Green Schools - Better Air
The built environment often grapples with the technical mechanics of indoor air quality, yet implementing these systems in underfunded public sectors creates a distinctly complex operational challenge.
In the latest episode of the Air Quality Matters podcast, we address this systemic reality with LISA GREENFIELD , Regional Programme Manager for the Midwest for the Centre for Green Schools at the USGBC. With a twenty-year background as an educator, Lisa Greenfield brings a highly specialised, lived perspective to building physics and environmental performance. Her current professional focus centres on mitigating the environmental risks present in ageing, poorly ventilated school infrastructures across the United States.
She specialises in developing actionable, scalable frameworks for facility managers and administrative boards, attempting to bridge the staggering $90 billion annual funding deficit that severely limits preventative mechanical upgrades. By deploying strategic regional fellowships, open-source technical toolkits, and robust peer-to-peer engineering networks, Greenfield helps school districts transition from reactive, emergency-driven maintenance to strategic, health-focused building management.
How can school districts navigate the $90 billion funding gap to implement effective indoor air quality strategies?
She notes that chronic underfunding paralyses school boards, forcing facility teams to allocate capital to emergency interventions rather than preventive mechanical maintenance. To bypass this financial bottleneck, the Centre for Green Schools provides a customizable toolkit and pairs districts with a peer network of facilities experts who have successfully executed low-cost environmental upgrades. The discussion detailed a specific methodology for securing executive buy-in by translating air quality improvements into direct fiscal benefits, such as reduced health insurance premiums and lowered substitute teacher expenditures.
What role does environmental monitoring play in balancing healthy school environments with energy efficiency mandates?
Continuous air quality monitoring provides facility managers with empirical data to pinpoint localised ventilation failures, preventing the costly and inefficient over-ventilation of unoccupied or adequately performing classrooms. Lisa points out that this baseline data empowers technical teams to target their limited budgets where interventions are needed, while also delivering significant energy savings. The conversation detailed how analysing carbon dioxide and particulate matter trends allows building operators to identify misaligned heating and cooling patterns, delivering a distinct return on investment through optimised HVAC scheduling.
Expert Perspectives
A central critique raised by Lisa during the episode focused on the industry's systemic failure to view indoor air quality as a primary factor in occupational health and talent retention within the education sector. She forcefully argued that the physical degradation of the teaching workforce due to sick building syndrome is a highly predictable, mathematically measurable, and completely preventable driver of teacher attrition. Rather than treating ventilation parameters as abstract facility management issues, she positions environmental quality as a foundational workplace right that directly dictates district-wide operational stability, cognitive performance, and chronic student absenteeism.
Furthermore, she criticised the standard fiscal objections to mechanical upgrades, noting that the long-term financial drain of substitute teachers, elevated healthcare premiums, and accelerated pathogen transmission far outweighs the capital expenditure required for baseline HVAC optimisation. Lisa summarised the severity of this infrastructure impact on educators and operators alike, stating, "The quality of your indoor environment affects everything... if we can do all the things that we can to help prevent the attrition, we're doing good things because good teachers are hard to find."
The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with
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The One Take Podcast in Partnership with
SafeTraces - Inbiot - Farmowood - Ei Electronics - iAir Group - Zehnder
Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.
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0:00 - Welcome back to Air Quality Matters.
0:02 - I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Lisa Greenfield.
0:07 - Lisa is Regional Programme Manager for the Midwest for the Centre of Green Schools at the USGBC.
0:15 - Lisa has had a career as an educator in the school system in K through 12 and since her time in education, Lisa has become a prominent voice in indoor air quality.
0:26 - She
0:27 - dedicated to educating stakeholders on the importance of healthy IAQ and the significant benefits it offers to students, staff and the entire school district.
0:40 - The Centre for Green Schools at the USGBC is a global leader in advancing green schools and providing the resources needed to create sustainable, healthy, resilient and equitable learning environments.
0:54 - And more recently, they have really focused in on indoor air quality.
0:59 - Coming from a family of educators, Lisa has a profound respect for the field.
1:05 - She actively works to build strong relationships with school districts, helping them to achieve their goals in energy efficiency and indoor air quality.
1:16 - Guided by the principle, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, she prioritises building trust and nurturing partnerships to help them achieve their goals.
1:30 - It's fascinating to hear from someone so passionate about making a difference in this space, who at the same time literally has education running through their veins.
1:41 - It's a really down-to-earth conversation about what the centre is up to, the challenges it faces and the benefits it can bring, not only to children, but to teachers for whom schools are their workplace.
1:55 - This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Man Hummel, Particles Plus, Aco, Eurovent Lindab and S&P Ventilation.
2:05 - and simply would not be possible without them.
2:07 - Please do check them out in the show notes and at airqualitymatters.net.
2:12 - This is a conversation with Lisa Greenfield.
2:30 - We often talk about air quality being good for schools and that we know what we're doing technically a lot of the time for schools.
2:39 - We know what the solutions are.
2:42 - But all of this stuff is very easy to say and very hard to do in practice in the real world, in schools, with all of the funding challenges and the technical challenges and the staffing challenges they have.
2:53 - And, you know, life's hard, particularly in the education system.
2:58 - So I know a lot of the work that you're doing is about building these roadmaps out, building these processes out for schools to start going on this journey.
3:07 - in much the same way as the US Green Building Council did many years ago with green schools and their green school journey.
3:14 - So I'm fascinated to chat to you about that really.
3:17 - When you're approaching schools of all descriptions, what are you kind of thinking about when you're thinking about what this roadmap looks like for them?
3:28 - Well, one of the tools that we have is our Energy Efficiency Indoor Air Quality Toolkit.
3:37 - Let me just show you a little hard copy here.
3:40 - But if you go to centerforgreenschools.org, you can find a download for it.
3:45 - And the beautiful thing is it's customizable.
3:48 - So a school district can utilize it, make some changes, make it their own, and put a plan together.
3:57 - So I think one of the biggest challenges for schools is they say, like, we don't know where to start.
4:03 - So that toolkit is our map.
4:06 - It's our roadmap.
4:07 - And the exciting part about this is that we're bringing on 53 fellows, which is our biggest cohort yet,
4:19 - for indoor air quality.
4:21 - And so public school districts across the country will be coming together, learning from the Center for Green Schools.
4:31 - And we're gonna be building out that network.
4:35 - So we are building an infrastructure of peer networking.
4:41 - And a lot of these school districts have already,
4:46 - have already gone down the road of improvements and have navigated it and can be guides to those that haven't.
4:55 - So one of the major goals of what we're working on is making those connections, because right now, you know, every state is different in what the requirements are.
5:07 - So some states are ahead of others.
5:09 - Some school districts are ahead of others.
5:12 - And, of course, financing is.
5:14 - and funding have a lot to do with that.
5:19 - So when we come to school districts, we're offering our help, our services, our support, and there's no cost involved to it, which is a beautiful thing.
5:29 - And a lot of school districts think like, how can you possibly help us without charging us anything?
5:37 - Well, that's the beautiful thing is that we,
5:41 - We're here just to be a service to them and it's no cost.
5:45 - So we work with a lot of partners and they have provided wonderful supports.
5:53 - We have a great community.
5:56 - professional network that oversees the work that we're doing.
6:00 - A lot of them have been guests on your podcast before.
6:05 - And so it's pretty wonderful to have all of those supports.
6:09 - But, you know, when you think about schools, you think about the lack of funding, you know, we have the state of our schools 2025 report.
6:21 - We have almost a $90 billion funding gap.
6:25 - just in the United States every year for our schools.
6:29 - Our schools are the second largest infrastructure in our nation, second to our roads and highways, which is kind of ironic that we're talking about this roadmap because here we are not funding the roads and highways, right, of our
6:56 - and we're ready to lead folks to the help that they need.
7:02 - And what I thought was really interesting when you started there was you mentioned this peer network and fellowships.
7:07 - So it sounds to me that it's clear that one of the things that the education system needs and schools needs is real people who understand this process, who have either trodden this journey or have got the experience to bring people on that journey.
7:27 - and can help lead by example.
7:29 - So that seems like it's a really key part of the strategy.
7:35 - I was only talking about this to somebody the other day.
7:37 - Often in life, all you really want to know is what good looks like.
7:40 - Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel.
7:42 - You just need somebody to hold your hand, often point you in the right direction, give you the reassurance when you need it, have lived experience of being through these things.
7:51 - Yes.
7:52 - That's what a lot of this is about, isn't it?
7:54 - It is, yes, definitely.
7:56 - Yeah, it's very exciting.
7:58 - It's a very exciting time.
8:04 - I'm always conscious when we talk about these big projects that we say things like air quality in India and air quality in schools or roadmaps for sustainable construction.
8:18 - And we're talking about huge, great, big, giant things, complex things.
8:23 - Yeah.
8:26 - And even in the area that you work in, I know there are huge differences between schools in small school districts in rural parts of America versus big school infrastructures and school districts in cities.
8:38 - Like there's a huge cross section of K through 12 schools in the US states, as we're talking about here.
8:44 - So this thing has to be able to be fit for purpose in a whole broad spectrum of environments.
8:51 - Yes, definitely.
8:52 - And really, our goal is to reach all schools, but specifically schools that are Title I, so that have a higher free and reduced lunch program attendance.
9:09 - Also, our rural school districts, they often have very few resources, and our tribal schools.
9:18 - One of the things that people often forget is that our schools are mostly funded by our real estate tax base.
9:27 - And so depending on where you live, that factors in to how much money your school district is going to receive because only a small percentage is coming from federal funding.
9:40 - That's really interesting.
9:40 - And I heard somebody else talk to me about this a year or so ago.
9:46 - And that's a specific case in the US, isn't it?
9:50 - That schools very much are influenced by the value of real estate in a particular area.
10:00 - So you can get this driven inequity in the school system based on your postcode effectively.
10:07 - Yeah.
10:08 - Yes.
10:09 - When I was attending Drake University, I was a sociology major.
10:13 - And of course, being in education, I took the sociology of education.
10:19 - And that's one of the things that I learned.
10:22 - And a lot of people don't realize that, but it is what causes the huge difference in our school quality.
10:30 - And, you know, when you think about that funding gap, that funding gap ultimately falls down to deferred maintenance.
10:38 - Because those funds often go to pay staff, right?
10:42 - Prior to anything else being done.
10:45 - And then then the building tends to be instead of investing money in preventative maintenance strategies that they so desperately need, they're having to throw money at emergency situations.
10:58 - And those often cost more than preventative maintenance four times or more.
11:03 - So it's a big problem.
11:06 - So perhaps for people that aren't familiar with what you were just talking about then, can you explain a little bit what a Title I school is?
11:17 - I think people will understand what rural schools are and perhaps the challenges for that and perhaps also some of the other things that you were talking about.
11:26 - But Title I is obviously a specific category, I guess, of something.
11:30 - Yes, it's typically lower income.
11:34 - So fewer resources.
11:37 - So that's what Title I is.
11:39 - Because schools that are Title I get some additional funding because of they're needing that extra support due to the socioeconomic standing of the community, typically.
11:55 - And from what you're saying, and I think most people, I think, can systems think themselves into this picture that...
12:03 - When you don't have, when there is a huge funding gap in a school, the focus has to be on having teachers in the first place, keeping the lights on, you know, some basic safety measures, but very quickly, very fundamental things that keep schools performing well.
12:24 - start to fall away and i think that you know in many parts of europe the us and all over the world people are very familiar with having to contribute to even do things like provide school books and and pencils and art gear and all of the things that you would imagine a state would be in a position to support so this is not an unusual story i don't think for people globally um
12:51 - But that's a real, so I think that's a challenge that resonates, I think, beyond just the US is this idea that,
13:00 - We've got an infrastructure that's so critical for humans, for kids that spend such a lot of time in these spaces.
13:09 - They don't have the agency often to control these spaces.
13:12 - They don't get to choose whether they're in a classroom with bad lighting or bad air quality.
13:16 - You know, that's just where they go.
13:20 - So this stuff's really important to get right, isn't it?
13:24 - Absolutely.
13:24 - You know, you think about how many hours a child spends at school
13:30 - And here in the US, we have before and after school care that often happens at the school.
13:36 - So not only are they in school, they're six to seven hours every day, but they're coming an hour, an hour and a half before school starts and staying an hour and a half after.
13:45 - So you do the math, but that's up to 10 hours a day, you're in that school.
13:51 - So depending on the air quality in that school, that's how often,
13:59 - they are breathing that air so many hours in a day, comparable to the teachers that spend a lot of time there.
14:06 - But, you know, one of the things we don't think about in our underserved communities is that a lot of our students are coming from environments.
14:17 - And you talk a lot about that in your book, which was amazing, by the way.
14:22 - Thank you so much for that.
14:24 - Yeah.
14:26 - you talk about their home environments and when they're coming from home environments that, um, are not being cared for, depending on who their, you know, property manager is, that sort of thing.
14:40 - Um, they're already coming with challenged, um, lungs, right.
14:45 - Challenged immune systems.
14:47 - Uh, I taught headstart and early headstart for 10 years, which is a, um,
14:53 - federally funded early childhood program here in the United States.
14:56 - And it's for mostly under served low income families.
15:02 - And one of the things we had to do was go do home visits twice a year.
15:07 - And so we got to go to these children's homes and see the environment that they live in.
15:13 - And we often forget that they're not just coming to school, you know,
15:19 - And, you know, it's not a big deal if the air quality isn't great, they're going to go back home.
15:23 - What if they go back home and the air quality at home is worse than it is at school or simply not good?
15:30 - Right.
15:30 - And that is pretty common.
15:33 - So we have to be thinking about that.
15:35 - You know, when we're thinking about indoor air quality in schools, they kids don't have a choice.
15:41 - And I often go back to this.
15:43 - They don't vote.
15:45 - So they don't have a voice, right?
15:48 - And one of the things that I really took away from my years in teaching was I wanted to be a voice for them because I saw some of the situations that they were coming from and taught in some of the classrooms that were not the healthiest.
16:08 - And, you know, this is like, it's a crucial conversation that we need to have because,
16:13 - You know, we have federal oversight of our school lunch programs.
16:19 - We have oversight of water, so there's no lead in it.
16:23 - But yet here we have the one thing that they process, you know, what, 30,000 plus breaths a day.
16:31 - They breathe a lot during the day.
16:34 - You know, we eat a few times a day.
16:36 - We drink, you know.
16:38 - often during the day, but like nobody breathes, everybody breathes all day, every day, and you don't have a choice where you're doing that.
16:46 - Yeah.
16:46 - And, you know, I think with, I think with schools and a friend of mine, Adam Taylor, put this very powerfully to me one day was that, you know, and I think we recognize this with so many other aspects of kids, like long-term health and wellbeing, a school,
17:04 - is the one place that the state can control an environment of where they may not be able to in the environment outside of school.
17:11 - And a school may be the only place that a child is that is warm or cool or has food or is safe.
17:23 - Yes.
17:24 - You know, I think we fundamentally recognize the importance of that.
17:28 - Hence school food programs and water programs and, you know, advocacy for children that are in difficult situations.
17:35 - I think we fundamentally get that.
17:37 - But yet I don't think we've quite got that with air quality yet.
17:40 - I think that's been a missing piece.
17:43 - And I think when it's put in that way to people, you see the light bulbs go on.
17:53 - to be in an environment that is an impact to its long-term health and wellbeing from an air quality perspective.
17:58 - And we know that's so important in early development.
18:02 - Yeah, absolutely.
18:03 - And you know, the, um, you know, there's one in 13 students in the U S have asthma and asthma is exacerbated by your environment.
18:16 - Um, but, uh,
18:19 - You know, this is a huge predictor of absenteeism.
18:24 - So when you think about chronic absenteeism, which is like 10% or more, um,
18:34 - Just one or two times a month being absent, those are cumulative.
18:40 - So over the years, it continues to become more of a setback.
18:46 - And so by the time they get around to high school, they're so far behind that they typically fail to graduate.
18:53 - And I'm not saying this is true for just asthmatics, but I'm saying for any reason being absent
19:01 - you know, pathogens in the air.
19:04 - There's a lot of, you know, measles are making a comeback.
19:08 - 250 million children are going into kindergarten who are not immunized or are in our school system that are not, have not taken the vaccine.
19:18 - And so another reason to be very mindful of air quality measles is the most contagious airborne pathogen.
19:28 - And so keeping that in mind, you know, people kind of think like, oh, it's just like chickenpox, you know, it's a rite of passage.
19:38 - And not to get into, you know, vaccines or anything, but just simply saying the risk is becoming greater, whooping cough.
19:48 - But there are long term effects that come from these things and from exposure.
19:57 - you have poor air quality, you have asthma, come to a school that has poor air quality, that exacerbates it.
20:04 - These little lungs that are developing don't have a chance.
20:09 - And they are stunted for a lifetime.
20:11 - There are often long-term health consequences that come from
20:16 - this exposure.
20:17 - COPD is one of them.
20:19 - So I preface, I'm not a doctor, but I did teach and I know that, you know, I had to learn how to give treatments to kids who were asthmatic.
20:30 - It was very common.
20:32 - So being able to reduce that
20:36 - only gives them a better long-term prognosis.
20:40 - And, you know, it really affects the trajectory of their life.
20:42 - If you think about how often they're gone and how it compounds and ultimately leads to not graduating, well, that leads to
20:52 - earnings being a lot lower as well.
20:55 - So I come back to like the sociology of it all, right?
20:59 - It's all interconnected.
21:00 - Yeah.
21:01 - Yeah, absolutely.
21:02 - Yeah.
21:02 - This thing compounds over a lifetime and into the district itself and perpetuates a lot of the triple jeopardy that we have within those
21:11 - uh poorly served communities in the first place and you mentioned infection risk there as well and of course one of the some of the great work the likes of plum stone from the safer air project has been showing is that this is an accessibility challenge as well for a lot of kids there are there are a lot of kids that a classroom presents a really unique infection risk uh
21:33 - problem challenge for them both for them directly if they're vulnerable themselves but even for family members if they're bringing that risk back home and the same for teachers as well of course and you know I think at this stage we move heaven and earth if a child is disabled and needs wheelchair access or is you know visually impaired or hearing impaired we do a lot of things to help support children or try to at least and
22:00 - We forget that air quality is an accessibility issue for a lot of kids as well.
22:05 - And we're all one diagnosis away from a cancer diagnosis or an infection risk or long COVID.
22:13 - And all of a sudden, these classrooms present a real challenge.
22:18 - Yes, and I think that's one of the reasons why we're here today is bringing a voice so that indoor air quality can be heard.
22:29 - You're bringing it to light, right?
22:33 - And through doing work like this,
22:37 - People are seeing, right, what needs to be done.
22:43 - But we also need them to really consider how we're all affected.
22:48 - And I think it kind of ties in with special, you know, you were talking about accessibility, the Americans with Disability Act, with children, it's the IDEA, which says this child deserves
23:08 - to attend school in.
23:09 - And, you know, if we, I know Plum is amazing.
23:14 - And one of the things she talks about is making every workspace and classroom accessible, right?
23:22 - To, you know,
23:24 - accommodate everyone.
23:26 - And we do that with people with disabilities, with ramps and elevators, but kind of like kids who maybe have severe ADHD, you look at them and you're like, they look normal.
23:40 - um everything must be okay well it's kind of like that with our air quality right i don't smell anything off everything must be okay it's not we know that yeah so i think you know this is a well trodden path in our conversations and conversations on this podcast i think about why this stuff matters to kids but at some point
24:07 - as we've said at the very beginning of the podcast, this stuff's easy to say, very hard to correct and no more so than in a school environment where there's lack of funding.
24:17 - Um,
24:19 - practically like meat on the bone stuff here where when you're starting to look at okay we want to actually have an impact here you say right okay we need a network of fellowships of people that that can be gone to to seek advice from that can stand up and do town halls and go into go into schools and so on
24:45 - you then start unpacking what that roadmap actually starts to look like for a school.
24:50 - And the first thing often you ask is, who's the customer?
24:54 - Who are the stakeholders here that I need to be talking about?
24:59 - What's your perspective on that?
25:00 - When you're looking at schools, how would you start to break down who the stakeholders actually are in this space?
25:08 - Yeah.
25:08 - Mm hmm.
25:09 - Yeah.
25:10 - So the decision makers and then the implementers.
25:14 - And so you have the board and the superintendent, and those are your decision makers.
25:20 - They all have to be in agreement, but they often will take recommendations and feedback from your facilities manager, your operations manager, who's going to be the one implementing these strategies.
25:33 - And so everybody needs to be, um,
25:37 - on the same page, have the buy in.
25:40 - And what what we found is that
25:46 - We're not having to convince these school district leaders that they need help in improving indoor air quality.
25:52 - They know that.
25:54 - So those are the folks that we're reaching, I would say, most because they're ready to receive it.
26:02 - We don't have to convince them.
26:04 - So bringing the opportunity has, you know, we had an overwhelming number of applicants for this fellowship, which was amazing.
26:13 - So we know that they're ready to make those changes and, you know, having the buy-in is crucial.
26:21 - I'll be speaking along with Lisa Gebhardt with the American Lung Association in Wisconsin in November.
26:32 - at the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, where we'll talk about buy-in.
26:38 - And one of the superintendents from a school district in Wisconsin will be speaking on that and how crucial it is.
26:46 - And one of the things that the fellows had to submit with our application was a letter of support from their direct report.
26:55 - So, so with having that, there is buy in already, which is beautiful.
27:05 - So it's the best starting point we could ask for.
27:08 - And, you know, the more success that is happening in this space,
27:14 - the more the ripple effect will happen.
27:17 - So I'm, you know, excuse me.
27:21 - I think that this is, you know, just a wonderful opportunity for other school districts to see it can be done.
27:28 - And, and here's how it was done.
27:31 - And we're here to help you do the same thing.
27:35 - That's interesting.
27:35 - So the kind of the decision makers, the boards, the superintendents, the idea of clean air for schools, they're fundamentally getting.
27:48 - So your feeling generally is this is resonating with that cohort of people and stakeholders.
27:56 - I would say a majority of them understand it, especially our fellows.
28:01 - They they definitely do get it.
28:04 - And so, yes, but but you have to have everybody on board, you know, and that's the beautiful part about the fellowship is bringing those folks into this space.
28:17 - They're going to be the teachers for the next round, you know, and.
28:24 - It's only going to continue to grow that network where oftentimes I think school districts feel very isolated simply because they lack funding.
28:37 - And you are, when you're a school district, you're kind of your own little world.
28:41 - And so to be able to branch out and have the support of others is going to be wonderful.
28:48 - And this is kind of like our
28:50 - our opportunity to build those highways and roads across the country.
28:54 - Yeah.
28:56 - And I'd like to kind of talk about some of those stakeholders individually, because I appreciate that we need to kind of bring them all together.
29:02 - It doesn't, none of this happens in isolation with one cohort versus another, but they all have very different worldviews, I suspect of what their challenges in a school environment is.
29:14 - And you mentioned, you know,
29:16 - The kind of the management class of schools, I guess, for want of a better word, the superintendents, the boards, the people that are making the funding decisions, the infrastructure decisions and so on.
29:30 - you mentioned the kind of the operational side of it, the organisations whose responsibility is to manage those buildings.
29:37 - If it's a big school district, I'm guessing it's kind of facility management businesses, but it might just be local maintenance people or small teams of, you know, the class all the way down to the janitor, right?
29:50 - Yeah.
29:50 - And the guy maintaining a boiler in rural United States somewhere or other, Iowa.
29:57 - Yeah, exactly.
29:57 - Yeah.
29:59 - But there are also other cohorts here, and I think this is what the USGBC has been very good at in the past, is understanding that you also then need to bring the workers, the teachers on board.
30:10 - These are the people that teach this to the kids.
30:15 - The kids is the other part of this, the learners in those space.
30:18 - And we...
30:19 - We know that they're an incredibly important cohort.
30:22 - They bring this stuff home to their parents.
30:24 - You know, I think all of us that have had children and been involved in green schools initiative somewhere or other have been lambasted for not recycling by our kids or whatever it is they've brought home from school.
30:38 - You know, they're incredibly, they get this stuff very quickly, kids.
30:41 - So they're in a really important cohort.
30:44 - And then, of course, the parents, you know, the people who are making decisions about where their kids go in some cases, but also helping advocate for their children.
30:53 - So there's a huge community, actually, of stakeholders when you start breaking it down, isn't it?
31:00 - Yeah, absolutely.
31:01 - And we're we're all affected.
31:04 - Like you said earlier, kids go home and they bring that stuff home with them.
31:09 - Aggregated access.
31:13 - Aggravated asthma can go home and the parent's up with the child all night doing breathing treatments.
31:20 - The parent can't go to work.
31:23 - They're having to choose between paying for groceries or staying home with their sick child.
31:31 - This is a huge socioeconomic issue that goes far beyond just the walls of school.
31:39 - Parents are amazing advocates, and I often recommend them attending board meetings.
31:48 - Here where I live, you can ask for three minutes in front of the board and
31:54 - And you can sign up ahead of time.
31:57 - You get your time, you get to talk to them about why indoor air quality is important in schools.
32:03 - Ask them questions, you know, what have you done to improve indoor air quality in our schools?
32:09 - And, you know, a lot of folks have COVID fatigue, like we don't have to worry about this anymore, COVID's over, which we know it's not.
32:19 - But as a former educator,
32:22 - and a parent now of grown children, I can tell you, um, these issues were all there before COVID.
32:31 - Now COVID is just the additional problem, right?
32:35 - And so from being in the classroom, uh, as a, as a teacher, I can tell you that, um, you know,
32:44 - the illness spreads rapidly when it starts.
32:47 - And, you know, if you've ever been a teacher in sixth grade, you'll know that the ASHRAE standard for ventilation was first created by the presence of body odor.
33:00 - And I can tell you that sixth grade where I taught was underventilated.
33:06 - Yeah, I can imagine.
33:08 - And there's a reason why we call schools Petri dishes.
33:11 - You know, I mean, every parent knows that that autumn season of sending your kids back to school, you know, you're just going to spend six to eight weeks with various colds and flus running through the house.
33:22 - And, you know, as much as it is important for children to be exposed to
33:28 - the real world.
33:29 - I mean, that's partly why we socialize them, right?
33:33 - Right.
33:33 - Like dogs, you know, we need them to go out there into the real world and experience stuff and catch stuff.
33:41 - There is too much of that in school.
33:43 - So instinctively we know this isn't just a COVID-related problem.
33:46 - But you mentioned that COVID fatigue.
33:49 - Yeah.
33:49 - Yeah.
33:50 - Have you, in your role now, had experience talking to each of those kind of cohorts, the boards, the FM businesses and the operators, the workers, the kids, the parents?
34:07 - Are you now having those direct conversations and hearing what's resonating with them, where the resistance is?
34:17 - Because often I think there's as much to learn in...
34:20 - the no's, the soft no's and the hard no's in this as there is the successes.
34:25 - Yeah.
34:26 - So I'm fascinated if that's the case, if you're starting to have those conversations, because I think that's what particularly listeners are experiencing out there as well is, you know, say, for example, the boards and the governors.
34:38 - What are you hearing back from them as a stakeholder group when you're starting to bring up something like air quality in schools?
34:47 - Well, what we're learning is the no is typically fiscally based, right?
34:57 - I mean, who doesn't want their children and educators to be working in a healthy environment with good air quality?
35:05 - They do.
35:07 - You know, the funding is the, is the no, the lack of funding is the no.
35:11 - So when we come in, you know, here's the thing that we can offer.
35:15 - We can offer a roadmap with the toolkit and we can start addressing the lowest hanging fruit, which is often just
35:23 - ventilation and filtration can make huge improvements in an indoor environment just by making some simple adjustments there.
35:34 - So then we start to talk about, OK.
35:38 - all the benefits that come from improving indoor air quality, which are a ton are fiscal, right?
35:46 - Lower health insurance premiums, which the board loves that.
35:50 - We're gonna save on the bottom line because we're not gonna have as many of our staff members out sick utilizing the services, the doctor, the medication, hospitalizations, or their dependents.
36:06 - And so looking at it like that, but also it costs money to have teachers being absent.
36:14 - You know, they're paying their sick pay, but they're also having to pay a substitute teacher to come in.
36:20 - So when you look at the numbers on a grand scale,
36:25 - it is impactful.
36:28 - And that's just the fiscal benefits.
36:30 - And then we start to talk about the learning benefits, you know, the increased cognition, teacher productivity, all of the things that come along with that are so beneficial to improving indoor air quality.
36:47 - And it doesn't have to be a complete system overhaul.
36:50 - It can just be those simple first steps
36:53 - and making those initial changes.
36:56 - It doesn't have to be scary.
36:58 - There's a lot of school districts that have already done it that we've been working with for many years now, making those improvements.
37:06 - So it is possible.
37:08 - And I think, you know, kind of taking that fear away of, look, we're not going to come in here.
37:13 - And, you know, I think they're afraid of like, we don't know if we want to know what's going on in here because we don't have any money to fix it.
37:21 - And that's often, you know, a common concern.
37:25 - And it's like here, nobody's trying to nail a school district to say like, you guys are bad.
37:31 - Your air quality is terrible.
37:34 - No, but you have to understand it to be able to improve it.
37:38 - And so I think that people under people appreciate that transparency.
37:48 - And, you know, you think about liability wise.
37:52 - They can be concerned about liability, but the concern should be more on the liability of not doing anything.
37:59 - I mean, you may not be able to fix everything right away, but you can start by making small changes and having that transparency with your teachers, your educators, your parents, so that they know that you honestly are doing things to make changes.
38:19 - Yeah.
38:21 - Oftentimes there's a lot of grace there and understanding that it takes time to get to the end point.
38:28 - And I think everybody in that ecosystem instinctively know where schools are coming from here because we're all being asked to put our hands in our pockets as individuals to pay for what we consider basics in the first instance.
38:41 - So we know there's no money in the system.
38:44 - I love that kind of risk statement of, am I doing everything that can be reasonably expected of me to mitigate this risk?
38:52 - That's all you can ever ask of a risk situation.
38:57 - And I think everybody recognised that no school can just throw millions at state-of-the-art HVAC systems on day one.
39:05 - It's an unfixable problem in the first instance, but...
39:09 - at a strategic level, those conversations you're having with them, you're laying out, you know, the benefits.
39:16 - I mean, I'm assuming in the States, schools are measured on performance and results and so on.
39:23 - And air quality is one of those things that affects that metric.
39:27 - And all the kids are going to do is turn up and breathe to realise it.
39:30 - You know, I had this conversation with a teacher the other day, the amount of money that...
39:35 - gets poured into teaching for teachers to go away and learn how to be better teachers, to get better results with the kids or a new IT system or new teaching method or whatever.
39:46 - Whereas ventilation, literally all the kids have got to do is turn up and breathe to receive the benefit of that fixed.
39:54 - Yes.
39:55 - You know, and I was thinking about this earlier, you know, how, how many times have you heard somebody say like, I'm going to go step outside and get some fresh air.
40:05 - And it's like, well, you need to do that, why?
40:09 - Why?
40:09 - Because you're not feeling clear headed.
40:11 - You're feeling claustrophobic, you're feeling overwhelmed.
40:14 - And what do you do?
40:15 - You go outside and you get some fresh air, hopefully it's fresh, and you feel more oxygenated.
40:22 - You feel clearer, you feel ready to go back and start at it, right?
40:28 - It's not coincidental.
40:30 - And so when you think about that, it's like, oh,
40:34 - Maybe I should try that more often.
40:37 - Or when you're in your car driving and you're getting sleepy because you had it on recirculate, open those windows.
40:44 - And it's amazing how you all of a sudden you start to feel a little more awake, even without blasting Van Halen.
40:52 - I'm smiling because I imagine if it was me, that statement would be me stepping away from the kids for 10 minutes.
40:58 - So I didn't murder them.
41:00 - I'm just going to go.
41:01 - I'm just going to go and get some fresh air kids for 10 minutes.
41:04 - I need to step away.
41:05 - I'm just going to step away for five minutes.
41:08 - Yes.
41:08 - Yes.
41:08 - Fresh air does amazing things for us.
41:12 - Do you find yourself engaging with the FM and the operational cohort in that stakeholder group yet?
41:19 - Yeah, very much.
41:21 - What are the kind of things you're hearing from them?
41:22 - Because they have a very particular worldview as well.
41:25 - And often they're the poor souls that have been trying to hold a school together with sticking plaster and masking tape for the last 15 years.
41:34 - Duct tape, yes.
41:35 - Yeah, yeah.
41:36 - Yeah.
41:37 - You know, it depends, definitely depends on the school district.
41:40 - Some school districts are super supportive of their facilities managers and say, you go take it.
41:47 - Huntsville City Schools, they do an amazing job, but they have an amazing doctor.
41:54 - He oversees operations and they do amazing work because they've allowed him
42:00 - to take over, he's been very much involved in indoor air quality, understanding it, how to improve it, you know, upgrading older facilities, being proactive in building of the new facilities.
42:17 - All of those things can factor in.
42:19 - And so what we're finding as we're out at conferences
42:24 - is when we can reach the facilities manager and talk to them and understand where they're coming from, since they're the ones that are running the show, basically, when it comes to the building itself, they're the expert.
42:38 - And the expert needs to be the one who consults the decision makers on, you know, what's being spent and decisions being made on, you know, capital improvements.
42:50 - So,
42:52 - Yeah, really interesting.
42:53 - And...
42:55 - I think particularly in the cohort of schools that you're dealing with as well, often we're dealing with very simple buildings, which means often the levers that we can pull to affect a better outcome in those spaces is understanding the environment, opening windows or closing them at the appropriate time, using the HVAC system at a very basic level in the right way, at a very basic level understanding when filters might need replacing.
43:24 - really bootstrap stuff and requires agency, which means for success here, I guess you have to engage with the users of those spaces as well, that some of this stuff within this roadmap, we can talk about strategic investment in schools and better strategic operational management of those spaces, but often what we're talking about here is awareness and fundamental use of the building as it is.
43:52 - So I guess a lot of those conversations are with the stakeholders of the actual users of those spaces, the teachers and the kids and the principals and the people in the schools themselves.
44:03 - Yes.
44:04 - One of the things that I've really noticed is in Virginia, the state of Virginia, they have a new expectation for schools to have a certain indoor air quality.
44:20 - And the schools say, well, we don't have funding to do that.
44:24 - And so what's interesting is, though, like here in Iowa, we have radon legislation for testing radon in schools.
44:36 - And that only happened because we had a teacher who.
44:40 - advocated for this law who developed lung cancer.
44:44 - Radon's the second leading cause of lung cancer.
44:48 - And, you know, she lost her battle because she was a 30-year school teacher, you know, that had been exposed.
44:56 - And so...
44:58 - When you have that in place, when there are requirements in place, the money typically follows it to help supplement.
45:07 - And, you know, just from the school districts that are working in those environments where there is the expectation set, um,
45:15 - then there's typically funding that starts to follow that because we know schools don't have that money.
45:21 - So how are they going to get to that end point?
45:26 - I've just seen the movement happen when the expectation is put up there.
45:29 - It's kind of like with students, right?
45:31 - You got to put your, the learning goal up here, they're never going to reach it.
45:35 - They're never going to make progress.
45:36 - And so I kind of, I see that as,
45:41 - You know, we need more standards in place, more legislation in place.
45:46 - I know a lot of people are like, oh, no more, no more government.
45:50 - But when you think about it, we have that for almost everything.
45:54 - We have the structure, right?
45:56 - Like we talked about school food programs, but nothing for the indoor air quality.
46:01 - So when we have the expectations, then they ultimately have to be met.
46:07 - And then, well...
46:10 - magically starts to happen when it has to be done, you find a way, right?
46:15 - You find a way.
46:16 - Yeah, it's interesting you say that about the standards.
46:19 - I mean, ultimately, what we've been talking about here is the mechanics of trying to improve schools.
46:25 - But at some point, you've got a
46:29 - and draw a line in the sand and say, what is a good outcome?
46:34 - And you can identify outcomes based on implementation of certain things.
46:39 - We've put a HVAC system in according to a standard or we've provided guidance on opening windows in urban environments or there are kind of the mechanics of this.
46:51 - But often, as you say, one of the levers is setting an expectation, a target of what is a good out?
46:57 - What is a PPM threshold that we want to achieve?
47:00 - An eight-hour average?
47:02 - Do we need to be concerned about particulate matter, radon?
47:05 - What are the things we're actually measuring here beyond the installation of stuff that says this had a good outcome?
47:15 - And so you're seeing that, are you?
47:17 - That in certain places where...
47:20 - a number is provided for something, whatever it is, people are going, okay, well then we need funding to achieve that.
47:27 - These, these spaces are not achieving these basic numbers.
47:31 - Help please.
47:32 - Yes.
47:33 - Yes.
47:33 - Yeah.
47:35 - And I, you know, definitely, you know, we have ASHRAE standards for ventilation, which are great, but they're not mandatory.
47:45 - And it's when, excuse me,
47:50 - then people get serious about meeting those requirements.
47:54 - And we're seeing a lot of schools really actually interested in improving indoor air quality.
48:00 - They know the benefits.
48:02 - And so doing an initial assessment can be very illuminating to what is happening or not happening in your space ventilation-wise, particulate matter-wise, CO2, you know, all the things.
48:18 - The American Lung Association currently has mini grant funding available to school districts to do assessments and to address problems.
48:31 - common issues and then ultimately for implementation.
48:38 - So that's a little bit of funding out there right now available to do those first steps, which is wonderful.
48:47 - And we just need more of that.
48:50 - And I think the more momentum we start to build.
48:55 - I think the more changes that we'll see and that, you know, it can be done and that it doesn't have to cost millions of dollars.
49:01 - You just have to start.
49:03 - I'll have you back to the podcast in just a moment.
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50:59 - Now, back to the show.
51:00 - Does air quality monitoring become part of this conversation?
51:05 - Because, you know, I know trying to make the invisible visible for people is a really important part, particularly for schools.
51:11 - We saw that during COVID as well.
51:13 - So is that something that you're dealing with in this programme?
51:17 - Yes.
51:18 - School districts that...
51:21 - want to know what's happening in their space.
51:23 - We're working with Attune, who provided a half a million dollars in grant funding to school districts to implement monitoring and utilize those as
51:37 - a jumping off point to improving indoor air quality.
51:41 - Those school districts are going to be able to go on and show other school districts how they utilize those tools, which I think is going to be a wonderful opportunity.
51:52 - Some of those school districts were already working with or will be working with.
51:57 - So,
51:59 - you know, getting your baseline is the first step in understanding where you need to make those changes.
52:05 - The schools that are like, you know, really don't wanna know what's happening in this space because we have zero funds to do anything about it to improve it.
52:15 - And and that's where we can come in, you know, with our toolkit, with our supports, our trainings, our studies, the road that we've already been down with other school districts to be able to say, like, look, it's about transparency, transparency for especially the parents.
52:41 - to be able to say like, I'm, I'm sending my child to a place that's safe.
52:46 - Um, it is about health and safety ultimately.
52:49 - And, um, so when you look at it through that lens, it's about protecting and preventing, um,
52:57 - indoor air quality monitoring isn't that scary.
52:59 - It's simply just your blood pressure cuff.
53:03 - If you have a high blood pressure, you have to monitor it.
53:06 - You have to keep it in check.
53:08 - And how do you do that?
53:10 - You do it by having your blood pressure taken.
53:13 - I know it's simplifying it, but the truth is what we don't know can hurt us.
53:21 - Yeah, and it's so true with particularly schools you find.
53:25 - When you look at data, so many of the spaces in schools are often fine anyway.
53:31 - What monitoring does is enables you to understand those spaces that aren't, be able to benchmark them against the places that are performing okay, even within the same school.
53:41 - That's what we learn from air quality monitoring over and over again, that it's the surprising places in a school that catch us out.
53:48 - And without monitoring, we don't get to see that.
53:51 - Yes.
53:52 - And, you know, that's kind of where we come in with the energy savings part of it.
53:56 - When we're overventilating a space in a school that doesn't need to be ventilated particularly that much, you know, we can scale that back and you're having energy savings from that space.
54:10 - Right.
54:10 - So being able to utilize it as a tool for energy savings is a huge part of indoor air quality monitoring.
54:18 - It's also a wonderful way to have the transparency, but also, you know, oftentimes I'll hear like, well, we're going to be we're going to be held liable.
54:28 - And, you know, and ultimately, when you're when you understand what's happening in that space and you're you're saying, I understand there's a problem and we're going to work on it.
54:40 - We know you only have so many dollars to make those changes.
54:45 - But if you're genuinely trying to improve things, that is a wonderful way to say, hey, look, we're doing the best we can and let's continue to make improvements.
55:01 - But there's a lot of reasons people don't wanna know, but ultimately it's the best thing we can do for so many reasons.
55:10 - Yeah, and there's a ton of co-benefits from monitoring as well.
55:13 - I mean, I remember being involved in a couple of projects a few years back where we were monitoring a bunch of classrooms for air quality.
55:22 - But actually, one of the surprising things we were able to identify from that data were misaligned heating and cooling patterns in those spaces.
55:32 - And the savings that I'd been able to identify those properly for the first time were able to achieve more than paid for a lot of the remediation and the monitoring that was going in in the first place.
55:44 - So the data can be incredibly useful, even in some big colleges.
55:49 - You know, we were seeing...
55:52 - poor controls being provided for air conditioning and HVAC in those spaces.
55:57 - And the monitoring was able to detect classrooms that had been lying empty for two or three days or auditoriums that are being held at design temperature with nobody in them.
56:08 - You know, these kind of things that data can be enormously revealing.
56:14 - Yeah.
56:15 - if you know where to look with it.
56:17 - So yes, there's this kind of perceived risk of, Oh my God, my entire school is going to have a red flag across it for poor air quality, but actually more often than not, there's a ton of benefits that you get from monitoring spaces.
56:30 - Yes.
56:30 - And you don't have to sacrifice air quality for energy efficiency, you know, like our airtight buildings that we've built, you know, that can become very sick because of that, you know, you know,
56:44 - it's not sacrificial.
56:46 - The two can be done together.
56:48 - Yeah.
56:51 - And another thing, and I often say this in housing an awful lot, is that one of the big fears from organizations, institutional or otherwise, is that there's this cost, this unknown cost that is involved here.
57:07 - But very often...
57:10 - People are paying for stuff anyway.
57:13 - We've just never really scrutinized the outcomes of this stuff.
57:17 - And so often, you know, the school has people spent money building a school.
57:23 - People spent money putting a Hivac system in if a Hivac system was put in.
57:27 - People spend money on teachers and people and users of those spaces to use those spaces properly.
57:36 - And often we're not getting value for money from that spend.
57:39 - So a lot of this often is about identifying savings more than it is costs or getting proper value out of the money that you're spending in the first place.
57:48 - You know, understanding if a filter has been replaced properly.
57:52 - You know, you can see that in the particular matter if that's what you're measuring.
57:55 - So often is the case that this is about just more effectively using the money you're already spending.
58:03 - Yes.
58:04 - I think a lot of our challenges with most things that are negative is being able to reframe them.
58:13 - And one of the most important things that we can do is just like what you said is reframing this.
58:21 - I have to, to, I get to.
58:25 - I'm going to get to monitor and I'm going to get to find all these savings and I'm going to be the school district hero.
58:32 - Because our test scores are going up and our absenteeism rates are going down.
58:38 - And all it took was a little finesse of monitoring, making some changes that were not hugely costly.
58:49 - And, you know,
58:51 - showing those benefits.
58:53 - And yes, it takes time.
58:55 - And yes, it takes manpower to do those things.
58:58 - But you're going to have the guidebook to do it, where before I think a lot of school districts were just like, look, we're just getting by.
59:07 - I'm lucky to get the filters changed in my units.
59:11 - I don't have any manpower.
59:13 - And, you know, we can help you understand what to prioritize and how
59:21 - There's some amazing folks that we're working with.
59:24 - So I say I'm the liaison between the school districts and the amazing advisors that we have, technical advisors.
59:34 - Just, you know, we have so many good people supporting this program.
59:39 - So it's really, truly an honor to be part of what I'm doing here with Center for Great School.
59:47 - Let's go back to that program.
59:48 - So where is it in its kind of life cycle at the moment?
59:53 - Where are you with the kind of the bringing on board the peer network, the fellowships?
59:57 - Are they all on board now and out there in the wild or are you still bringing them bringing them through?
1:00:03 - So this isn't the first fellowship program year for Center for Green Schools.
1:00:09 - We've been doing that for quite a few years with sustainability focus, health and safety, sustainability.
1:00:18 - Those are all our focus areas.
1:00:20 - This particular cohort is our largest, and it will start in mid-September.
1:00:28 - And then that's when we'll get the ball rolling and it'll be that school year.
1:00:33 - They'll be attending monthly meetings.
1:00:39 - We'll have specialists, experts come in teaching to one of the top things that they wanted to learn about was indoor air quality monitoring and how to differentiate that data and what to do with it.
1:00:53 - So that's exciting.
1:00:54 - Yeah.
1:00:56 - So we'll have folks coming in to talk to them about that.
1:01:00 - And they will be attending the Green Schools Conference in February in Austin, Texas at the Hyatt Regency.
1:01:07 - That's February 8th through 10th.
1:01:09 - And then they'll go on to have another couple days as just the cohort at a summit.
1:01:18 - So just bringing all of that learning together, bringing all of the knowledge that they've taken so far and starting to implement that toolkit, having a plan put together.
1:01:32 - One of the things we often forget about is that we have the silver tsunami, right?
1:01:38 - Right.
1:01:39 - the guy who knows everything about the systems in the school, and he's going to retire and he's going to take all that information with him because there's not a written plan.
1:01:48 - And so it's another benefit to having that toolkit and the written plan in place for operations success, but also for continuity, right?
1:01:59 - We don't have to, we're not going to have to go back and relearn.
1:02:02 - And the new guy coming in is going to have that roadmap ready for
1:02:07 - him or her, I should say, the new person coming in because we have some pretty amazing female facilities managers that are going to be our fellows as well or that are already have been fellows for us.
1:02:19 - And
1:02:21 - Who is a fellow?
1:02:22 - Is this somebody that's full time in this role going out there?
1:02:26 - Or is this somebody that's doing this and advocating as well as a day job?
1:02:29 - I mean, what will their what's their kind of week or month look like as a as a fellow?
1:02:34 - Yeah.
1:02:35 - OK, so.
1:02:37 - There's five regional program managers overseeing this program, and I'm one of them.
1:02:46 - But these fellows are folks that are typically from a public pre-K through 12 school district here in the United States.
1:02:56 - And we're seeing we have folks that are in financial side of leadership.
1:03:03 - A lot of our facilities, operational folks, we have a huge variety of different sizes of school districts all the way down from, you know, a thousand students to
1:03:21 - 60,000.
1:03:22 - So there's a huge range.
1:03:25 - And they're all going to bring their specific expertise to work together and learn and make those changes in their school districts, but hopefully go on later and be mentors to subsequent cohorts.
1:03:46 - That's really interesting.
1:03:47 - So there's a real spectrum of skills that are coming in with this first cohort of fellows.
1:03:55 - So in my head, when you were describing it originally, I imagine, you know, fellows being kind of regional and working in certain school districts.
1:04:02 - But as you're saying, some of them might have financial experience.
1:04:05 - Others might have operational and mechanical and electrical experience.
1:04:08 - Others might have educational experience, whatever it is.
1:04:12 - Will they be kind of teaming up and working together and bringing,
1:04:15 - their expertise to different areas?
1:04:18 - Yes, absolutely.
1:04:20 - We have an app that we're using called Circle, where we'll all be able to communicate with one another.
1:04:27 - And if someone has a concern, a question, they'll be able to come to that app
1:04:33 - portal and ask those questions and find out who's done this before.
1:04:39 - I need to replace a boiler in this particular situation, in this particular region of the country, because there's a huge...
1:04:49 - difference in the climate throughout the country.
1:04:51 - So so we have them grouped by regions, the five different regions.
1:04:56 - And I'm over the Midwest and radon is a huge issue in the Midwest.
1:05:02 - And so one of the
1:05:06 - Webinars that we're going to be doing on October 14th is about radon in schools and testing and mitigation, because that's something that has to be done by July 1st of 27.
1:05:17 - All schools need to have tested and mitigated, remediated.
1:05:25 - You know, being that support for them, for those particular things is a goal, but also them sharing their expertise with those folks in the region.
1:05:40 - Yeah, we'll have our opportunities where we'll all be together as one group.
1:05:46 - learning from the experts, and then we'll have time together as a region as well.
1:05:53 - So it's a great opportunity for them, but also for the program and for the outreach, you know.
1:06:01 - I say they're like skipping rocks, you know, like they're just going to like those ripples are just going to go crazy.
1:06:10 - And I'm so excited for I know the positive effect it's going to have for our schools here in this country.
1:06:18 - And.
1:06:20 - Will you have kind of, what's the measurement of success here?
1:06:24 - Like the kind of a basic level, KPI level, is it like the green schools initiatives?
1:06:31 - It's about schools signing up to be on this program and to be working through something or is it a measurement of success in particular areas?
1:06:42 - What's the kind of, how do you look back in a couple of years and go, okay, this program was a success or not, do you think?
1:06:50 - Yeah, yeah.
1:06:51 - Building it out, up and out.
1:06:54 - You know, the more folks we can bring on board and teach and give them expertise and then share their expertise with us, the bigger this impact can be.
1:07:06 - And I know I showed you this before, but the toolkit has...
1:07:12 - every kind of resource you can imagine, templates for making improvements and getting them down in writing.
1:07:19 - Success is for a school district to implement a plan.
1:07:25 - And so creating it, we already did that for you.
1:07:30 - You need help getting there.
1:07:31 - We're going to be here to support you in doing that.
1:07:35 - And then ultimately, you know, the goal is to have that written plan to improve indoor air quality, but also being able to implement it successfully and in a way that is sustainable.
1:07:48 - And so that is the goal.
1:07:50 - And I think the more school districts that get involved, the more we can share resources.
1:07:56 - what we already know and build out that network so that we're not operating in these school district silos.
1:08:05 - So it's even within states, there's kind of a disconnect where they only come together once a year and it's during a conference and being able to just
1:08:17 - reach out and ask a question to a school district that's already done what it is that you need to do.
1:08:23 - I'm not the expert on it all.
1:08:25 - Thankfully, I don't have to be because we're going to have those experts, you know, through our advisors or through other school districts that have already walked that path or gone down that road, so to speak.
1:08:37 - So success is going to look different for every school district, you know, depending on their size and their funding.
1:08:45 - But we're going to do everything that we can to support them in their success.
1:08:50 - And are those resources that you were pointing out, are they available online for others to look at?
1:08:55 - Or is that part of a school that signed up?
1:08:57 - So this is a publicly available resource.
1:09:00 - It is.
1:09:00 - Okay, great.
1:09:01 - We have a Clean Air Schools course.
1:09:05 - It's free to take.
1:09:06 - You can learn all about what a clean classroom is.
1:09:11 - We have resources for everything from ventilation to filtration to air
1:09:18 - indoor air quality monitoring.
1:09:21 - Uh, so, uh, lots of different resources that are free.
1:09:25 - Um, so yeah, center for green schools.org and, um, webinars are all kinds of good stuff for folks to utilize.
1:09:35 - We'll make sure we put the links in the show notes for all of that for sure.
1:09:39 - You know, it sounds like it could be really interesting.
1:09:41 - Well, one thing that I meant to ask you was that how do,
1:09:48 - You're going to be in a position of expertise in this and being in an advisory role for a lot of schools.
1:09:56 - And I imagine the fellows are also going to be in a position where they become kind of trusted advisors, really, for a lot of organizations in this sector.
1:10:06 - How do you guard against the risk of getting sucked into the noise of industry and sales and products?
1:10:15 - Because, you know, we saw it post-COVID.
1:10:18 - It became a very messy space, particularly in the school sector.
1:10:22 - Anybody that went to market looking for HVAC systems and air filters and cleaners and stuff.
1:10:28 - It was a real shit show at times.
1:10:32 - There's a...
1:10:34 - There's a lot of money at stake here in the sense that we know there are billions required, as you pointed out at the beginning of this, in investment in schools.
1:10:43 - So I imagine industry is paying very close attention to initiatives like this.
1:10:51 - you both need industry on your side in this, but you also, I know you've been around long enough, Lisa, to know that the consequences of being involved with industry as well in the same breath.
1:11:04 - So that I imagine is going to be a delicate path to tread that you're not becoming a,
1:11:11 - the sales proxy sales team for HVAC and filter companies.
1:11:16 - Yes, yes, absolutely.
1:11:18 - Yes.
1:11:19 - Center for Green Schools is brand agnostic.
1:11:24 - So we don't,
1:11:26 - you know, endorse any company.
1:11:29 - We do have sponsors.
1:11:32 - It's how we are able to, well, it's part of the way that we're able to do what we do.
1:11:38 - But as far as resources, that's going to be something that other school districts are going to refer to
1:11:49 - school district, other brother or sister school districts too.
1:11:52 - I was just on a webinar yesterday with Virginia schools and a lot of the folks were asking about who did you use to do that work?
1:12:05 - And then he proceeded to give them the names and companies of who they used.
1:12:11 - And that's how it's going to work for, you know, word of mouth referrals, that sort of thing where we stay out of that.
1:12:20 - We're we're kind of like the bridge.
1:12:24 - to bring those school districts together.
1:12:26 - We don't have a list of vendors or any specific companies.
1:12:32 - So we leave that up to our school districts to share with other school districts who they used.
1:12:39 - And I'm telling you, it's powerful.
1:12:41 - If you're a company and you've worked with the school district and you've been successful in the work there, they're gonna tell other school districts about it and vice versa, of course.
1:12:51 - So that's gonna be the strength in that.
1:12:54 - I was going to say vice versa.
1:12:55 - That's the power of a network.
1:12:57 - If you are found to be selling snake oil and myths and legends to people, you will be found out, you know, because people will talk.
1:13:05 - And that's been, I think, the big concern in the education system is that, you know, sectors have been doing completely different things on their own and not talking.
1:13:15 - And this is a really great way of bringing people together and creating a network of, of,
1:13:20 - exemplar cases.
1:13:22 - On that note, are there some really good kind of case studies coming out of this already?
1:13:29 - Or is it a bit early?
1:13:30 - Are you able to kind of signpost what a good journey looks like for schools already?
1:13:37 - Yes.
1:13:38 - So we've been working with over 300 school districts across the country already and have numerous case studies.
1:13:45 - A lot of those are included in the toolkit as examples of how this is how you do it.
1:13:52 - This is how they did it.
1:13:54 - And every conference that we attended that we present at, we try to have a school district leader that has implemented their strategies and to share their strategies.
1:14:04 - their knowledge with the other school district leaders.
1:14:08 - So really, this is about promoting their success and learning from potential mistakes.
1:14:16 - But yeah, the road map is set.
1:14:18 - I know I keep saying the road map, but it truly is like, you know, how do you get somewhere that you've never been before?
1:14:26 - You ask someone who's been there because they can show you the way.
1:14:30 - Yeah, he'd ask for directions, right?
1:14:32 - Yeah.
1:14:32 - Yeah, no, for sure.
1:14:34 - How did you end up getting involved in all of this?
1:14:37 - I think you hinted at it early.
1:14:38 - You started out in teaching.
1:14:40 - Is that right?
1:14:41 - I did.
1:14:42 - I spent almost 20 years in the classroom.
1:14:47 - My mother was also a schoolteacher, her mother a schoolteacher before her.
1:14:52 - So coming from a long line of educators and in those years, I spent a lot of them sick because I.
1:15:02 - of why we're here today.
1:15:03 - Poor indoor air quality, lack of ventilation, lots of folks in a little space breathing the same air.
1:15:10 - And it was towards the end of my teaching career that I was teaching in a classroom that had mold that was not seen.
1:15:22 - And I developed allergic asthma.
1:15:25 - that was inhaler dependent.
1:15:28 - I'd never had asthma in my life.
1:15:30 - I was like, what is happening?
1:15:33 - Ultimately, another peer started having the same cough.
1:15:38 - And I was like, wait a minute.
1:15:41 - When did you start having that cough?
1:15:43 - And she's like, I started when I started working here a few days ago when I was like, oh, here we go.
1:15:49 - And that's when I started looking further into like what's happening here.
1:15:53 - Um, it was then, and then also COVID, you know, when we.
1:15:57 - I was going to ask, was that pre or post COVID that?
1:15:59 - That was pre-COVID.
1:16:01 - Yeah.
1:16:02 - And then I was very much aware of what's in the air and how it can affect our health, right?
1:16:07 - I knew before with all the colds and viruses, you know, that came with the job.
1:16:12 - But then when the mold, I learned so much about it so that when we went into COVID or when COVID happened, I should say,
1:16:23 - I already knew and understood what was in the air can really harm us.
1:16:27 - And so I really dove in.
1:16:30 - I was in college at the time.
1:16:31 - I'm a late bloomer.
1:16:33 - And I just dug in to how am I going to make this classroom safer for us when we do go back in?
1:16:41 - Because there was no vaccine at the time.
1:16:44 - There was no interventions.
1:16:47 - And so going back into the classroom, it wasn't long that I got COVID.
1:16:52 - Yeah.
1:16:53 - And I was out of the classroom for three months.
1:16:57 - I had long COVID.
1:17:00 - It was pretty much the sickest sick I've ever been.
1:17:04 - And when I was laying there and I was trying to do my capstone paper at the same time as being sick, I thought, I need to do something about this.
1:17:16 - this, this, we have to do something about this.
1:17:19 - And it was at that point, I was like, I'm pretty sure this is what I'm going to do.
1:17:24 - I'm going to leave teaching and I'm going to make a bigger impact than one classroom at a time.
1:17:30 - And, and it started my trajectory out of teaching into having an influence in health and safety in a bigger way.
1:17:39 - And,
1:17:41 - it's such a gift to be able to be here in this space, to be able to say like, I get it.
1:17:47 - I understand.
1:17:48 - Uh, I'm here to help.
1:17:50 - And, um, you know, that's kind of how it all happened.
1:17:54 - I'm blessed to be able to be a part of this and have this role.
1:17:59 - Um, I think, um, you know, I really got involved on LinkedIn during, um, COVID and, and, uh,
1:18:07 - when I was getting ready to graduate networking.
1:18:11 - And the more I started talking to these folks, the more I understood how important it is to be impactful in this space.
1:18:20 - And there wasn't a voice for educators and students for indoor air quality.
1:18:26 - There are numerous amazing doctors and scientists that have done this research for decades, but it wasn't until COVID that it really illuminated it.
1:18:38 - And to have, I guess, my voice as a former educator, to be able to make an impact in a positive way, that is what I hope to do.
1:18:50 - in the work that I'm doing now.
1:18:52 - But that's, that's how that evolved into, into where I'm at today.
1:18:56 - And it's, it's interesting to me, someone that straddled both the education system, but also then found yourself in industry for a bit as well, just post COVID and what your experiences were from both sides of the fence.
1:19:14 - Cause you know,
1:19:16 - You obviously you obviously had an awakening of the importance of air quality in classrooms and then you found yourself in industry.
1:19:24 - And I guess you must like a lot of people in industry gone.
1:19:27 - Well, why isn't everybody just buying this stuff and getting on with it and realizing that it's actually far more complicated trying to get.
1:19:36 - this infrastructure upgraded and the money spent in the right places, you know, and you found yourself on the other side of that fence, like talking to your ex-colleagues effectively going, look, you know, this is a problem.
1:19:49 - You've just been through it.
1:19:50 - You know, these are the solutions.
1:19:52 - And then hitting those obstacles, right, you know, from the private sector side of it.
1:19:58 - Yes.
1:20:00 - You know, it's one thing to be in the classroom and then it's another thing to be the person that wants to help you improve the classroom.
1:20:11 - But when you're in a position of sales, people are very leery of you and they should be leery because, like you said, a lot of snake oil that was out there.
1:20:20 - Um, well, number one, there wasn't funding, you know, and so during that time, it really helped me understand like how we need to pivot how we need to reframe this, um, not as a loss, but as a gain.
1:20:35 - Right.
1:20:36 - And, um, yeah.
1:20:38 - Through those years that I was in that industry, it really helped me understand the other side.
1:20:44 - And I do that with almost everything in my life.
1:20:47 - I try to anyway, is to understand the opposite end, right?
1:20:51 - So that you can be empathetic.
1:20:55 - So, yeah, it's it's my first role out of teaching.
1:21:00 - I looked at Head Start to kind of stay there and be an impact there.
1:21:05 - And there was a company that was utilizing a tool to sanitize and disinfect.
1:21:13 - objects, right?
1:21:14 - But I was like, but you need something for the air.
1:21:17 - And they just happened to be getting ready to launch HEPA air filtration.
1:21:23 - And so that's kind of the launching point of like, the two worlds that came together.
1:21:29 - I think it's really interesting that we've got to, there's so much low-hanging fruit in schools, you know, there's so much potential to do good at such an important and critical junction in people's lives as children in those spaces.
1:21:48 - Mm-hmm.
1:21:50 - So the opportunity to do good here must be very exciting for you that you know, you've been on the side of teaching, you've been on the side of being in those spaces, you know, you were literally brought up in classrooms.
1:22:03 - Yes.
1:22:05 - in school and as a child of a teacher.
1:22:08 - Yeah.
1:22:09 - So you've got that innate perspective, but you also recognize now, I think, having been on your journey, the impact of the long term health and well-being and the short term acute health and well-being of those kids.
1:22:20 - Right.
1:22:21 - Yes.
1:22:21 - You know, I thank you for bringing that up, because back in the day when my mom was teaching and I was in school, those schools were old then.
1:22:30 - They're really old now, you know, and I know that that's an issue overseas, you know, age of of the infrastructure and the deferred maintenance issue.
1:22:39 - So coming back to that.
1:22:41 - But yes, it's it's a wonderful place to be to be able to make an impact in a positive way.
1:22:48 - And, you know, USGBC is truly amazing.
1:22:53 - you know, a game changer for a lot of these school districts who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.
1:23:01 - Yeah.
1:23:02 - And the USGBC have got a great track record in understanding what it takes to build the networks and awareness and move the needle in those spaces.
1:23:11 - And they've been sitting on board a success of green schools for decades now at this stage.
1:23:17 - And there are
1:23:18 - whole generations of kids that have come out of schools for the better as a result of that work so they've got a track record which i think is really good they know how to work in that space and a lot of it is based around networks and peer groups and circles and so on i've actually got the founder of the usgbc coming on the podcast in a few weeks time so yes we talked about that
1:23:43 - Yeah, it's a fascinating area.
1:23:47 - And one of the things I did want to talk to you about was that a lot of this conversation has been about classrooms and schools for teaching and the impact on kids.
1:24:01 - These places are workplaces too.
1:24:03 - And you've got that innate experience, both your mum was a teacher and you have been a teacher.
1:24:10 - There's a very specific cohort of people that spend most of their career, forget children for a moment.
1:24:17 - There are people who spend accumulatively longer in these spaces than even the kids do.
1:24:22 - And that's the teachers, right?
1:24:24 - Yes, absolutely.
1:24:25 - Yes.
1:24:26 - And, you know, sadly, it's not, my story is not uncommon.
1:24:32 - I learned that, um, through being out there and talking to folks, um, that are like, Hey, I I've had the same experience as you did.
1:24:41 - Um, and you know,
1:24:45 - knowing that, knowing how much improvement there needs to be made, you know, you think about teaching, you know, and a lot of people are like, man, I'm so glad I got to drop my kids off at school today because I was ready for a break.
1:24:59 - They spend all day, Monday through Friday with your children and 29 others, you know, that they're managing in a building with hundreds, right?
1:25:11 - So they have like
1:25:13 - one of the hardest jobs there is next to law enforcement, if you ask me, because, you know, it is hard work and it is, um, and oftentimes thankless.
1:25:25 - Um, oftentimes the pay isn't great.
1:25:28 - Um, but the reason why they're there is because they love kids.
1:25:32 - They love teaching.
1:25:34 - They want to invest in the future.
1:25:36 - And, um, you know, I saw that with my mom and the hour she put
1:25:43 - It's just, it's in their hearts.
1:25:46 - And we owe it to them to provide them a workplace that is safe and healthy, where they don't have to fear getting sick from a sick building.
1:25:58 - And so I think it's the simplest thing that we could do that would make probably the biggest impact.
1:26:09 - Yeah, and when you think about it,
1:26:12 - teaching is probably one of the few careers left that is still a career that the most people go into teaching with a vocational love for it and you know whether they burn out early or not that's a separate conversation but but it's not one of these jobs that you go and do for five years or three years and it's a stepping stone into something else like a lot of teachers
1:26:40 - stay teaching so that you are by the nature of that going to be in that environment for most of your career yes you know whereas someone like me who's done a bit of this and done a bit of that and work at home and have worked in the ambulance service and
1:26:59 - been a plumber and all this my environment has changed through my life but there are teachers ending their career that have effectively been in the same room in many cases their entire working life and i there's very few spaces like that other than perhaps a lot of some of the blue collar work that that's like that
1:27:24 - Yeah.
1:27:24 - Yeah.
1:27:25 - And then you have the opposite end of the spectrum where you have teachers leaving the profession and they're stating their facilities are the reason or leaving to go to a different school district or different building.
1:27:41 - So it's a huge factor for talent retention.
1:27:46 - The quality of your indoor environment affects everything, you know, so.
1:27:52 - It's something that we often don't think about, but we're having a hard time with teacher retention.
1:27:59 - And if we can do all the things that we can to help prevent the attrition, right, then we're doing good things because, you know,
1:28:10 - Good teachers are hard to find and we want to keep them because they are impactful.
1:28:16 - But when they're sick from their environment, you know, they can't be there and they're not having the impact they need to have.
1:28:24 - And they're not at their best.
1:28:25 - So it's foundational.
1:28:29 - Yeah.
1:28:29 - You know, and of all the things that you can control and all the things that you can't control in teach, I imagine when you kind of make your imaginary list of the things that's likely to make you give up teaching.
1:28:47 - the air that you breathe shouldn't be one of them.
1:28:50 - Not that you're getting lung cancer from radon or you're developing COPD or you're just constantly sick and eventually it just breaks your immune system down to the point that you just have to give up.
1:29:02 - Like, these are the stories that are making teachers leave and that must be desperately sad for those teachers.
1:29:10 - It's the one thing I'm sure they didn't expect to get them, you know.
1:29:15 - You know, when I was going through almost a year of the issues with the molds and the health consequences of that, I thought to myself, what good is possibly going to come from this suffering, you know?
1:29:32 - And it's funny because there's purpose for the pain.
1:29:37 - And that is where my passion comes from, is truly like, you know what?
1:29:43 - All of these things that did happen, even though I'm not in teaching anymore, and that's
1:29:49 - a lot of it is because of the air quality and the poor air quality.
1:29:53 - I'm now in a space where I can affect it positively.
1:29:56 - And it's because of all of the negative stuff that happened impacted me so greatly that I thought I have to do something to help change this and make this better for other educators and students.
1:30:11 - So it's a, you know, it's a, it's been amazing.
1:30:16 - been a huge aha for me, even though it was why I left.
1:30:21 - It's been my jet fuel, so to speak.
1:30:26 - And what's your sense when you talk to ex-colleagues about their general awareness of air quality and the environments they're sitting in?
1:30:33 - Is this something that's
1:30:35 - not even making it into...
1:30:37 - I mean, I know we've just come through a pandemic, so it's probably more front and centre than it would have been pre-pandemic.
1:30:44 - But nonetheless, when you're talking to teachers, is this something that they think about at all?
1:30:51 - The ones that don't know that every time you talk to them, you're talking to them about air quality.
1:30:56 - So there's that cohort, I'm sure.
1:30:57 - But in general, when you're talking to teachers...
1:31:01 - Cause I imagine your love is your friend's son with Jesus.
1:31:03 - Here comes Lisa again.
1:31:04 - I know what she's going to say.
1:31:06 - My former co-teacher, bless her heart, Kristen Glenn.
1:31:10 - She saw me through all of, all of that stuff through college.
1:31:15 - And, you know, I, I often say like, see, I told you, I told you this is the way it was going to go.
1:31:21 - And she's like, yep, you did.
1:31:23 - And anyway, but, um, talking to other, um, folks, um,
1:31:29 - in schools, it kind of depends on what school district you're in and what school you teach in.
1:31:34 - And it also depends on the age that you teach because those younger kids don't typically have hygiene for sneezing and coughing and oral touching and all of that.
1:31:49 - So early childhood, childcare, those teachers are very aware of,
1:31:56 - of the importance of indoor air quality because they're affected by it so greatly.
1:32:02 - I would say those are the folks that often get it more than others do.
1:32:08 - But, you know, with a school that's brand new, you can also have problems in those, right?
1:32:15 - They can have ventilation issues.
1:32:18 - So,
1:32:19 - There's no perfect world.
1:32:20 - But again, I've heard too many stories of too many teachers, my mom included, where she was got sick from one of her classrooms.
1:32:31 - So it is common and it's something that we know how to address it.
1:32:39 - And it's the it's the the building of this system.
1:32:44 - And I hope that it can be adopted by other infrastructures across the world, because, you know, it started with some really amazing people that said, I see this as a problem.
1:33:01 - and we need to do something about it.
1:33:03 - And it's taken decades to get this far.
1:33:06 - So really excited to continue to be doing this work.
1:33:09 - And I hope to be able to see a huge improvement in our teaching population, our students, and reduction in all of those things that come from poor indoor air quality.
1:33:21 - Do you think with the right awareness with teachers, I mean, because there's a lot of rights and responsibility involved in workplace, right?
1:33:32 - In both your responsibility as an employer and an employee.
1:33:36 - And often a lot of those structures, as you were talking about earlier with standards and regulations, often when you know you've got a standard that you need to hit and a regulation to hit that.
1:33:47 - that can drive some of the funding often that, you know, say, look, these, this is where we're falling short.
1:33:51 - We need the money to sort this out.
1:33:54 - And you'd have thought, you know, and we saw a little bit of this during COVID in the UK.
1:34:01 - Some of the teaching unions started to come together and go, look, this is not acceptable.
1:34:05 - You know, we need a plan as a group of unions to start protecting our workers.
1:34:11 - Do you get any sense of that in the States that, well, firstly, is it unionized, particularly in the States teaching?
1:34:17 - And do you get any sense that there's any kind of coming together to go, look, you know, employers have got a responsibility to provide a safe place to work and clearly...
1:34:29 - anytime we measure classrooms, we find that they're some of the worst places from a, from a environmental risk perspective.
1:34:36 - So like this, this should be sorted out.
1:34:40 - Did you get any sense of that?
1:34:41 - Like in the wind over in the States?
1:34:44 - I've heard about unions being involved in, um, you know, teachers grievances about sick buildings.
1:34:52 - I've not worked with any of them, so I can't speak specifically to that.
1:34:58 - Um, but, uh,
1:35:01 - Not all teachers are unionized and it's an option to take it.
1:35:07 - So even if you are in a school district that allows a union, you don't have to be part of it.
1:35:14 - So that being said, I can't speak a whole lot to that, but I have heard that there are some involved there having that advocacy.
1:35:29 - Yeah, there's got to be right, isn't it?
1:35:30 - With that many teachers across the states, you can imagine somebody somewhere has taken a class action lawsuit or somebody somewhere is bringing the unions in.
1:35:38 - Or, you know, if you know, we know that classrooms are not great places for long-term health and wellbeing for teachers.
1:35:46 - Air quality, just one example, obviously.
1:35:48 - But you can imagine that somebody somewhere is taking this seriously.
1:35:53 - You just don't see it.
1:35:55 - And I don't see it either.
1:35:57 - And, you know...
1:35:58 - it's one of the few places in life where...
1:36:02 - particularly in the built environment where there is actually this fundamental responsibility of employers to provide safe spaces for people to work.
1:36:12 - And it's one of the most fundamental working rights.
1:36:15 - And, you know, we all went through that pain over many centuries to try and fix those problems.
1:36:22 - Yet I don't see it being used as a lever nearly often.
1:36:26 - It's a funny one.
1:36:27 - I, and I must speak to a union person from, um,
1:36:31 - from teaching at some point and ask them because I know I definitely recall during the pandemic, all of the British unions came together because I think there was four or five of them or something.
1:36:43 - And they wrote a document on how teachers can advocate for better protection during COVID.
1:36:50 - Yeah.
1:36:52 - But as you said, post COVID, it hasn't gone away every winter.
1:36:56 - Teachers are getting sick from cold and flu and what have you.
1:36:59 - Like this isn't a uniquely COVID problem.
1:37:03 - No, it's not.
1:37:04 - And it's a symptom of a deeper issue, you know.
1:37:09 - And when you think about it, it's a symptom of an underfunded infrastructure.
1:37:15 - And so when we have those sick buildings, it's often due to lack of funding and deferred maintenance, you know.
1:37:23 - putting off preventative maintenance, all of those things.
1:37:27 - So when I look at the big picture, I see that this is, you know, that's part of one of the symptoms that could potentially not be eradicated, but certainly reduced.
1:37:44 - And I'm guessing the answer to this one, but I'm assuming it having something like a roadmap back when you were starting to question the air quality in your classrooms would have been a very powerful tool for you back then.
1:37:57 - So, you know, like some of the work that you're doing with the Centre for Green Schools is an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle here to connect some of those dots for teachers.
1:38:07 - Yeah, absolutely.
1:38:09 - One of the things that school districts can work on is just a questionnaire.
1:38:13 - So if a teacher has a concern about the air quality, what's your system for taking that complaint?
1:38:21 - What are the questions that you're asking?
1:38:24 - All of those things matter, you know, in communication and what can get addressed.
1:38:31 - So, you know, on a simple basis of just that alone, that can make a big difference in, you know, having remediation done because the teacher gave enough information for them to be able to.
1:38:48 - maybe better understand if it's a large school district.
1:38:53 - Yeah, I mean, there's a process for everything and providing that roadmap for how to, or what worked with one school district, what worked with another, and having those resources just makes it more likely that others will be able to adopt those and make them work for their school district.
1:39:12 - It's like every step matters, right?
1:39:15 - Every step is closer to the destination.
1:39:19 - So, yeah.
1:39:21 - What's the structure in the state?
1:39:24 - Is it OSHA would be kind of the, would have oversight over kind of health and safety for schools?
1:39:31 - Would that be?
1:39:32 - OSHA does.
1:39:34 - The only problem with OSHA when you compare it to or bring it to schools and school employees, typically OSHA oversees more like the manufacturing, the broader like exposure.
1:39:52 - You know, the guy in the paint booth painting cars like there are certain standards that are in place.
1:39:58 - But it's very ambiguous when you try and bridge that into school indoor air quality.
1:40:06 - The two just don't align, right?
1:40:11 - The thresholds are very different and what you're being exposed to is also different.
1:40:17 - Yeah, I've had this conversation before with kind of health and safety industrial hygienists.
1:40:22 - There's a very different world of saying...
1:40:25 - what's your industrial exposure to limonene in a chemical factory?
1:40:30 - Yes.
1:40:31 - Versus what are the confounding factors that are contributing to a sick building, you know, where you've got so many things that are, you know, industrial hygienists and people in that space don't like that space.
1:40:46 - It's very gray and woolly and involves all sorts of things that are outside of their control.
1:40:52 - Yes.
1:40:53 - Whereas if you're going into a manufacturing plant and you're looking at a particular chemical exposure, usually it's very clear what that's going to be.
1:41:00 - It will be on all the labels of the stuff you're using to make the stuff and you're checking to see if you're exposed to that.
1:41:06 - Whereas the school thing is much more complicated.
1:41:09 - Why am I seeing a high level of absenteeism in a cohort of teachers in a particular school that's an outlier compared to others?
1:41:18 - That's not measurements they're taking.
1:41:20 - No, no.
1:41:21 - That's where it gets difficult.
1:41:23 - And with everything, having cuts, fiscal cuts, that cuts the number of those folks facilitating those particular interventions.
1:41:35 - NIOSH is another group that can come in and actually do an environmental assessment,
1:41:44 - But you're working with a lot of these folks that are at bare bones.
1:41:48 - And, you know, so getting that assessment, who knows how long it's going to take.
1:41:54 - So, yeah, and they're probably going to be looking at fire door closers and trip hazards and very basic.
1:42:00 - You know, they're not going to have the time to be investigating complex data sets of air quality monitors and things like that.
1:42:06 - So with all these cases, I remember speaking to a.
1:42:11 - public health kind of building control type person years ago talking to him about their role.
1:42:16 - And it was at the time of a boom in construction.
1:42:18 - And he was saying, look, mate, the most I get to do when I'm going on site is make sure they're not building too many more buildings than they put into planning for because we're so...
1:42:29 - such a skeleton staff that I would love to be spending four hours in a building doing an in-depth survey but I've got another 32 of them to do by the end of the week it's just not happening you know so yeah and that's where we can engage our educators and our students in um awareness um we had some wonderful um
1:42:52 - interns this summer that helped put together some different tools for the classroom teacher, for the students, just to do kind of like an environmental check.
1:43:04 - Is a window open?
1:43:06 - Should it be open or should it be closed?
1:43:09 - You know, just are you seeing moisture?
1:43:12 - Are there stains on the ceilings?
1:43:14 - Water stains on the ceilings?
1:43:16 - Simple things where
1:43:17 - Being in this space, like we just know like, oh, that means there was water and where there was water, that could mean mold.
1:43:23 - Not everybody knows that.
1:43:25 - So educating the educators about what to be looking for is important, but also, like you said earlier, engaging our students in that mindfulness process.
1:43:38 - of, you know, wow, it feels really warm in here.
1:43:41 - I wonder if the ventilation unit is on.
1:43:45 - I mean, that's going to be your older kids, of course, but we worked on some projects where, you know, even the youngest ones can go around and like, is the HEPA air purifier off or on?
1:43:58 - if it's off, ask your teacher to turn it on.
1:44:03 - I mean, simple things like that, right?
1:44:05 - Because they often get turned off, sometimes due to sound, or just, you know, maybe you have a power failure, and then they just never get turned back on.
1:44:15 - But simple things like that is engaging the folks that are actually in the space to be more mindful of the space and be proactive and preventative and
1:44:25 - Oh, completely.
1:44:26 - Yeah.
1:44:26 - I did a wonderful one take podcast there a few weeks ago on storytelling of kind of pre-K 12 cohorts of children.
1:44:39 - And the study was really lovely because it was pointing out that actually younger children are much more affected by temperature than adults are.
1:44:47 - They want a cooler temperature or warmer.
1:44:49 - I can't remember which one it was, but
1:44:51 - Anyway, they don't advocate for themselves.
1:44:54 - So they're not going to raise their hand and ask for a window to be closed or a window to be open or an air conditioning to be...
1:45:02 - They suffer and then their education suffers as a result.
1:45:06 - Absolutely.
1:45:06 - And something as simple as...
1:45:09 - They wrote a storybook that had a cowboy, fireman, nurse, a whole classic characters all having a temperature problem and what they did about it, how they put a jumper on or opened a window or very simple stories.
1:45:29 - And for a whole cohort of the kids, they told this story in storytelling and for another cohort, they didn't.
1:45:38 - And they then surveyed the likelihood of those children advocating for their own temperature as a result.
1:45:45 - It was a double-blind study.
1:45:46 - It was really brilliantly done.
1:45:48 - And they found an enormous impact on the kids that had that awareness made through very simple storytelling about advocating for their own environmental conditions.
1:45:59 - and the impact that that had.
1:46:01 - So some of this stuff doesn't require investment in multi-billion pound EVAC systems across an entire state.
1:46:08 - Sometimes it could be as simple as a storybook read to junior children about being aware of their environment and how to do something about it in the right way when it's not right.
1:46:22 - And again, the USGBC has got a phenomenal track record with that kind of stuff, hasn't it?
1:46:28 - Yeah, absolutely.
1:46:29 - Yeah.
1:46:30 - Children are amazing.
1:46:32 - You know, they're resilient, you know, but their little brains, just like the rest of their bodies are forming.
1:46:39 - And neurologically, those first years are so impactful.
1:46:45 - It really is like the neurological roadmap that's being created.
1:46:50 - You know, these branches of learning are happening and they're at their core, you know,
1:46:56 - where you can make the most impact.
1:46:59 - And, you know, they are amazing sponges to be able to regurgitate what they learn.
1:47:09 - And so, yes, that's, you know, a huge reason why we're here, right, is to
1:47:16 - They're our future.
1:47:18 - And it's like you invest in your future, right?
1:47:22 - They're going to be the ones that are running our countries.
1:47:26 - And so we need to make sure that the spaces that they're learning in are benefiting them and not harming them.
1:47:34 - Yeah.
1:47:35 - And sometimes we've got to take the opportunities as they present themselves as well.
1:47:39 - And that was one of the questions I had for you is, has your work or the education system been impacted by things like wildfires, for example, and smoke from things like that, stuff that suddenly makes air quality.
1:47:54 - I mean, we had a pandemic a half a decade ago, which is amazing to even say at this stage.
1:47:58 - Mm-hmm.
1:47:59 - But, you know, you've now got environmental things like wildfire smoke covering half of the northern part of the US.
1:48:07 - Like these things suddenly pop up where there's this opportunity to really lean into something in the general consciousness, isn't there?
1:48:17 - Absolutely.
1:48:17 - I know recently there was grant funding available for school districts to implement strategies to protect against wildfire smoke.
1:48:28 - And, you know, when you think about that, it's not just when they're in the school, which is important, but it's also when they go outside.
1:48:35 - Like we have mandatory programs.
1:48:37 - temperature restrictions for younger children.
1:48:40 - We have a heat index where if it's a certain degree, right, you don't go outside because those little bodies can't regulate that kind of heat.
1:48:52 - But that also factors in indoors, right?
1:48:54 - While we have a threshold, I think that the temperature for our thresholds here differs by state, but it's too warm.
1:49:01 - And
1:49:01 - I can tell you that.
1:49:04 - There's not a whole lot of thinking happening when you, you know, you're, you're sweating, you just can't focus.
1:49:10 - We also have ozone warnings, right?
1:49:15 - Well, that ozone comes right into our, to our classroom.
1:49:19 - And so it's like, okay, we understand we shouldn't be outside.
1:49:22 - Vulnerable populations shouldn't be outside.
1:49:24 - Well, that air is coming inside.
1:49:26 - So
1:49:27 - I think the more we can relate what's outside is also inside, the better we're going to be at being successful at addressing it.
1:49:38 - Yeah, no, I agree.
1:49:40 - If there was one thing you hoped was done at a federal level that would support the kind of work that you're doing now with the Centre for Green Schools and this initiative, what would it be?
1:49:53 - What are the kind of things you would like to see being done and made?
1:49:58 - You know, we've got, for example, the whole kind of Make America Healthy Again movement.
1:50:04 - You know, for all its...
1:50:05 - goods and ills, you know, we're certainly not going to go into that in this podcast.
1:50:12 - There is an opportunity for federal government to really make an impact and help.
1:50:17 - What are the kind of things you think that they could do that would really support the work that you're doing?
1:50:22 - Yeah.
1:50:23 - Well, you know, during COVID, when we had that influx of funding, a lot of great things were done to improve indoor air quality with that funding.
1:50:37 - That being said, there wasn't a lot of direction on how to make those improvements.
1:50:43 - So funding with direction, win.
1:50:49 - But then you have to consider every state has their own, you know, ways that they govern.
1:50:56 - So but definitely having more funding on the federal level, yeah.
1:51:04 - would help support those efforts to make those necessary changes.
1:51:09 - We federally support our roads and highways and making the improvements and updates and,
1:51:17 - We need to be doing the same thing with our schools.
1:51:21 - They are the way to the future.
1:51:24 - And, you know, you can't get there when you've got potholes and bridges that have fallen down.
1:51:31 - You know, you have to support that.
1:51:35 - So I see it.
1:51:37 - Even if it's supporting standards, all of this stuff helps, doesn't it?
1:51:42 - At the end of the day.
1:51:42 - Absolutely.
1:51:43 - But standards, you know, if you have those like at a state level, then there's an expectation to be met.
1:51:51 - So bring that expectation and then let's bring some funding to support that.
1:51:59 - that that that's my dream uh and we'll have the plan for making it happen yeah and the reality is is you can't have a a sector that has a 90 billion a year hole in it and not
1:52:14 - money not be part of the problem right all of this stuff all comes back to infrastructure and maintenance and development and technology and ultimately at some point money's part of this conversation you know and even and even if it's general money
1:52:35 - that makes the competition for, uh, bandwidth easier.
1:52:43 - That's a helpful thing.
1:52:45 - You know, the principals would often tell me like, you've just got to understand the list of battles I'm facing at any one week.
1:52:55 - you know, things I'm trying to sort out from staff shortages to sicknesses to disciplinary actions to infrastructure failures to auditors coming around to like at any one point I've got a dozen balls in the air I'm trying to keep up, you know, and you're saying, what about this ball?
1:53:15 - You know, we think you should really add this to your juggling act.
1:53:19 - And this is what we're asking of them.
1:53:21 - You know, this is the big challenge.
1:53:24 - Okay, so another back to my sociology training, the hierarchy of needs, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
1:53:34 - Food, water, air, foundational, right?
1:53:40 - For life.
1:53:41 - Everything else is built upon that.
1:53:44 - So when we think about staff shortages, are those people out because they have long COVID or?
1:53:51 - Are they taking care of a child that had consequences from, you know, illness?
1:53:59 - All of those things you can kind of bring back to the basics.
1:54:04 - And so I think about that and I, you know, if we get the foundation right, everything else can be built on that.
1:54:13 - Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, if a percentage of your teachers were out sick every year because of food poisoning from your canteen, you'd be doing something about the canteen, right?
1:54:23 - Yes, absolutely.
1:54:25 - This isn't rocket science.
1:54:26 - You know, if you traced it back to dodgy hot dogs from the canteen, causing 15% of your staff at any given week to be off sick,
1:54:37 - You'd be doing something about the hot dogs, man.
1:54:40 - Like this is what it comes back to.
1:54:43 - It does.
1:54:43 - Yeah.
1:54:44 - Yeah.
1:54:45 - It's a really interesting one.
1:54:47 - Lisa, it's been brilliant talking to you this afternoon.
1:54:49 - I was really looking forward to this chat.
1:54:51 - We've been connected online for ages.
1:54:53 - It's been really interesting seeing your journey and really genuinely can't wait to see what happens with this project with Centre for Green Schools.
1:55:02 - We'll put links in the show notes for people to look at the materials and keep an eye on what's going on because I think there's people much wider than the States.
1:55:12 - We'll be interested to see how this goes.
1:55:15 - So thanks so much.
1:55:16 - Really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
1:55:19 - Well, it was truly my pleasure.
1:55:21 - And anyone that's interested in what we're doing can get involved.
1:55:25 - There's no restrictions.
1:55:26 - You don't have to be a school district.
1:55:28 - You just have to want to learn and help improve school environment.
1:55:33 - So that's why we're here.
1:55:35 - And it's truly been a pleasure speaking with you today.
1:55:39 - I thank you for having me.
1:55:42 - No problem at all.
1:55:44 - Thanks for listening.
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1:55:59 - So thanks a million to them as always.
1:56:02 - See you again next week.