All:
It is so disheartening to think about 56-60 million kids heading to school this Fall. I am a 16 year retired architect. During my years in architecture, I worked on about 60 school projects in Alaska ranging from isolated 3 room schools in the Aleutian Islands to major high schools in Anchorage, Fairbanks and the Kenai Peninsula.
What make me angry today are the attempts by many school districts to retrofit older schools in part with floor mounted HEPA Filter plug-in classroom floor fans as one solution to solving air quality issues in classrooms.
This pandemic has created a nightmare for schools in America and exposed just how marginal the school classroom environments are for our children, grandchildren and in my case a great-granddaughter who will start school in another 5-6 years.
To heck with infrastructure funding for roads and bridges. We should be spending billions of dollars to first retrofit, repair and/or replace our over 113,000 public & private schools in this country.
To me it sounds like our policy makers are putting all their resources towards shots-in-arms maybe in the hopes this is the cheaper way of dealing with a pandemic killing 650,000-700,000 of us so far. We should pressure Government to also address a far more costly solution of repairing/replacing our schools to protect our children first and then our public buildings to protect adults second. I doubt privately owned buildings will ever be completely retrofitted.
This pandemic is not going away. It will be with us because it is in the world and much of the world is unable to receive immediate vaccine relief & will probably never have public buildings environmentally upgraded.
It took probably thousands of years to eradicate 99% of polio from the planet. I doubt the Corona virus will disappear in this century.
So we should begin the “long haul”
to make all our schools safe for our children. We should never rely on local school districts to “fix” their schools to make them safe against an airborne Delta variant and who knows what else! That is not fair to them and will ensure the richer school districts will do a better job of protecting students from Covid infection. A quarter of a million kids per week are presently testing positive for Covid-19 & variants. How many kids will have to die before we as a country shift our focus toward saving them?
Plug-in-floor fans be dammed!
We should create an OSHA type agency to reduce Covid spread, and have them or their inspectors look at every school in the U.S., determine exhaustive Covid relief measures, provide federal relief money, see that construction contracts are awarded and carried out to meet specific specifications and federal standards. Heck I doubt such standards for buildings even exist!
Howard A. Partch
Anacortes, WA
Sent from my iPhone