Using Data to Ensure Classroom Health

According to the NCES, US schools require $197 Billion in repairs and upgrades to bring onsite building conditions up to “good overall condition”.

- The condition of 1 in 5 permanent buildings are rated as fair or poor, this number doubles to 2 in 5 in temporary buildings, and 31% of schools have temporary buildings.

- Public schools report 30% of HVAC, ventilation/filtration systems and lighting are in fair or poor condition in their permanent buildings, with higher numbers reported in the temporary buildings.

Some of these issues, such as high or low classroom temperature or lighting problems, are obvious to those who spend their days in the classrooms, others like CO2 are harder to identify, but can significantly impact cognition. Schools throughout the country need to implement a reliable and transparent system for measuring classroom environmental conditions so that our students, parents, and teachers can be confident that our classrooms are healthy environments for our students and teachers. This classroom condition monitoring can also serve to identify the classrooms that most need maintenance and upgrade dollars, allowing those schools with the most need to receive their slice of the $197 billion, not those with the loudest voice or best connections.

"Schools throughout the country need to implement a reliable and transparent

system for measuring classroom environmental conditions"

We’ve seen this successfully implemented in Hawaii, where sensors placed in classrooms allow administrators, parents, students, and teachers to track temperature and humidity throughout the school day. This data then informed decisions about allocation of funding and assessing the effectiveness of different cooling solutions. RoundhouseOne is proud to have supported this work and are excited to see what else can be done.

If you have any thoughts on how we can use data in the classroom and beyond to make our schools safer for our students and teachers, please comment below.