Union leaders representing more than 4,000 Portland teachers and other licensed educators say they will meet with Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero and other Portland Public Schools administrators in coming days to urge them to acknowledge ventilation issues in a significant swath of elementary and middle schools.
Leaders of the Portland Association of Teachers say the district shouldn’t ignore the problem of stale air in at least one quarter of K-8 classrooms – and they want the district leaders to fix it.
“This is the part that’s so frustrating to us – they have all this information and what are they doing with it?” said Gwen Sullivan, union vice president. “We’ll just ask them flat out: ‘What is your plan?’”
The union’s questions are prompted by The Oregonian/OregonLive’s “Below the bare minimum” investigation, which found that nearly 500 of almost 2,000 classrooms in the district’s elementary and middle schools fail to meet experts’ bare minimum recommendations for fresh and filtered air. Many ventilation scientists set that minimum threshold at no less than three air changes per an hour, though they say five or six should be the goal.
Experts also say there is no magical number that makes an indoor space “safe,” but the higher the number of times a room’s total volume of air is replaced, the less likely students and staff will catch airborne diseases such as COVID-19, colds and flu, or suffer ill effects from mold, air pollution or the build-up of carbon dioxide.
Over the past week, the news organization asked all seven Portland school board members whether the district should improve ventilation and filtration in its schools, such as by setting an air-change goal. At least eight of the metro area’s largest districts have set such goals – including Beaverton at 5 and Hillsboro at 6. Both say they’ve achieved those rates in all classrooms.
Two Portland board members – Andrew Scott and Julia Brim-Edwards – said they want the district to explore whether it should set a minimum standard for the number of times fresh or filtered air should be brought into classrooms. Scott said he’d like to send the question to the board’s Facilities and Operations Committee.
Two other board members – Gary Hollands and Herman Greene – said they couldn’t comment because they hadn’t read The Oregonian/OregonLive’s May 15 analysis. Additionally, Eilidh Lowery, Amy Kohnstamm and board chair Michelle DePass were either unavailable or didn’t respond to interview requests.
“The fact that we did the testing shows how much we care about air quality for kids in our schools,” Scott said, of the $800,000 the district spent to measure air changes in every classroom. “I think the question now is where do we go? …What more do we need to be doing?”
Brim-Edwards said the district has worked hard to protect students and staff from COVID-19 by focusing on what leaders believe matters most: promoting vaccinations and masks. As new information about air changes has emerged, she said the district should delve into whether to set a goal by having additional conversations with public health agencies and by tapping experts outside those agencies.
“We’ve done a lot of things, and is there more to do? Yes,” Brim-Edwards said. “(The Oregonian’s) analysis of what’s happening in our classrooms adds to the body of knowledge. …And when we have that information, it’s good to act on it.”
District administrators didn’t grant an interview or answer questions about whether they’ve changed their tack. In interviews leading up to the publishing of the investigation, Chief Operating Officer Dan Jung said local and state public health agencies haven’t recommended that the district meet a specific air-change-per-hour goal. Guerrero said he thought the district has done an “admirable job in ensuring that the air quality in our schools are as optimal as they can be, within our means.”
The district has spent more than $5 million installing portable air purifiers in every classroom and upgrading building systems with higher quality filters. Still, that work failed to boost hundreds of classrooms to bare minimum levels, experts say. More than half of cafeterias, gyms and libraries districtwide also fall below three air changes per hour.
Effie Greathouse is a mother of two at Hayhurst Elementary in Southwest Portland, where 73% of the classrooms are below bare minimum recommendations, including her children’s. She bought a portable air quality monitor – which measures a key indicator of air quality, carbon dioxide – and lent it to her children’s teachers so they can detect when numbers start to climb and open windows. But she said that’s only feasible some of the time, because her daughter’s classroom borders a noisy outdoor basketball court.
Last week, Greathouse created a Facebook group for parents, teachers and community members wanting to collaborate to improve the air in all types of indoor spaces.
“It seems like for whatever the reason,” she said, “this is not something the district has taken on, and therefore it looks like it needs to be parents and teachers doing some of this work on the ground and then showing the district that this is important.”
Vernon School parent Maya Pueo von Geldern has been disappointed since the story ran because she’s received no communications from the district acknowledging its low ventilation rates and how it plans to respond.
She said she also was disheartened to attend a school board meeting packed with more than 100 people last week and find only two portable air purifiers in the room. One was running at half speed and the other was turned off.
With permission, she switched one of them on to full speed during a break, only to see someone get up a short while later to turn it down to half speed, she said. She suspects it was because it was too loud. The Oregonian/OregonLive’s investigation found many teachers say they run their classroom purifiers at half speed because of the noise, and that undercuts their effectiveness at cleaning the air.
Sullivan, the teachers’ union vice president, said the union as early 2020 asked the district to heed recommendations put out by Harvard University to measure the air flow inside classrooms and achieve five or six air changes per hour, but was rebuffed. Sullivan said The Oregonian/OregonLive’s investigation cast a new light on the issue, and she doesn’t want that to fade.
“My worry is the fact that folks on the district side haven’t even brought this up,” Sullivan said.
Union president Elizabeth Thiel said teachers care deeply about healthy air. And it’s an issue the union will continue to advocate for.
“There is so much going on right now it’s hard to sort out which crisis to pay attention to,” Thiel said. “But this is really, really important. And I hope the district will use (The Oregonian’s) reporting as a guide to figure out some triage plans and some long-term plans to make things better.”
— Aimee Green; agreen@oregonian.com; @o_aimee
