Highlights

“Your average school building that you’re going to walk into today is not a commercial facility where you go to do your grocery shopping, or retail shopping, or even a lot of the office spaces that folks are used to going into every day. And even if you want to, it’s really difficult and expensive to retrofit these buildings with the controls needed,” he said. Barkkume discovered guidance for clean air even from the CDC has fallen short. “From the beginning and up until today, the CDC does not recognize full aerosol transmission of the virus and this trickles down to the state level and it informs the requirements the Department of Education places on school districts and it changes the way they do their planning,” he said. He is now working with teachers unions to raise a red flag about air quality in schools. He believes aerosol droplets can escape even when a person’s wearing a mask. And Barkkume says the state has no measurements to prove a school’s met the required clean air standards. There’s been a big focus on filters lately, with some districts investing in MERV filters. But Barkkume says that’s less important than ventilation. And it [...]

Heather Sorge, Campaign Organizer, Healthy Schools Now, WEC had an open conversation with Congressman Norcross to discuss school reopening and staff and student health and safety alongside Marie Blistan, President, NJEA, and Tina Dare, teacher and GR Representative, NJEA.  School buildings must be safe for in-person instruction to resume.  Watch the video here.  

‘If you want to do it, do it right’ Last month, in conjunction with the Coalition for Healthier Schools, the New Jersey Work Environment Council (WEC) issued “The Pandemic vs. Schools,” a national call to action emphasizing the importance to districts of having a solid plan before reopening. WEC is a Trenton-based labor coalition that typically concerns itself with workplace health and safety issues. “Schools can either slow the spread of the virus or speed it up,” the report reads. “Right now, schools across the country are struggling to come up with these plans on their own,” a task, it argues, for which many are ill-equipped to respond on the fly. Healthy Schools Now campaign organizer Heather Sorge said an unprecedented absence of federal guidance for public school re-openings has resulted in uneven school re-openings across the country. She hopes that districts will take the time to create rigorous health and safety plans before returning to in-person instruction. “I know there’s a big rush to return to normalcy,” Sorge said. “However, if you want to do it, do it right. “We don’t want to go backwards, and we certainly don’t want to rush to find out that we were wrong, and that we started too [...]

School Buildings and Occupants Can Speed or Slow the Spread of COVID-19 Jul. 9, 2020 / PRZen / SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. -- As pressure mounts for schools to reopen this fall, awareness is growing of the need for specific plans on how schools will not just open, but stay open, by protecting the health of children and their families, teachers, administrators and school staff.  By their nature, schools are an environment conducive to the spread of illnesses, including COVID-19. They are densely occupied for long periods and have a well-documented history of deferred maintenance which has resulted in well-known problems with ventilation and indoor air and plumbing, and challenges in cleaning. The virus is not going away. Moreover, the poorest communities hardest hit by COVID-19 also send their children to the poorest schools in the worst condition, making this a supremely challenging health and education equity and rights problem with no quick solution. Over 60 national public health and healthy school leaders joined the Coalition for Healthier Schools today to release a National Call to Action for state health agencies to provide an authoritative School Infection Prevention and Control Plan to all schools to adopt. The current piecemeal approach to no-plan-just-open, will clearly deepen the [...]