Dave Blake of the Northwest Clean Air Agency and Mike Anderson of Bellingham Public Schools test a portable for carbon dioxide levels. Photo: Katie Campbell.
Katie Campbell
Did you know indoor air quality is almost always worse than the air outside? Anything nasty outside gets tracked inside, where it’s not going to get flushed out as easily.
That was one of our key takeaways from Inside The Box, a project EarthFix and InvestigateWest jointly undertook this year examining indoor air quality in schools and specifically the over-reliance on portable classrooms.
Our reporting in May showed those abundant, aging portables burden schools with high energy costs and expose students and teachers to mold and mildew, poor ventilation and the potential for volatile gases from cheap building materials. Our reporting also showed governments in Oregon and Washington are doing very little about it.
Down in California, administrators in Malibu schools are now dealing with a major contamination issue. Test results released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) showed significant risk of exposure to chemical compounds known as polychlorinated biphenyls, often called PCBs. The results were millions of times above health standards.
This was in the school’s permanent buildings. PEER’s statement on the testing actually calls for students to be moved out of the permanent structures and into portable classrooms, which despite their many problems, can be perfectly suitable structures if they’re built and maintained properly and used as they’re intended (temporarily, not for decades at a time as is common practice in the Northwest).
Extremely high concentrations for PCBs is more dangerous than anything we found looking at classrooms in the Northwest.
One reason for that is there’s no routine testing for those types of contaminants or other toxic materials. Most schools in Oregon and Washington rarely even get tests to make sure carbon dioxide levels are low and the classroom is getting the fresh air that children need.
So if the systems in place aren’t protecting students and teachers from harmful exposure, what can you do?
For a start, as part of our special project KCTS in Seattle produced an air quality checklist for your classroom.
Also today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released new guidelines to help schools protect their indoor environment while increasing energy efficiency.
Fewer than half the schools in the country have adopted indoor air quality management plans. Most are based on EPA guidelines, but many can be very basic, without requirements to test for things like PCBs. According to the EPA, that leaves about 60,000 schools and 25 million children across the country in schools unprotected by indoor air quality programs.
-- Tony Schick