Grantee Research Project Results
2017 Progress Report: Assess school environmental effects on children's health and performance and strengthen state/community capacity to create a healthy and safe learning environment
EPA Grant Number: R835636Title: Assess school environmental effects on children's health and performance and strengthen state/community capacity to create a healthy and safe learning environment
Investigators: Lin, Shao
Current Investigators: Lin, Shao , Thurston, George D. , Hwang, Syni-An
Institution: The State University of New York
Current Institution: Health Research, Inc. / NYS Dept. of Health
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: December 18, 2014 through December 17, 2018 (Extended to July 31, 2020)
Project Period Covered by this Report: December 18, 2016 through December 17,2017
Project Amount: $1,000,000
RFA: Healthy Schools: Environmental Factors, Children’s Health and Performance, and Sustainable Building Practices (2013) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Children's Health , Human Health
Objective:
Aim 1: Assess if children’s exposure to contaminants in school environment is individually or jointly associated with adverse health outcomes and performance.
Aim 2: Examine if school environmental factors changed over time and their relationships to outcomes modified by SES, neighborhood and meteorological factors.
Aim 3: Identify potential factors mediating school environment on various outcomes and develop new methodologies to assess multiple exposures.
Aim 4: Identify sustainable and best school practices and evaluate environmental policies or programs’ impacts on school building and children’s health.
Progress Summary:
We have completed most tasks for Year 3, including obtaining 2015 building condition survey data in New York State (NYS), completing data cleaning and linkage, finalizing development of statistical methods, finishing many components of statistical analyses, analyzing collected surveys, developing detailed standard operation procedures for monitoring equipment, recruiting school participants, and starting sampling visits in multiple schools. Even with the multiple challenges we are facing, we actually completed some tasks ahead of schedule, such as completing the recruitment of all 10 schools, completing the analysis of survey from private and public schools, and monitoring personal exposure in 5 schools. The goals of the project have not changed, and we have made good progresses toward achieving our project’s aims (Shown below, completed tasks are designated by the darker color).
[INSERT ACTIVITY TABLE ON PAGE 1]
Specific Aim 1:
Completion of Private School Leader Survey/ Public School Leader Survey:
In Year 3, we analyzed the surveys we collected from private and public school leaders. Overall, we received responses of school administrators from 17 counties in NYS and the returned survey from public school leaders were more complete than the survey received from private school leaders. This is expected since participants in the public school survey were mostly facility managers whose responsibilities were centered on the school building and environment while private school survey participants were mostly principals whose responsibilities involve a wide range of aspects. We compared the questions that were shared between the two questionnaires regarding of school building maintenance, environmental health issue identification and education, perceived indoor air quality (IAQ) and IAQ related policies, pest management, and other environmental health concerns. Overall, the comparison raised the concern on school environment in private schools. While private schools are more likely to be located in a cleaner neighborhood with less industrial pollution, less preventive practices or policies were implemented in private schools. Compared to public schools, private schools were more likely to have no specific individual being in charge of school maintenance, have fewer mechanisms in identifying school environmental issues, and have no regular education program for staff about school environmental issues. Leaders from private schools reported lower rating for the perceived air quality in their schools and no private school implemented a formal IAQ program. Practices that may improve IAQ, such as following green cleaning guideline, using HEPA filters, and having policies of animal in classroom were rarely implemented in private schools. Over 80% of public schools utilized integrated pest management (IPM) while less than 40% of private schools utilized IPM. Additionally, 40% of private school leaders didn’t know whether they implemented IPM which indicated limited knowledge of pest control among private school leaders. All public schools reported giving some types of notification before applying pesticide while over 40% of private schools gave no notification. Among schools that gave notifications, public schools were much more likely to send notification at the beginning of school year (see Figure 1-3 and Table 1 below).
[INSERT FIGS 1-3 FROM PAGES 6-8]
School and student recruitment and air pollutants measurement:
Based on our sampling plan, we have successfully recruited 10 schools, that includes 2 biomass schools, 3 urban high need schools, 3 low-need schools, and 2 rural high need schools. Dr. Lin, Dr. Khwaja and other team members scheduled meetings to meet the district Superintendents or school Principals first and then teachers. During these meetings, Dr. Lin, the PI explained the study purposes, procedures, importance and benefits to school and children, our prior findings and experience in school environmental health areas, and data protection issues. We also started the initial round of sampling for 5 NYS schools so far- all of which have been completed during the school’s heating season. The sample trip included two major components: 1) environmental sampling: classroom sampling and personal sampling, and 2) survey: teacher/parent questionnaire and symptom diary. In addition, we have begun scheduling the next round of trips for the non-heating season, as well as continuing our recruitment for additional NYS schools.
Specific Aim 2:
By working with NYS Education Department, we recently obtained the 2015 Building Condition Survey (BCS) data in New York State. We have begun our univariate analysis, in addition to analyzing the data for its 1) completeness and 2) accuracy. As we proposed, we are comparing 2015 BCS with prior BCS in 2005 and 2010 to determine if there have been any major changes of certain school environmental variables over time. Through the preliminary analysis, we found that many school environmental factors have been improving in the past 10 years, such as fresh air free of blockage, less dust/dirt around air intake, less dirt or debris near ductwork, more dampers functioning as designed, and better job to make outside air adequate. Other school building variables remained similar as 2010 within good status in NYS. We are currently conducting trend analysis to compare these factors overtime.
Specific Aim 3
Selection of highly correlated variables for modeling: We added and integrated a new dataset from USEPA for environmental quality index into our analysis. This dataset has been linked with the school and patients home addresses to identify multiple outdoor environmental indicators such as traffic density index, environmental quality index, risk-screening environmental indicator, and modeled PM2.5 and ozone level. Additionally, we cleaned and re-categorized indicators of school building condition. Therefore, about 120 variables that were selected as biologically plausible related to outcomes, were entered to the independence screening combined with smoothly clipped absolute deviation penalty (ISIS-SCAD) to select important indicators of the exposures related to student’s respiratory health. These selected variables will then be input to the mediation model and assess the direct and indirect effect of respiratory health on the path between school environment and student’s academic performance in the next-step analysis. Appendix 2 describes the method comparison on variable selection.
Specific Aim 4:
EPA policy on school building conditions: During Year 3, we have selected 49 biologically plausible variables from a large set of school building factors from 2015 Building Condition Survey to determine if the EPA’s Tools for School (TfS) Program or other environmental health programs have any significant improvements in building scores for the year 2015. Compared to those schools without TfS Program, our preliminary analysis showed significantly improvements in 33 variables out of 49 school environmental variables selected among those schools with TfS implemented (ORs ranged from 1.06–3.68). The top three school building variables with the largest improvement related to TfS are overall cleanliness (OR: 3.68, 95%CI: 1.77–7.69), school practice IPM (OR:3.11, 95%CI: 2.58-3.76), and good scoring of humidity/moisture (OR:2.00, 95%CI:1.22-3.27).
Future Activities:
1) We will complete and submit a manuscript summarizing the findings from the private and public school surveys; 2) we will continue to analyze the building condition survey data, specifically examining how total environment, including school building conditions, school outdoor and home outdoor environment, and socio-demographics affect children’s health, test scores and attendance; 3) we will continue school recruitment and field trips to measure PM2.5 and VOCs in school outdoor, classrooms, and personal monitoring; 4) we will also examine the modifying effects of socio-demographics/ neighborhood factors on school environment-children’s outcomes by conducting stratified analysis; 5) we will move forward with the mediation analysis methods newly developed to study the interrelationships among student performance, health outcomes, and student absenteeism; and (6) we will prepare manuscripts to summarize our findings regarding environmental policy implementation on children’s performance and health.
Journal Articles on this Report : 5 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
Other project views: | All 24 publications | 11 publications in selected types | All 11 journal articles |
---|
Type | Citation | ||
---|---|---|---|
|
Kielb C, Lin S, Muscatiello N, Hord W, Rogers-Harrington J, Healy J. Building-related health symptoms and classroom indoor air quality: a survey of school teachers in New York State. Indoor Air 2015;25(4):371-380. |
R835636 (2016) R835636 (2017) R834787 (2013) R834787 (2014) R834787 (2015) R834787 (Final) |
Exit Exit |
|
Lin S, Lawrence WR, Lin Z, Francois M, Neamtiu IA, Lin Q, Csobod E, Gurzau ES. Teacher respiratory health symptoms in relation to school and home environment. International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health 2017;90(8):725-739. |
R835636 (2016) R835636 (2017) |
Exit |
|
Lu Y, Lin S, Lawrence WR, Lin Z, Gurzau E, Csobod E, Neamtiu IA. Evidence from SINPHONIE project: impact of home environmental exposures on respiratory health among school-age children in Romania. Science of the Total Environment 2018;621:75-84. |
R835636 (2016) R835636 (2017) R835636 (2018) |
Exit Exit Exit |
|
Muscatiello N, McCarthy A, Kielb C, Hsu W-H, Hwang S-A, Lin S. Classroom conditions and CO2 concentrations and teacher health symptom reporting in 10 New York State schools. Indoor Air 2015;25(2):157-167. |
R835636 (2016) R835636 (2017) R834787 (2013) R834787 (2014) R834787 (2015) R834787 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
|
Palumbo JR, Lin S, Lin Z, Neamtiu IA, Zhang W, Csobod E, Gurzau ES. Assessing associations between indoor environment and health symptoms in Romanian school children: an analysis of data from the SINPHONIE project. Environmental Science and Pollution Research International 2018;25(9):9186-9193. |
R835636 (2016) R835636 (2017) R835636 (2018) |
Exit |
Supplemental Keywords:
school environment, VOC, PM, air quality, student health and performance, building conditions, home environmentProgress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.
Project Research Results
- Final Report
- 2019 Progress Report
- 2018 Progress Report
- 2016 Progress Report
- 2015 Progress Report
- Original Abstract
11 journal articles for this project