Breaking point: COVID-19 exposes the inequities of long-standing school building failures

With the fall semester underway, “going to school” has become a fractured, frustrating patchwork of individual states and school districts attempting to balance how we keep students safe and how we make sure they learn. The coronavirus has been the catalyst for upending the school day for everyone, but the impacts are outsized for low-income families.  Are we using the pandemic as an excuse for not having dealt with a full spectrum of educational inequalities that we already knew were there?

Just to be clear, America’s students are not simply facing a “lost year” in their educational journey because of COVID-19 but a societal failing so complete and pervasive it may forever compromise any meaningful shot at real equality in education. And it’s rooted in the inequities of our school buildings themselves.

Back in spring, when schools were being closed in response to the threat of COVID-19, media coverage focused on how distance learning would swell the widening attainment gap: between students who had access to broadband and those who didn’t; between students from higher income households and those who enjoyed less economic privilege; between students with their own quiet spaces and those jostling for Zoom-room around the kitchen table. Perhaps, most poignantly, highlighting the chasm between students with their own tech and those sharing devices with multiple family members.

But now, just as students should be settling comfortably into their new academic year, it’s clearer than ever that the inequities learners are facing in 2020 aren’t solely – or even primarily – attributable to COVID-19. 

The unpalatable truth is that many students who have been falling behind due to a lack of effective remote learning support are the same ones who have been failed every day of the year by our inadequate public school buildings. 

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in June 2020, after nationwide visits made in the last quarter of 2019, observed that 54 percent of public school districts needed to “update or replace multiple building systems or features” in their schools. The figures showed that 41 percent of districts needed to renew or upgrade heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in at least half of their schools, representing an estimated 36,000 schools nationwide. 

In about half of the 55 schools visited, officials cited problems stemming from older, leaking HVAC systems that often lead to a gradual deterioration in indoor air quality due to conditions like mold. Twelve months on and the same dilapidated conditions recorded by the GAO using pre-COVID data are now materially affecting the ability of schools to safely welcome students back to class at all. 

The House Education and Labor Committee recently cautioned that unless issues relating to heating and ventilation systems and hand washing facilities are addressed, tens of thousands of schools will fail to meet the CDC guidelines for safe reopening, which I believe are sparse to begin with.

The sad part is that when it comes to our nation’s schools we’ve known about these threats to health and safety for years and have chosen to look the other way.

We understand the factors that underpin a positive educational experience. We know that health-focused learning environments that incorporate good air circulation and filtration, as well as thermal comfort and effective lighting solutions, help students to focus and learn more effectively. These factors are further magnified when combined with design features that encourage activity and movement throughout the day, access to healthier foods, quiet spaces for study and focus and access to nature—indoors and out. 

Conversely, schools that are in a state of disrepair – suffering from poor indoor air quality due to lack of ventilation and proper filtration and compromised water quality – are already several steps behind. These schools weren’t sufficient before the pandemic; today they are just plain dangerous. 

Back in 2016, the Center for Green Schools, which I founded, published the State of Our Schools report identifying a $46-billion shortfall in school funding. According to Mary Filardo from the Build America’s School Infrastructure Coalition (BASIC), that shortfall has only continued to widen in the intervening years.

This year, the chronic underfunding that has been a feature of our public schools has thrown the whole system into a crisis that it is ill-equipped to handle.

In the summer, the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health – led by respected environmental science expert Joseph Allen – released a report detailing risk-reduction recommendations for schools reopening this fall. Like many scientists and educators, Allen is advocating a return to in-person schooling because of the significant advantages – educational, emotional, social and behavioral – that are hard to replicate through distance learning. Not to mention critical access to meals, medical aid and mental health services. Couple that with the economic impact of working parents suddenly being without child-care, and the cascade of long-term impacts is profound.

Students in low-income communities experience the biggest hardships, regardless of whether their school went virtual or is back in-person. If virtual, these students are struggling with woefully under-resourced online learning provisions. If they are back in-person, it’s likely that many are returning to facilities that were already health compromised long before COVID. These students are also more likely to be living in multi-generational households, potentially exposing and infecting vulnerable family members.

The shame of it is that school facilities should be one of our greatest strengths in the fight against the virus. The target of low transmission rates could be achieved, and even reasonably expected, if we made some basic changes to the way our schools are operated and maintained, focusing on the kinds of buildings and equipment improvements that could deliver real health and safety benefits. The poor state of our school infrastructure makes that unrealistic. While the federal government has stepped up in many other sectors, it has yet to intervene in the existential struggle schools are now facing. 

The fact is that a huge number of our schools are simply not fit for purpose and haven’t been for years. The deficiencies that have been laid bare by the pandemic are the result of decades of denial and under-spending and can’t be resolved by school districts and states alone. The 1995 version of the GAO School Facilities Assessment noted that for every $1 not invested, the system falls another $620 behind. Extrapolate those figures to 2020, and you begin to get a sense of the enormity of the problem.

While schools need to implement urgent practices and protocols, we must plan more strategically for the long term. We must invest in schools that can deliver more sustainable, resilient learning environments, while protecting and improving the health and well-being of the students, faculty and staff who walk through the doors every day.

It’s a problem that can only be solved at scale. We urgently need the U.S. government to step up and commit federal aid to maintain and upgrade school facilities, focusing on redressing inequities in provision and raising the bar for all students. We and our partners at BASIC are delighted that the $10 billion-worth of emergency repair and upgrade funds we’ve been so strongly advocating for in the next COVID-19 relief package has been at least partly acknowledged in the latest version of the Heroes Act introduced by the House on September 29. 

If passed, the proposed $5 billion support package will go some way to mitigating the pressure felt by schools responding to COVID conditions, but it’s just a drop in the bucket to what is needed overall to provide all our children a safe, adequate day-to-day learning environment for the future. Beyond COVID-19, the fires that have ravaged the West Coast and the hurricane impacts in the Gulf have shown us that the next disaster is – always – right around the corner. In the face of a heightening climate emergency, this is the new normal.

The disruptions in learning attributed to the pandemic are hard to estimate and even harder to comprehend, but we know that it will harm outcomes for millions of our children, damaging the long-term education prospects for a generation of young people, especially those from low income families. It’s a situation that’s aggravated by the growing divide between those who have options that allow them to continue learning, and those for whom such options are an unimaginable luxury.

COVID-19 should be the wake-up call for changing the way we value and fund our schools forever. Because where our children learn matters, and each one of them deserves a first-rate education that’s safe and healthy.

Rachel Gutter is President of the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI). She spent nearly a decade at the U.S. Green Building Council, where she served as Senior Vice President of Knowledge and was Founding Director of the Center for Green Schools. Rachel and her team recently created a free training program for teachers designed to help schools implement health and safety recommendations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.