BREATHING SPACE
Class air quality in spotlight
With the Ontario government poised to announce its school reopening plan in the next few days, critics are watching for inclusion of a key safety measure to help protect students and staff from COVID -19.
Fresh indoor air.
This week the province's COVID -19 science advisory table joined the chorus of experts, education unions and parents calling for more attention to the importance of ventilation in preventing the transmission of the virus in schools.
The report said ensuring adequate air quality by upgrading HVAC systems was one of the permanent changes schools needed to make, along with vaccinations, excluding students and staff with COVID -19 symptoms from school, hand hygiene and cleaning.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce has acknowledged the importance of the issue and says he's proud of his government's investments to improve ventilation in schools and to provide portable air filters for some classrooms.
But critics say it's not enough and are calling for standards that would apply to all schools.
The Ontario government gave “best practice” guidance to school boards last year about how to improve ventilation and air quality. But it's difficult to get a full picture of what has been done and what still needs to be done at schools across the province. There's no consistency, either.
For example, Lecce points with approval to schools in Toronto, where portable air filters were purchased for every classroom. That's not the case at schools elsewhere.
“What we've seen so far are general guidelines and best practices, but not real standards,” said NDP MPP Marit Stiles, her party's education critic.
“We need the government to be clear on the outcomes for reporting, and we need to actually have assurances that each and every classroom that our kids will be in will meet those standards.
“Boards have been working very hard to try to do the best they can with what has to be pretty limited resources. It's pretty clear that we need to do more, and we need to do it very, very quickly.”
The science table report recommended a “systematic approach to identifying and prioritizing schools for ventilation upgrades.”
As a starting point, schools that don't meet the minimum ventilation guidelines from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) should be given priority for upgrades, the report said.
Schools could consider exceeding that ASHRAE standard in rooms where more aerosols are likely to be generated, such as music rooms, auditoriums, cafeterias and gyms, the report said.
The report also provided technical guidance.
Better ventilation alone won't prevent transmission of the virus, the report noted, but it's one of the key layers that work together to make schools healthier and to reduce the risk of infection.
Caitlin Clark, a spokesperson for Lecce, did not respond directly to questions about whether the province would implement the recommendations in the report, whether ventilation standards would be included in the school reopening plan and whether the government had identified how many schools now meet ASHRAE standards.
Clark said the government took the issue of air ventilation seriously and listed things that had already been done.
Those include $100 million provided for schools to make immediate improvements in ventilation systems and to buy air filters, and $450 million awarded through the Canada Infrastructure Program for 2,052 ventilation-related projects at 1,670 schools and childcares located in the same buildings. Many of those projects are being done this summer, including some at Ottawa school boards.
Ventilation or air quality improvements have been made at all schools, Clark said.
That could include installing higher-quality filters, recalibrating HVAC systems to increase the amount of outside air flow and repairing or replacing HVAC equipment.
Clark said 55,000 portable air filtration units had been purchased, with 25,000 of them at schools in Ottawa and the Greater Toronto Area. (There are 4,844 schools in Ontario.)
Part of the challenge is that little attention has been paid in any sector to the importance of indoor air quality, said Jeffrey Siegel, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto who specializes in the subject area.
Siegel is one of the co-authors of the science table report on school reopening.
It's complex. Calls to improve ventilation are “easy to state, harder to do, depending on the school,” Siegel said.
He believes schools should meet the ASHRAE standards and even exceed them during a pandemic. There are practical challenges. The ASHRAE standards are embedded in building codes for new structures, but there is no requirement that HVAC systems be continually upgraded, Siegel said.
“A school must comply with the ventilation standard in place at the time of construction. There is no (law requiring) continuing to meet the standard, and also the standard changes over time.”
Siegel also said he supported purchasing portable air filters for all classrooms, calling the idea a “no brainer.” The units clean the air and remove harmful particles.
The New York City public school system recently announced that every classroom would be equipped with two air purifiers in the fall.
Portable air filters are relatively cheap, Siegel said, at around $500, plus the cost of new filters — perhaps $200 a year.
They can be noisy and must be installed properly.
Siegel also said it would be helpful for Ontario to provide information to school boards about what
What we've seen so far are general guidelines and best practices, but not real standards.
devices worked to improve air quality and to provide training to building facility staff.
A wide variety of devices that companies claim improve air quality are aggressively marketed to schools, but many of them have no proven benefit, he said.