Making the Grade on Healthy Indoor Air
Healthy indoor air is a public health imperative, and schools are where we must ramp up action
by Liz Peters
In the recent IWBI webcast, From Classrooms to Communities: The Future of Healthy Indoor Air Policy and Advocacy, experts and innovators came together to explore how indoor air quality policy, technology and advocacy are reshaping the built environment, with a focus on the schools, a priority sector for driving action.
“What started as a weekend project spun completely out of control. Eleven years later, here we are.” – Liam Bates, CEO, Co-Founder, Kaiterra, explaining how and why he founded his company, Kaiterra, as a passion project focused on helping people breathe healthier indoor air.
“COVID forced people to understand that the places where we live, work, learn and play isn’t just a tagline–it’s vital for survival and human health.” – Jennifer Berthelot-Jelovic, Client Development Director, BranchPattern, underscoring a paradigm shift in how we think about health and well-being inside our buildings, where research shows people spend 90% of their lives.
“We can get a little more shoulder behind [modernizing our schools] and make sure we don’t miss a generation.” – Mary Filardo, Executive Director, 21st Century School Fund, emphasizing the urgency to make progress across our nation’s school facilities.
“The kids should be more important than screwing your outdoor air shut. We’ve got to figure out how to do better.” – Glenn Wilson, Applied Air Business Development Manager, Daikin Applied, illustrating that some school facilities are not optimizing for health when they should be.
Moderated by Jason Hartke, IWBI’s EVP of External Affairs and Global Advocacy, the session explored how advocacy, policy and technology are converging to make healthy air a reality–from schools to workplaces to community spaces. From cutting-edge IAQ data tools to policies driving investment in healthier learning environments, the discussion highlighted how schools can lead the way–and how public-private collaboration is spreading those benefits into workplaces and communities everywhere.
From personal passion to public impact
For Jennifer Berthelot-Jelovic of BranchPattern, the conversation starts at home. As a mother and longtime sustainability consultant, she’s seen firsthand how awareness can spark action. “When my teenage son turned on the exhaust fan above our gas stove after attending the WELL Healthy Homes Summit,” she shared, “I realized education is everything. We need to bring that same awareness into our schools.”
Standing shoulder to shoulder for schools
Mary Filardo, who founded the 21st Century School Fund more than 30 years ago, reminded everyone that America’s schools are massive and underfunded–and that our policy at all levels of government must match that reality. “Every community makes decisions about the conditions in their schools,” she said. “With the civic, education and industry sectors working together, we can get a little more shoulder behind this and make sure we don’t miss a generation.”
Filardo, the lead author of the next State of Our Schools report, which will be released later this year, shared that the annual gap in school infrastructure investment continues to grow at an alarming rate. She emphasized that while the challenge is seeming more insurmountable, there are significant opportunities to drive proven solutions, saying, “If we were doing [facility spending] smarter, holistically, the gap wouldn’t be so big.”
Innovation with heart
For Liam Bates of Kaiterra, the path to advocacy began with a personal story. When his now-wife’s asthma flared in a polluted city, he wanted to know what was in the air, but he couldn’t find any affordable or accessible ways to measure it. “I took on a small weekend project that spun completely out of control,” he laughed. “Eleven years later, we’re helping people make the invisible visible.”
As a call to action he urged stakeholders to do something, even if they can’t do everything, a great start being measuring. “Imagine if every school in the country had just one [indoor] air quality data point,” he said. “You’d immediately see which buildings are in crisis and which fixes cost nothing at all.”
Doing better by design
Glenn Wilson from Daikin Applied brought a technician’s perspective—and a dose of urgency. “I can’t count how many times I’ve been on a school roof and seen the fresh air dampers screwed shut,” he said, a cost-saving action that compromises proper ventilation by reducing the amount of outdoor air into the building. “Kids should be more important than saving a few dollars. We’ve got to figure out how to do better.”
The path ahead
The conversation returned time and time to the theme that our school facilities, and more importantly, the children, teachers and administrators inside them, are too important to continue to underfund our school infrastructure. To move forward and spark action, the panel called for smarter policy, more creative and scalable funding and cross-sector collaboration.
As Hartke summarized, “We’ve spent decades investing [billions] in energy efficiency. It’s time we invest in health with the same intensity.”
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