The Clean Air for Schools Fund is working to get effective air purifiers into classrooms at scale, reducing airborne disease transmission and improving student health and academic outcomes. Below you’ll find a high level summary of progress to date across our top priorities.
Understanding What Works
Given the absence of efforts to learn from what worked and didn’t work during the pandemic in air purifier programs in schools, we proposed and ran a series of workshops in partnership with the US Green Building Council interviewing district leadership, facilities managers, teachers, and policymakers from school systems that deployed purifiers during COVID.
Central finding: compliance is the biggest challenge and, thankfully, is due to very solvable design problems. If devices aren’t appropriate for classrooms or are implemented poorly, staff turn them off or down, rendering them ineffective for reducing airborne disease transmission.
We’ve drafted a Target Product Profile and Model RFP to steer districts toward effective, classroom-appropriate devices. We’ll publish these soon.
School System Partnerships & Pilots
Two school system partners signed onto air quality monitoring and air filter programs and pilots, covering ~60 schools.
Launched a grant application program soliciting additional school systems to partner at little or no cost.
Research Partnerships
We’ve seeded a few studies in various stages of development that would likely not have happened otherwise, including wastewater-absenteeism study, a cluster randomized trial on filtration in schools in northern Canada, and a study characterizing what exactly is in the air in classrooms
Communications & Policy
Published an op-ed in The 74 on air quality as an education intervention.
Published an article on the paradigm shift in airborne disease published in SSIR’s quarterly print issue.
Met with a Massachusetts state rep on a proposed indoor air quality monitoring bill. He's connecting us to Education and Public Health committee chairs and discussing a pilot in Lexington.
India & International
We provided support to UChicago/Michael Kremer’s lab team in Delhi, achieving ~40% PM2.5 reduction in Delhi schools using window-inlet ducting to purifiers, even with un-optimized configuration and while maintaining low CO2. This approach addresses the core challenge in South Asia, where extreme outdoor pollution normally overwhelms indoor purifiers.
We’re exploring a new set of designs and low-cost positive pressure systems that could achieve much higher levels of PM2.5 reduction
Secured a meeting with India’s National Minister of Environment
Field Building
We're incubating a new clean air organization that's securing pledges from top-level leadership across multiple countries to prioritize and invest in indoor air quality.