Which kids have cleaner air and which kids don’t
On Monday October 6, 2025, three SIAFOS members sent urgent emails to school board members, leadership, senior facilities staff, and high school principals in PPS. We worked all weekend on careful, considered emails to bring something we know is critical to equity, absences, learning and health:
- Facilities’ plans to get rid of all good working air purifiers that were first placed in high schools, and are still perfectly functioning and needed in the district.
They may have been planning to get rid of them quickly, they may have been planning to get rid of them slowly, but the plan was pretty clear that they would be getting rid of perfectly functional air purifiers, when teachers and maintenance think they only need a filter change, but they do not even actually need a filter change.
And if the first air purifier placed in high schools will be gotten rid of whenever the filter change light goes on, that would ultimately mean – no high schools having two air purifiers. - Franklin got a big batch of the air purifiers that came from OHA, even though Franklin has mostly great clean airflows with just one air purifier.
Those units from OHA should be prioritized to go to other schools which have poor ventilation rates – and should not be used to replace Franklin’s perfectly functional units — and then trash those perfectly functional units?
What the three of us emailed in bears directly on environmental health inequity. But maybe the part that shows it bears on environmental health inequity was buried too far in to the data report – a data report that emphasized findings from lab tests this summer that frequent filter changes are not needed. A report that was first trying to make it plain that we shouldn’t get rid of air purifiers that the district thinks needs a filter change but do not even need a filter change yet.
The equity piece is: Franklin and Grant, with Black student populations of ~5% and 6%, have mostly great air quality. While Roosevelt and McDaniel, with Black student populations of ~12% and 13% and predominantly students of color, have mostly poor air quality.
Here are clean air rates at these 4 modernized schools if there are no air purifiers – bigger bars to the left of the solid line = lots of classrooms with extremely poor air quality. Bigger bars between the solid and dotted line = lots of classrooms with middling air quality to approaching our minimum goal for health-based levels of clean air. Bigger bars to the right of the dotted line = good to great air quality.
See how much better Franklin and Grant are:
You could think of these graphs like this: the larger the bars are on the right, the more days those students are not home sick with flu, colds, or covid, not home with asthma complications, not home taking care of siblings they brought these viruses home to because we aren’t cleaning our indoor air the way we clean our indoor running water.
Here are clean air rates at these 4 modernized schools if they have only one air purifier – see how much better Franklin and Grant are:
Two air purifiers per classroom are needed at McDaniel and Roosevelt to get to the same very good to great distribution of clean air rates as Franklin and Grant get with one:
To be extra extra clear, McDaniel and Roosevelt’s second air purifiers are either still in storage (or maybe some of them are at Franklin now) or maybe, as Franklin was told, facilities has unnecessarily told McDaniel and Roosevelt that they need to swap out working first air purifiers for the second air purifier instead of telling them why they should add the second air purifier to have two per room … leaving McDaniel and Roosevelt with this environmental health inequity. Also, swapping them out is not the communications message we have been working in good faith with the district on.
We only relatively recently got analyses of high schools done. And we did not do these distribution graphs on any other high schools until this issue of swapping units came up. That includes Jefferson.
Jefferson has been low on our priority list because the staff who held most of the power on ventilation and air purifier decisions two years ago (and now are no longer at PPS) made the decision to keep Roosevelt and McDaniel’s second air purifiers in storage, but amazingly, did give Jefferson their second air purifiers. So Jefferson has not been on our priority list. That was a mistake. We have listened to Jefferson families describe the racism they have faced, and we should have known better and prioritized Jefferson.
Here is Jefferson (Black student population of 47%) compared to Franklin and just in case you wonder, is the low ventilation rates at Jefferson just because the building isn’t modernized yet? I’ve put in Cleveland (Black student population 3%), too. Here is Franklin, Cleveland, and Jefferson with no air purifiers:
Here are Franklin, Cleveland, and Jefferson with one air purifier per classroom — look at how much better this environmental health issue is at Franklin and Cleveland here. We fully recognize Cleveland has so many other environmental health issues, and they really need two air purifiers in classrooms as well, but still Jefferson has so much less clean air in a one air purifier situation:
Finally for looking at Jefferson compared to Cleveland and Franklin, here is Jefferson and Cleveland if they have the two air purifiers placed and running compared to Franklin with just one air purifier running. Jefferson is only at middling levels of clean air with two air purifiers per room:
Decisions are being made right now that we think are holdovers from the previous leadership’s and previous employees’ non-evidence-based approach to air quality and air purifiers that left Roosevelt and McDaniel without their bank of second air purifiers that would correct the inequity between them and Franklin and Grant. We understand that everyone in facilities is doing what they think is best for students, staff, and operations, but the prospect that the district is taking the first air purifiers out of all these high schools whenever they have a filter change light go on, which goes on at a schedule that is best for manufacturer’s replacement filter changes and not on a schedule that is best for PPS operations, we hope to work with the district on a different plan.
We know from research that great classroom air quality = fewer absences. We know from research that great classroom air = better student learning. There are direct impacts of clean air on focus, learning, and test scores. We know from research that great classroom air quality = less lung cancer, fewer strokes, and better heart health, including for teenagers! We know from research that great classroom air quality = fewer asthma episodes. We know from research that great classroom air quality = fewer kids getting asthma in the first place! We know all of these things are severely affected by social determinants of health.
PPS has a new superintendent and a new slate of school board members, so we are hopeful that if we can get more eyes on this information, we can succeed with a different plan for filter maintenance and changes — best plan would include development of an evidence-based schedule that conserves filters, yielding enough time to pursue support and funding from health entities for replacement filters, and better communication to teachers and staff on filter maintenance and changes. We have made so much progress on understanding and support for indoor air quality since February, when it is a most fundamental, but misunderstood and ignored, environmental health issue. We truly need to clean the air in classrooms where we pack kids in to a uniquely dense occupancy in buildings that are commonly and chronically under-ventilated across the country – and here in Portland, we could be leading the way and have excellent air quality, all while centering health equity.