look at all of the advertising for products that put stuff into the air,” Spark says, “things to make it smell good or solve some other problem. People don’t think twice about doing that when all we really need from air is oxygen. Anything else you add to it probably shouldn’t be there.”
There are a lot of things that don’t really belong in indoor air: biological contaminants like mold, pollen and pet dander; harmful gases like carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide; dust mites; tobacco smoke; lead; nitrogen oxides; pesticides; radon; volatile organic compounds such as formaldehyde and cleaning agents.
As Spark points out, the EPA’s Tools for Schools program offers a variety of solutions that are often remarkably straightforward and easy to apply. For example:
• Manage sources of pollution. Ask bus drivers not to idle near buildings’ fresh air vents. Move garbage bins away from air intakes. Prohibit smoking on campus. Eliminate conditions conducive to mold growth, such as leaky plumbing or interior carpets and walls that are constantly wet.
Reconsider the costs and benefits of classroom pets. Though popular with students and teachers, furry animals like guinea pigs, mice and hamsters can trigger asthma and allergic reactions in sensitive students or staff.
- Use exhaust fans to remove pollutants before they disperse into indoor air. Make sure they’re operating correctly and are not blocked by books, posters, furniture or other classroom materials.
- Ensure adequate ventilation, which helps dilute any indoor pollutants.
- Reduce dust mites by minimizing cloth furniture and draperies, and clean them regularly.
The keys are easy, Spark says: good management and common sense.
“There are always going to be problems so serious in terms of repair that no management program is going to be able to address them beforehand. Things happen,” Spark acknowledges. “What good management does is optimize its resources. Schools don’t waste money. They solve the simple problems first, like not storing ammonia and bleach next to each other on shelves without earthquake dams. That’s just common sense, but people don’t think about it.”
(As any chemistry teacher worth his or her NaCl can tell you, when ammonia and bleach are mixed, as may occur during an earthquake, they form chlorine gas, which can be lethal.)
Fix the easy stuff first, Spark advises, and do it in an open, enthusiastic manner.
“That’s been a problem,” Spark says. “A lot of school officials are really reluctant to proactively address the issue of indoor air quality because they’re afraid that if they do, people will think there’s an existing problem, something that the district is trying to hide.”
Or not.
In 2000, Visalia Unified School District officials launched an indoor air quality program after watching Tulare County officials unsuccessfully attempt to minimize and cover up a major mold scare in the local courthouse.
“We had one set of portable classrooms in particular where teachers had become concerned,” says Susan Cox, the district’s risk manager. “They felt the issue wasn’t being addressed because they never saw maintenance doing anything, though actually they were—in the early hours before people got to school.”
Cox says school officials and workers attacked the problem overzealously, dismantling much of the portable building only to discover a single piece of moldy cardboard.
In the process, however, they became aware of the Tools for Schools program.
“It made a lot of sense with low cost,” Cox says. With training and guidance from EPA officials, the district held multiple sessions to make administrators and teachers aware of the issues and remedies. Problems were identified and prioritized. Communication between departments was improved.
The efforts didn’t go unnoticed. Fulmer—the school business official from Saugus Union SD, who ironically had moved on to a similar job in Visalia—says the local media there reported positively about the district’s efforts in contrast to the county government’s response to its own mold problem. The EPA was laudatory too, bestowing an award of excellence on the district in 2001. Only one other California school district had received the award at that point: Saugus, following that stressful experience that Fulmer likened to a train wreck.
Cox, Visalia’s risk manager, said one of the benefits of her district’s Tools for Schools program was improved morale and efficiency among the district’s maintenance and custodial workers.
“They realized they were critical to the education process, that what they did affected how well children learned. The custodians didn’t just clean up late at night,” Cox says.
Student performance
There’s little dispute that poor air quality negatively affects student performance, though supporting scientific evidence remains limited. The potential harm from inhaling high levels of mold, microbes and chemicals is apparent.
“I’ve looked into the association between air quality and student performance,” says Shaughnessy, back at the University of Tulsa. “It’s there.”
Less obvious are the effects of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is a natural, invisible component of the atmosphere. In small amounts, it’s necessary to human health. Too much CO2, however, is harmful: Concentrations of 7 percent to 10 percent in the air can cause dizziness, headaches, visual and auditory dysfunction and unconsciousness.
Our bodies naturally release excess CO2 when we exhale. A poorly ventilated classroom full of active children breathing hard can quickly raise carbon dioxide to unsafe levels.
William Fisk, head of the indoor environments program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, cites a Danish study that, he says, found “student performance on simulated school work tasks increased as the ventilation rate was increased. Classroom temperature also affected performance. Using devices to remove particles from the indoor air did not affect performance.”
An American study, he continues, “found that students’ math performance in standardized academic tests increased significantly when indoor carbon dioxide concentrations were lower. Reading scores also improved, but the increase was not statistically significant.”
High carbon dioxide levels are “probably the biggest cause of IAQ problems in classrooms,” Fisk reports. “Based on the existing classroom carbon dioxide data, I estimate that about half of classrooms have less ventilation than the minimum ventilation rate required in standards. In some classrooms, ventilation rates are far from meeting the current codes.”
That’s not something any school board or superintendent wants to hear. Raising awareness of indoor air quality tends to also raise administrators’ fears “that they’re opening a can of worms,” says Susan LaCombe, a school nurse and asthma program manager for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
LaCombe spent years trying to get indoor air quality on the agenda of the annual meeting of the district’s elementary principals, but to no avail.
“It wasn’t that they were against the idea of better air quality,” she says now. “It’s that they didn’t know much about the subject and it seemed like just one more problem they would have to deal with.”
The situation changed when Christopher Ortiz became president of the group. Ortiz put indoor air quality on the agenda for the group’s meeting last November and invited LaCombe to make a presentation to roughly 150 principals. A third of them quickly signed on to conduct Tools for Schools programs in their campuses.
“We’re just promoting common sense here,” says LaCombe, “things you can do but maybe don’t think about, like not bringing outside products to school like air fresheners. Or using the air conditioning system properly. Or recognizing a situation before it becomes a problem. There are lots of everyday things people can do—teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards.”
Do them, LaCombe and others say, and everybody will breathe easier.
Scott LaFee is a regular contributor to California Schools.
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