Alayne McGregor
With another triple-threat viral season about to hit, 30+-degree days increasing, and smoke from forest fires affecting air quality, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) is pushing the province for better ventilation standards and funding.
Last month, the board unanimously passed a motion calling on the province to update its air quality standards and guidance for public school buildings to support schools in creating the safest possible learning environments, and to provide dedicated capital and operating funding envelopes for reducing the spread of illness in schools.
The board will send this request to the Ministers of Education, Health, and Municipal Affairs, as well the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, and the Ontario Chief Medical Advisor and Chair of Public Health Board.
The motion aims to build long-term improvements to air quality in all schools and to support continued in-school public health promotion activities, in partnership with Ottawa Public Health. The board’s director of education was also mandated to present a report to the board by the end of 2023 on ventilation-related investments, challenges and opportunities, and other opportunities to reduce respiratory viruses in schools.
Trustee Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, a family doctor known for her promotion of vaccines and other measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, proposed the motion. She told The BUZZ that Toronto District School Board had passed the same motion.
She said that the threat from respiratory viruses (COVID-19, RSV, and influenza) indisputably affects student and teacher health, school attendance, and overall well-being.
“As congregate settings, schools are a place where we should be doing what we can to reduce the spread of viruses as well as improving indoor air quality. We saw this was an issue last spring with forest fires, and so it’s not just viruses but it’s also general air quality. There’s lots of research that supports this and the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers and others have released recommendations.”
In the last four years, the OCDSB has made small investments in some areas, but not a concerted effort to really look at what air quality standards should be, she said “to support schools in being as safe as possible. There are HEPA filters now in schools but they’re not running in every classroom, and there are some discrepancies [between] older buildings versus newer buildings versus portables.”
“If we don’t do something to improve air quality, that is going to affect significantly the spread of disease in schools, and has already affected it. And also the ability of students as well as staff to function if it’s too hot, if the air is poor quality.”
She said it was also important to monitor air quality, including collecting data on carbon dioxide levels in individual classrooms.
Trustee Justine Bell, whose Zone 10 covers Centretown, said that the ventilation situation in local schools has considerably improved since the beginning of the pandemic. Windows can now open, and there have been significant investment in classroom air filtration systems.
However, with many classrooms downtown at maximum enrolment, “we’re talking about very close proximity to to their neighbours and ultimately it’s not an ideal situation.” In addition, filtration units were often too loud. They could not be run with the windows open, and in hot weather, classrooms became overheated.
She said it was unfortunate that masking has become such a political issue, because “ultimately we need to create a culture of shared responsibility.”
At the top of her priorities when she met with the board’s new director of education, she said, was a plan “to ensure that each and every classroom has a suitable and functioning air filtration system so that we can lower the risk of of of transmitting sicknesses in the classroom. This is absolutely is an incredible investment.”
The board cannot afford to have many teachers become ill, she said, because “especially right now in our French immersion schools, we just don’t have the numbers to cover all of the classes if sickness starts to spread.”
Parents have told her that on hot days it’s very hard for children to concentrate in class, she said, making air conditioning also important. While every school in the downtown core has an air-conditioned space where children can have reprieve and some have more air-conditioned classrooms, “it’s not an equal playing field.”
Schools like Elgin Street, Cambridge, and Devonshire need more air conditioning, she said, but this requires more provincial funding, and it will be challenging to add to older schools like Lisgar Collegiate.
This year, ASHRAE, an international standards society for heating and ventilation, released a new standard (241) establishing minimum requirements for controlling infectious aerosols and reducing the risk of disease transmission in new and existing buildings. Included are requirements for both outdoor air system and air cleaning system design, installation, commissioning, operation, and maintenance to reduce exposure to infectious aerosols.