Now that New York City education officials have released details of the health and safety protocols for the school system's reopening plan, scrutiny has intensified over the ventilation systems in school buildings as a key element in keeping school communities healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Open windows and fresh air seem to be the best defense, public health experts said. But not all classrooms have windows. Upgraded Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning [HVAC] systems are second best, but some schools have had broken HVACs for years. Regardless, experts recommend filters, fans, and purifiers -- but schools may have to buy those themselves at a time when budgets have been decimated.
Some parents and staff say they don't feel informed about best practices when it comes to air filtration and don’t know whether city officials are following them. Teachers told Gothamist/WNYC that windows in classrooms frequently don’t open. In some cases, there are windows, but there are air conditioners installed in them (experts caution that air conditioners don’t help circulate outside air). Others said their HVAC systems haven’t worked for years.
The school system has about 1,300 facilities -- some of which don’t have centralized HVAC systems at all, and according to the DOE.
The city’s reopening plan calls for the New York City School Construction Authority and the Division of School Facilities to fix windows, HVAC systems, as well as “upgrading central HVAC system filters from MERV 8 to MERV 13 where appropriate,” with the higher grade filter touted to better catch smaller particles.
The DOE said in a statement Wednesday that repairs will be completed by the opening of school and “rooms without adequate ventilation will not be occupied.”
In a virtual meeting hosted by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza on Monday, one school official told Parent Advisory Council members that ventilation can still happen without central air conditioning -- in fact, windows can be even better.
“One of the misconceptions about ventilation is you need to have a central system in order to have a ventilation system. That’s not true -- many of our buildings are older and they were designed with many windows that open and that’s the best ventilation you’re going to have,” said John Shea, chief executive officer of the Division of School Facilities for the city’s Department of Education, at the meeting. “We’re also looking at our windows to make sure they’re operable so we can open them up and increase ventilation.”
Staff at the Brooklyn New School and Brooklyn Collaborative Studies, which share a 1920s-era building in Red Hook, said many windows don’t open at their schools.
Concerned school officials and parents wrote a letter to City Councilmember Brad Lander on Monday stating that a supervisor from the Department of School Facilities told them the building, despite many windows unable to open, has “adequate" airflow and ventilation.
"Many of our classrooms have no air conditioners, few electrical outlets and no cross ventilation. We were told there is no plan on the part of the DSF to add exhaust fans to any classrooms. If we want exhaust fans, we would have to use our school budget in a year when our schools have collectively already lost $400,000 due to budget cuts,” the letter read.
“At no point have we been given any scientific or quantifiable data about how the determination was made that our airflow situation is adequate,” the letter said, citing a recent paper from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health that reported “Natural ventilation through windows can be effective but is dependent on factors…. Therefore, airflow into the building, even with open windows, is not guaranteed.”
“It makes us very nervous,” said Alex Stimmel, a 3rd grade/ICT teacher at Brooklyn New School and chapter leader with the United Federation of Teachers, which represents the union. “We want to be in the building with the kids. But it doesn’t feel like anybody is looking out for us.”
For example, Stimmel said a representative from DSF said his classroom had sufficient cross-ventilation because he has a window as well as a door. But he said the door opens up to a long hallway and faces a wall. He expects classrooms will need fans but wonder who will pay for them.
“We have people telling us the building is safe, based on engineering, not the science of COVID. There’s no discussion of what the criteria for safety is,” Stimmel said.
The school was able to tap into its parent network and find an environmental scientist willing to do a pro-bono evaluation, Stimmel said, and acknowledged the vast majority of the city’s schools likely won’t have an environmental scientist checking things out for free. “This is not just our building," he said. “So many buildings are 80 years old, 100 years old. … The message we’re getting is you’re on your own.”
The DOE said on Wednesday that Brooklyn New School and Brooklyn Collaborative Studies windows are undergoing repairs “to bring the building in compliance with air circulation safety standards.”
Lander said the city needs to set a standard for airflow in school buildings: "The fact that there is not really a measure of airflow is a problem," he said, adding that having 50% of windows operable is not a "meaningful" standard. Lander has been advocating for more outdoor learning this fall and has organized a town hall on the subject for Thursday.
Educators have also complained about inoperable broken equipment. Lisa O’Connor, who teaches at MS 324 in Washington Heights, said the building’s “central air stopped working prior to 2013,” and repeated repairs did not solve the problem.
“In 2016, all classrooms that had a window got a window AC unit. If there’s only one window, the person now can’t open a window,” O’Connor said. She said the exhaust fans have also been listed as broken. “That’s not a building I would want to go into during a regular school year, much less a pandemic year.”
But the DOE said the MS 324 building has been deemed “safe” by their assessors. “It was determined that the cooling element of the air conditioning is not working for a number of rooms, but the system overall is providing the necessary outside air ventilation to all rooms. The air ventilation in this building is safe for the return of students and staff,” DOE spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said in an email.
That's little comfort to O'Connor. “There’s only so much that a mask and social distancing can do. If someone is sick and you’re in the same room with them eventually you’ll be breathing the same air. If the central air/HVAC system isn’t working to get that air to flow and get it out of the room then eventually we’re all going to get sick,” she said.
Dr. Jack Caravanos, an environmental health specialist at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, said he believes open windows are the best way to keep air moving. “When you open a window, there's dilution of that interior space,” he said. “And the dilution is good because the virus particles will go down and there’s less chance of being infected.”
Even if city school buildings improve their HVAC systems, Caravanos said the problem with modern HVAC systems is that they’re designed to save money by minimizing fresh air intake, which he sees as the best environment.
“Building ventilation systems are not designed to completely bring in 100% fresh air. It's sort of a waste of money to take hot humid air and then chill it for the summer, and vice versa in the winter,” he said. The best way to maximize filtration through HVACs is to run them constantly, Caravanos noted.
“Try to get the HVAC on all the time because a lot of them are on cycles where they go on for a few minutes and then they go off. So try to keep that air running all the time and also maximizing the fresh air intake,” he said.
Caravanos worked with Uber and the Independent Drivers Guild union on a study to examine particle flow in cars, and found that open windows were essential. “We released particles in the cab, measured how many particles were there and then opened the rear windows and in less than a minute, we got back to background levels,” he said.
While car windows are proportionately larger to car interiors than classroom windows, Caravanos said the same principle holds -- fresh air, as much as possible.
Caravanos recommends schools open all the windows, keep the HVACs running, increase fresh air intake, and “purge” classrooms throughout the day. “I would like to see every school at the end of the day purge the air that's in that classroom. And possibly even before classes--just start the day and during recess, just make it a habit of purging the air out every day,” Caravanos said.
The ventilation concerns go beyond the classroom, too -- union representatives for school lunch workers said they’ve long experienced stifling conditions in school kitchens.
As kitchen workers continued preparing meals for the city’s grab and go food program this summer, there were complaints that the summer heat made “work conditions that are unacceptable, unhealthy and inhumane” said Shaun D. Francois I, the president of DC37 Local 372 union, in a statement ahead of a rally Wednesday outside City Hall.
In one school kitchen in Manhattan, the temperature was as high as 135 degrees during one heat wave in July, he said in the statement.
“This is an ongoing problem where essential workers are not being taken care of," he said, and called on the city to perform "a comprehensive, school-by-school assessment of the ventilation and cooling needs in public school kitchens,” Francois said.
The DOE responded by saying they’re working with the union leadership to “develop long-term solutions to air cooling and ventilation concerns in school kitchens.”