Want Better Students? Keep Their Air Clean.

Schools around the country are always looking for ways to improve the performance of their students. Not only do they want to do the best job they can to prepare youngsters to be future world leaders, in the short term there are metrics that they must meet in order to keep parents, school boards, and legislators happy. As a School Facility Manager, you can help make a positive impact toward this goal in an area that is easily overlooked-because it’s literally invisible-the air that students breathe every day.

One organization that has been investigating the link between school environment and student performance is the World Green Building Council through their Better Places for People project. Since 2014, the project has been dedicated to showing how green buildings help people in a very real, impactful way. Schools are a major focus because, as the project notes, “School is a place a child has to go, no matter the indoor environmental conditions. And young children are impacted by indoor environmental factors, like poor air quality, more than adults.”

Positive Impacts of Good Indoor Air Quality Include:

• In a study of 100 US elementary classrooms, there was a 2.9% and 2.7% increase in math and reading scores, respectively, for each liter per second per person increase in ventilation rates
• Higher ventilation rates have been associated with faster and more accurate student responses for color, picture memory, and word recognition