Increasing Concerns About School Indoor Air Quality

Why do schools fall short on indoor air quality?

Many school buildings, including brand new ones, were not designed with good interior air quality in mind. Shrinking budgets and rising enrollments work to the detriment of IAQ as school boards trim expenditures by deferring school maintenance and repairs.

In addition, school personnel may simply be unaware of the effect that certain housekeeping/maintenance procedures have on IAQ.

Schools also have special characteristics generally not shared by other public facilities and office buildings. For example:

• Schools have four times the number of occupants per square foot as offices.
• Schools contain a variety of pollution sources, such as lab chemicals, cleaning supplies, chalk dust and molds.
• Schools often have aging and inefficient HVAC systems with differing performance needs and inadequate funding for repairs.
• Many open space schools of the 1970s and 1980s have been renovated to use the space more efficiently, which often upsets the intended ventilation flow.

In recent years, comparative risk studies performed by EPA’s Science Advisory Board have consistently ranked indoor air pollution among the top five environmental risks to public health. Good interior air quality is a very important component of a healthy indoor environment and helps schools reach their primary goal—educating students.

Failure to respond promptly and effectively to interior air quality problems can have serious consequences, including asthma episodes and allergic reactions, accelerated deterioration of the physical plant, increased risk of school closures and reduced productivity of teachers and staff due to discomfort, sickness or absenteeism.

Finding Solutions

Once interior air quality problems are brought to your attention, the solutions fall into two categories: the management of pollutant sources and the use of ventilation for pollutant control. Both can be handled quite readily. Let’s look at how one school district handled typical reallife interior air quality situations:

A Proactive Approach

The St. Cloud Area School District #742 in Minnesota began investigating teacher complaints about stuffy rooms and lingering illness reports about four years ago. An initial survey uncovered numerous interior air quality problems, many of which were resolved with little ado—using the IAQ Tools for Schools Kit available through EPA.

But then in 1997, severe spring storms left the district with wet buildings and a host of new problems, including severe mold growth within certain walls that required tearing down the affected walls and rebuilding them.

"We realized it was time to get serious about interior air quality," notes Michael Forer, supervisor of environmental health and safety at St. Cloud. "Rather than waiting for problems to happen, we decided we needed to prevent problems."

After studying the IAQ Tools for Schools materials, St. Cloud began to develop an interior air quality management plan.

"Our first step was to ask people to help us," recounts Forer. "We knew the planning committee would be critical to . . . generating support for our work."

St. Cloud recruited a school board member, the head of the teacher's union, the head of school nursing, an elementary principal who had had interior air quality problems in her building, the district's business manager and a parent of a chemically sensitive child to serve on the IAQ team.

"These people's leadership and their ongoing advocacy with their colleagues were critical to our success," says Forer.

The committee established six goals that the IAQ Management Plan would address:

1. Communicate regularly about interior air quality with parents, faculty, students and other district departments.

2. Integrate interior air quality as an integral part of the overall maintenance of school buildings.

3. Purchase equipment that improves interior air quality.

4. Develop and implement a district policy and administrative procedures that address animals in the classrooms, upholstered furniture, use of floor coverings, housekeeping, use of space and new construction and remodels.

5. Fund interior air quality work from the health and safety funds made available through the State of Minnesota, district operating funds and the capital budget.

6. Conduct a semiannual evaluation of interior air quality issues/progress.

Meeting every four to six weeks for about a year, the team did not always find the process easy. "Committee members lacked a common understanding of IAQ issues, and we struggled with defining what should be in the plan and what our goals should be," Forer points out.

There were also difficult decisions to be made. "We agonized over the floor covering policy, but ultimately decided to go with hard surface floors in new construction or when carpeting was ready for replacement," Forer recalls. "We also debated whether to allow animals in the classroom."

The resulting St. Cloud IAQ Management Plan is state-of-the-art, Forer believes, and gives IAQ high priority in the district.

Forer attributes the district's success to:

• The school administration's willingness to acknowledge and address IAQ problems;
• The time taken by school board members, administrators and other key leaders to learn about IAQ;
• A team planning process that engaged representatives from the entire district;
• Frequent communication between the team and the board; and
• Everyone’s willingness to “think outside the box” and take risks.

As the St. Cloud experience underscores, interior air quality issues, once identified, can often be solved with easy, low-cost measures. The key is taking steps to prevent IAQ problems before they arise—a process that can be simplified through use of the IAQ Tools for Schools Kit.

EPA’s IAQ Tools for Schools Kit is available free of charge to every school district. Visit EPA’s Web site at www.epa.gov/iaq or call 1-800-438-4318 for more information or to order a kit.