For over 2 years now, the district and their “Top Air Quality Experts” have let stand an egregious and most basic error in the high school ventilation reports.
The airflow with the portable air purifier running is wrong in every single room in the high school reports — and it makes the high school airflows look higher than they are.
While the district and their corporate environmental consultants were busy drafting memos and presentations full of misleading claims that the ventilation levels and air quality in PPS schools are just fine as they are, these staff and district contractors were not taking the time to properly analyze and do quality assurance/quality control on the data.
The underlying data in the airflow reports are good, but there are a multitude of errors that need correction across the whole range of buildings. But the errors reach a new level in the high school reports. There is an across-the-board error in every single high school room because the district reports mix meters and feet in a basic calculation. The error makes airflow look higher than it actually is.
See our analysis of the district’s error for the first 5 classrooms in each high school, plus three additional example classrooms demonstrating this error makes a difference in whether classrooms meet health-based targets for airflow or not.
Also, see our slides below walking through the error, as well as some of the additional problems with the high school airflows.
Addressing this and other problems with ventilation and airflow in PPS
We plan to analyze the high school airflows comprehensively and correctly in the coming months, as we have done for kindergarten through 8th grade rooms. In the meantime, join us and indicate if you’d like to know the correct numbers for particular rooms and classrooms at your high school — we will get back to you with the real airflow you’re getting and what it means. If you are a kindergarten through 8th grade family, we can get you details on not only your particular rooms of interest, but your whole school. Parents and families that join us also strengthen our parent network for educating the district on accurate air quality science and PPS families’ desire to have fresh, clean air in our kids’ and teachers’ classrooms.