Schools Ventilation Progress

Rationale for this site .. as a Haiku

In halls of learning,
Air flows with wisdom and care,
Safe breaths everywhere.

Summary of action plan steps:

1. Kids, parents, teachers (KPTs) check their school’s page on this site
2. KPTs add detail & fix inaccuracies in those pages
3. KPTs compare their school to others (local or elsewhere)
4. KPTs pressure their school to improve their poor ventilation, and:
   1. get involved in improvements including donation of DIY air filters
   2. pressure the school board and government
   3. build consensus with other KPTs

Contribute

This site is a “wiki” like Wikipedia, but for schools and classroom indoor climate: air-quality generally as tell as temperature. You can contribute to this wiki by editing the pages online. Look for “edit this page” links at the bottom of each page and read the contributing and rules guide.

NEWS

• Jun 11, 2024: Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation US: Upgrade your air with a DIY classroom project.

Kids and teachers being sick all the time is not normal

COVID-19 has weakened people’s immune systems to many diseases. Those could be repeat infection of Covid-19, or Flu, RSV, Staph, Strep, Measles, and others.

We have to lower transmission in schools as kids bring it home to parents, too. We know exactly how to do this without putting everyone in masks, making people attend school remotely, or implementing any form of lockdown again.

More detailed reading on the rationale for this site

1. See COVID-19 Is Airborne to learn how it was known from the start that COVID-19 is primarily airborne and the WHO engaged in their own mis-information and told the world that is was not (Feb 11th 2020).
2. See Ventilation work needed in order to get schools to healthy full attendance
3. See our Action plan

Mapping the world’s schools

• USA - just a few states for now, some partial at that
• Canada - just a couple of provinces for now
• UK: Wales - all schools, Isle of Man
• Republic of Ireland - all schools.

You’re invited to help edit the data within. Sake a look at one of the many schools listed and see what is marked as TODO. The intention is for you to fix one or more TODO-marked facts wiki-style. We have some advice on contributing and rules, some tools for working on per school entries, and a discussion of the technologies we use for this site

You’re also invited to help create a list of schools for your country, state, province, region or large city - See more areas - howto

If schools listed so far get some traction on this site, we will keep going to list other countries. Success would be every school we have listed so far graded, and have some more proseful commentary.

Grading of schools

Grades of 0 to 5 (“very poor” to “excellent”) should be established by 2025.

See Grading schools for a breakdown of what each grade means.

DIY air filters

A cash-strapped school is going to accept the donation of these, so y’all are going to need to see what they look like:

Resources

• Try this DIY indoor air purifier to get cleaner air - 2.5-minute video from Washington Post
• 5th Graders Make DIY Air Purifiers for Entire School - 3-minute video from Jeffco Public Schools (Colorado)
• The Homemade Air Purifier That’s Been Saving Lives During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Smithsonian Magazine
• Do-it-yourself portable air cleaners - Schools For Health site
• This DIY box helps clear indoor air of the coronavirus. Why aren’t more people using them? - L.A. Times
• Air filter workshops protect people from dangers of wildfire smoke - Simon Fraser University (video clip says wildfire smoke but these also scrub covids from the air)

Global school ventilation improvement efforts so far and resources

• Boston, USA: CO2 monitors in 4322 classrooms
• Berkeley, California: CO2 monitors in 687 classrooms
• Lübeck, Germany: CO2 monitors in 2200 classrooms and 28 nurseries. See also a press article on that
• Latvia: CO2 monitors in 875 schools and social centers / 14000 classrooms
• Connecticut: Schools have a state-wide grant for HVAC work to tap into and a resource on terminology including DIY air filters
• Website Let’s Air lists dashboards that show live CO2 levels for classrooms. Their list includes many of the above. The same group maintains all the same materials in French, too.
• Australian activists have created Covid Safety for Schools which is a comprehensive resource for teachers, parents, and students. The materials are initially for Australia but are applicable to any other country on earth. Watch our for their webinars.

Technologies we use and tools for fact-finding

• See site technologies
• See tools for working on entries

Site ownership

This site is edited by volunteers who are interested in accelerating the work to complete the adequate ventilation of schools. Volunteers includes parents and kids. This effort was not commissioned by education authorities or governments. The volunteers are in groups around countries, states, provinces, and cities.

If you want to launch another small country (e.g. Luxembourg), or a whole state/province (Nova Scotia), or a City (New York), you should have your own team ready to curate the entries for each school. A decent percentage of that team should have some software development skills and GitHub experience. You’d make a GitHub repo like Wales get it ready, then ask us to slot it into the main site. Pick a name that represents the hierarchy - Canada_Nova_Scotia)

Edit this page.