School Building Air Quality is Fast Becoming a Top Education Issue

The crisis began in February 1999 when an ailing student in the Saugus Union School District in Santa Clarita, Calif., visited a local doctor. The doctor said blood tests revealed exposure to arsenic, formaldehyde, phenol and mold toxins that could have originated in a portable classroom. As parents panicked, the doctor quickly concluded that several hundred children had been exposed to dangerous chemicals.

A principal enlisted Neale, then a 2nd-grade teacher, to throw together an indoor air quality program. The school quickly began environmental testing and enlisted help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state health department. But community hysteria outpaced school action. Many parents accused the school of poisoning their children and covering up a horrible secret. They organized a class-action lawsuit against the northern Los Angeles County district and the portable building manufacturer.

The mass outcry continued unabated for more than a year. But by May 2000, the state health department had confirmed the school’s findings that no serious health threats existed and had criticized the doctor’s methodologies as erroneous and invalid. The lawsuit against the school district unraveled, and the district appeased some of the most irate parents by inviting them to join its new indoor air quality oversight committee. The committee initiated policies that eliminated all pets, plants and strong perfumes and required air filter changes five times a year.

“If we had had the program in place when all this started, I can almost guarantee that this never would have happened,” says Neale, now the district’s indoor air quality coordinator and a 5th-grade teacher. “It would never have gotten to the crisis point that it had. We would never have had to spend $600,000 to crawl out from this cloud that was following us. This totally took over the district office operations because everyone was fielding air quality calls. The media was there all the time; they were calling us all the time.”

Spreading Interest

While the Saugus school crisis may be extreme, efforts to confront school environmental issues are becoming more commonplace. Eager to improve student health and performance and leery of potential litigation, administrators at school systems across the nation increasingly are tackling potential indoor air quality problems ranging from inadequate ventilation to mold and pests.

A 1995 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office showed that half the nation’s schools have at least one environmental problem. While research on the relationship between school environment and student health is still in its infancy, scientists have established that some environmental conditions, such as secondhand smoke and dust mites, can trigger asthma episodes and allergic reactions. Many school officials, fearful that unseen allergens and irritants may be hampering learning, are heeding federal government recommendations to clean up their schools.

“Definitely we’re seeing more schools taking an initiative on this,” says Elissa Feldman, associate director for the EPA’s indoor environments division. “A number of factors have combined to make the latter half of the 20th century probably worse in indoor environmental problems than the first half of the 20th century.”

Elissa Feldman, associate director for indoor environements division of Environmental Protection Agency
The flurry of school activity can be traced back to several factors. The average public school in the United States is 42 years old. Most were built as cheaply as possible and gradually were starved for maintenance money. Cash-strapped district officials tended to cut upkeep dollars in order to save money for teachers and classroom instruction. But inattention to maintenance over several decades exacerbated problems with leaky roofs, dirty carpets and malfunctioning ventilation systems.

Meanwhile, school officials have witnessed a rise in children’s health problems, particularly asthma. Asthma is now the most common chronic childhood illness, accounting for more than 14 million missed school days each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the mid-1990s, as staff and parents lodged more complaints about the air quality in school buildings, the EPA launched its Tools for Schools program. EPA provides schools with a free tool kit that can help eliminate five common indoor asthma triggers: secondhand smoke, dust mites, pet dander, mold and pets.

EPA’s kit provides a detailed checklist so that school administrators, teachers and maintenance staff can identify problems systematically and address them. Some indoor air quality problems can be fixed for little or no cost, including making sure that air vents are not blocked, sealing food and water to discourage cockroaches, prohibiting pets in classrooms and cleaning regularly. Other fixes may require a more costly overhaul, such as cleaning or replacing an ailing heating and ventilation system or removing old carpets that often provide a haven for dust mites.

“We’ve got about 10,000 schools implementing the kit, and many, many more are very interested,” Feldman says. “We’re now looking at getting whole school districts to adopt the kit, and it seems to be a strategy that has increasing promise.”

The New York City Public Schools have agreed to implement the tool kit in all schools, serving more than 1 million children, by school year 2005-2006. Cleveland, Ohio, Jefferson County, Ky., and schools in West Virginia are among those committed to use the tool kit, EPA officials said.