As counties across California look to reopen schools for onsite instruction, education and public health officials need to ask themselves a question: Have they made sure all schools and classrooms have adequate fresh air ventilation to reduce coronavirus transmission? If the answer is no, students and staff will get sick.
Some help emerged from Sacramento last week when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 841, which will tackle a slice of this. The bill creates the School Reopening Ventilation and Energy Efficiency Verification and Repair Program, directing upward of $600 million in energy efficiency funding to test, adjust and repair heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems in public schools over the next three years.
State public school facilities are on the front lines of this pandemic. Physically closing school buildings in March was a necessary and swift tool for “extreme” physical distancing to combat COVID-19. People were instructed to keep space between each other and to sanitize frequently touched surfaces and our hands regularly. Six months into this pandemic, the community has learned more about the coronavirus and how it transmits. It is now known this virus can spread through the air.
With an airborne virus, the riskiest places for people are indoor environments with very poor fresh air ventilation. This describes thousands of public school classrooms across California.
In the Woodland District, there is over $10 million in unresolved HVAC-related expenses spanning over nine campuses, according to the 2011 Woodland Joint Unified School District Facility Master Plan.
At Whitehead Elementary, $35,000 was needed for new controls for their HVAC system. At Rhoda Maxwell Elementary, $142,436 was estimated for a multipurpose HVAC. Dingle Elementary School had a potential bill of $410,480 for a replacement HVAC at the permanent campus building, and Plainfield Elementary School needed around $539,140 to replace their HVAC throughout the campus,
Campus-wide HVAC interventions were and continue to be needed at Woodland Prairie Elementary for a cost of $1.338,708, Sci-Tech Academy for a cost of $554,344, Douglass Middle School for $1,446,075, Woodland High School for a total of $4,252,276, and Cache Creek High Schoool for $476,448.
It should be noted that these cost estimates given in the plan are nearly 10 years old and not an accurate estimation of current costs.
According to Woodland Superintendent Tom Pritchard, implementation is still ongoing toward completing the next master facility plan. The Board of Trustees has approved moving forward with hiring a firm, but the pandemic has made that difficult. At this time, there is no estimate as to when the updated plan will be completed.
The district is looking at ways to support the facilities during the pandemic and beyond.
“Nick Baral is working with his team to do what we can, including making minor repairs and maintenance of our current HVAC systems as well as pursuing higher quality filters,” Pritchard stated. “While we wait for possible Assembly Bill 841 funds, the district will be using its maintenance and operations budget to address any acute needs in the area of HCAV repair. Although this may only be a short-term solution, we have placed a facility bond on the ballot in November that would provide funds to address this very issue for the long-term.”
To reduce the risk of spread when someone with COVID-19 enters the school building, school districts are advised to increase levels of surface cleaning, ensuring frequent hand washing for students and staff, conducting daily symptom screening, requiring mask-wearing, employing space utilization to physically distance students and staff, and ensuring higher levels of indoor air ventilation and filtration.
But when the California Department of Education’s school reopening guidance to schools was written in June, it was not fully understood how pervasive airborne transmission is. Everybody thought the main way it spreads is by touching a doorknob that an infected person sneezed on. But the science is clearer every day. Surface transmission risk was exaggerated, and the airborne or aerosol risk was under-estimated.
In a July 2020 open letter to the Wolrd Health Organization, 239 scientists from around the world argued that mounting evidence supports high transmission through aerosol particles. The letter called on the WHO and other leading health entities to take airborne transmission more seriously and to adjust their recommendations accordingly.
Over the past decade, indoor air quality specialists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Davis have consistently found that many public school classrooms in California fail to meet fresh air ventilation standards.
In a joint 2020 study, Lawrence Berkeley and UC Davis researchers found that only about 15% of classrooms they studied met the state’s ventilation standard.
Left unaddressed, these findings call into question the wisdom of reopening schools for face-to-face instruction inside classrooms.
How did the world’s 6th largest economy find itself in this situation? In 2018, Stanford researchers reported that state funding for K-12 facilities has fallen dramatically since 2008, and wide disparities exist in school facility funding exist from school district to school districts that are related to the wealth of local communities. If you don’t properly maintain and upgrade buildings, problems occur.
The bill has come due for California to attend to its school facilities problems — problems that this pandemic has laid bare. A 2020 study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that statewide, 38% of students go to schools that do not meet the minimum facility standards.
The passage of AB 841 will help. But keep in mind that it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the needs out there; $600 million won’t go that far across California’s 10,000 schools and their countless buildings.