Great Green Schools

By P. W. McRandle
Issue 136, May - June 2006

In August 2005, we at The Green Guide—a bimonthly magazine for environmentally aware consumers that provides green home tips, eco-product reviews, and advice for healthy living—published our first annual list of America’s Top Ten Green Schools.

We weren’t talking about schools that were painted green, as one puzzled administrator wondered, but wanted to recognize those schools that have gone the furthest toward building a better environment for their students and teaching children how to be more conscious of the natural world. While conserving energy, using recycled materials, and planting native species are all valuable in their own rights, the green schools movement also focuses on creating schools in which students can perform to the best of their abilities—by, for example, increasing daylight in classrooms and reducing asthma-triggering volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as ammonia and formaldehyde.

High-performance Schools
Eight-year-old Kai Nedd has asthma and lives in New York City’s Harlem, where asthma rates are among the highest in the country. She attends the Children’s Storefront School, where she learns about organic foods and healthier cooking oils, but she has to be careful at recess time. “She can play outside but can’t be around dirt and dust, which kick up her allergies,” says her mother, Elaine Nedd. So Kai can’t join in mucking about in the organic garden behind the school, a feature that helped make Storefront a runner-up in the Top Ten Green Schools list. Last fall, Storefront implemented an asthma program, working with parents and helping teachers recognize symptoms of asthma attacks. This is essential in a neighborhood where, no matter how clean the school, diesel fumes and construction dust can trigger attacks.

Each year, US children miss a total of 14 million days of school due to asthma attacks.¹ In 1995, the US General Accounting Office reported that almost a fifth (19 percent) of American schools reported unsatisfactory or very unsatisfactory indoor air quality.² A problem in itself, indoor-air pollution poses life-threatening risks to asthmatic children, whose numbers rose from the 1960s through the 1990s. Though there’s some evidence of a recent leveling off, currently about 6.³ million American children suffer from asthma, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).3 The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that asthma is the most common chronic childhood illness⁴ and a leading cause of disability among children, while, in 1994, direct healthcare costs for children’s treatment amounted to more than $3 billion annually.⁵ It seems that every parent either has a child with asthma or knows one.

Schools didn’t cause the rise in asthma rates, but anything they can do to remove irritants, such as molds, chemicals in cleaning agents, and volatile organic compounds released by paints or new construction, can help reduce the frequency of attacks and raise the number of days children can attend school. And it’s not just about asthma. “Indoor-air quality has a very real effect on how well, or how poorly, kids learn,” Claire Barnett, executive director of Healthy Schools Network, told The Green Guide. One bright sign is that, in August 2005, New York State passed legislation that will require schools to use “green cleaners,” banning those that give off fumes that irritate children’s airways.⁶ Though various cities and schools have adopted green cleaning, New York is the first state to legislate it, owing to the efforts of the Healthy Schools Network Environmental Advocates of New York, and New York State United Teachers, among other groups.

Another means of improving air quality and ridding schools of neurotoxic and carcinogenic pesticides is the use of integrated pest management, the first step of which is “depriving pests of food, water, and entryway,” says Mark Miller, MD, MPH, director of the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit at the University of California, San Francisco. One way schools do this is by planting hardier native plants rather than species that require herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, a tactic taken up by Punahou School’s Case Middle School, in Honolulu, and other schools on our list. But Punahou School goes even further.