Bad ventilation remains threat to U.S. students: NYT

The average American school building is about 50 years old, and about 41 percent of school districts needed to update or replace the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in at least half of their schools, about 36,000 buildings in all, reported The New York Times (NYT) on Sunday, citing official statistics, said Xinhua.

"It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix decades of neglect of our school building infrastructure," said Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Schoolchildren are heading back to classrooms by the tens of millions now, yet much of the funding for such improvements is sitting untouched in most states.

"Among the reasons: a lack of clear federal guidance on cleaning indoor air, no senior administration official designated to oversee such a campaign, few experts to help the schools spend the funds wisely, supply chain delays for new equipment, and insufficient staff to maintain improvements that are made," noted the report.

Indoor air may be contaminated not just by pathogens, but also by a range of pollutants like carbon monoxide, radon and lead particles. Concentrations can be five times higher or more indoors than they are outdoors, according to the report.