Safe Air in Schools

Maintaining indoor air quality has gained renewed importance as K–12 students around the country prepare to return to in-person learning full time.

It’s one of the timeliest, most important methods of keeping learning environments safe as the COVID pandemic winds down. And the more we learn, the more we refine and revise what we thought we knew.

Our guest today is Scott Huffmaster, a health spaces expert at Trane Technologies, Inc. He oversees the improvement of indoor air quality for commercial spaces from schools to office buildings. He’s here to tell us a little more about the steps that schools can take to create a clean, safe environment for teachers, students and staff.

This Viewpoint will provide the answers to:

• What are some specific measures that can be followed for proper ventilation and airflow in schools?
• The indoor air quality assessment looks like it focuses on four critical areas of indoor air quality. Can you tell us a little more about each of those and maybe a couple specific examples of each of those in a given school or a given assessment?
• Looking at some of these different technologies—the dry hydrogen peroxide, the bipolar ionization, UV light—how feasible are some of these different options?
• Can you give a quick layperson-type explanation of how you know which technology is right for which space?
• As teachers and students go back to school, is there anything that those ground-level employees can do or be aware of? Do you have any kind of general advice for education professionals, teachers, students that they can do to make the environment just a little bit safer?
• What are some trends that you’ve seen in the technologies related to the pandemic that have been coming out?