Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

32 | December 2022 Sustainability Snippets continuee from previous page have to experience the imbalance of air quality throughout classrooms. As we spend eight hours a day for 182 days per year at schools, the air that we breathe in has a lot of impact on our health. With these new protocols that are set to come into effect, fu- ture students, teachers, faculty, and administrators will all feel more com- fortable in our school buildings and will breathe in healthier air. Many of these initiatives seem to be low cost, but I also hope there's some funding included as well. Only then can we really get this IAQ actions started and keep them sustainable. in situations where they do not have access to their needed services any- more. Because of this, it is very import- ant to recognize the schools that have set forth in cleaning their indoor air and awarding them with a digital badge that they can publicly show on the building or on a website. The White House Summit on IAQ offered me insight on what the White House is working on to elevate schools throughout the nation at a much-needed higher level. I am very excited to see that there is sure prog- ress regarding air quality in buildings and hope that future students do not and even the gym. Wow! I thought to myself. If I am 18 years old now, this means that I've spent 16.2 years of my life indoors. This number is bigger than I ever thought. Now, take your age, multiply it by 0.9, and find out what your indoor age is. I bet you're thinking "Wow" too. Al- len also makes the point of how there should be a visible pulse to a build- ing. Now you may be thinking, "how do you take a pulse of a building?" It's metaphorical. When you go to the doctor for your yearly checkup, the first thing they do is take your pulse to make sure that you are healthy. Sim- ilarly, when you walk into a building, you should be able to look at a tablet that portrays the indoor temperature and monitors the air's quality and de- tects things like carbon dioxide. This is important now more than ever be- fore because of how fast respiratory illnesses spread in condensed envi- ronments. This week at my school, it is the COVID spike again. The week back from Thanksgiving, everyone had a cold. This is not normal, and the numbers of sick students could be immensely brought down with proper ventilation and checking our building's pulse, as Allen stated. The "Spotlight on Schools," mod- erated by Tracy Washington Enger, program manager in the EPA's Indoor Environments Division, also provide valuable insights for me. The key theme throughout the discussion remained the idea of updating outdated build- ing systems. I agree with this theme, and a proposed idea that stuck to me was that schools have become the stu- dent-centered educational home. This means that schools offer an array of services other than education that are central to the infrastructure of our ed- ucation system. For many students, it is important that they stay in schools until graduation because they rely on services, such as counseling and food. Every day, they have access to these things and have become dependent on them. We cannot afford another pandemic and putting these students Davena Halak Davena Halak is the Healthy Indoors 2022/2023 student intern. She's a high school senior in Massachusetts and likes business pitching, mock trials, and playing tennis. You can reach her at snippets@healthyindoors.com. 24-Hours Inside My Life • 8 hours of sleep every night • 1 hour per day driving to school and back, plus traffic and going to work • 3 hours at work • 7 hours at school • 2 hours spending time with friends or going to the gym • 3 hours at home relaxing and doing home- work

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