Grantee Research Project Results
Final 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 , Thurston, George D. , Hwang, Syni-An
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 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:
Assess impacts of school environmental factors on occupants’ health and performance, and identify best and sustainable building practices. This includes the following specific aims: 1) Aim 1: Assess whether children’s exposures to indoor/ outdoor school by: a) identifying gaps through conducting surveys among superintendents of New York State (NYS) public schools and private school leaders; b) Assess if school indoor conditions and home exposure are jointly associated with occupants’ upper/lower respiratory health and performance; and c) Use personal monitors in a sub-sample of occupants to measure actual and total exposure for validation. 2) Aim 2: Examine if the school environment health/ performance associations are modified by socio-economic/ demographics (SES), geographic areas, neighborhood and weather factors. 3) Aim 3: Identify potential mechanisms or factors mediating the effect of school environmental exposures on various outcomes and develop new methodologies through: a) Assess how school environmental factors affect student performance as mediated by health outcomes and school absenteeism; b) Improve exposure assessment methods by using two new methods for multiple, highly correlated environmental factors; and c) Develop predictive models of total school indoor/outdoor environmental factors on occupants’ outcomes. 4) Aim 4: Identify best and sustainable building practices through a community approach and intervention to: a) Evaluate if schools using US EPA Tools for Schools (TfS) and other environmental policies had better school environment; and b) The mechanism by which the EPA TfS and other environmental programs affected students’ test scores. The ultimate goal is to create a safe and healthy school environment in order to improve children’s health and performance.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
- Current school problems: Both private and public schools reported limited use of proactive approaches in identifying environmental health issues, lead in drinking water, and the need for idling reduction programs. Private schools had poorer indoor air quality (IAQ) compared to public schools, along with substantially less training and enforcement of school EH policies.
- School environment and health: We found that the increased rate of respiratory outpatient visits among school aged children was significantly associated with fewer custodians, taller buildings, poor rating in heating fuel system (poor boiler or furnace condition), poor Indoor Air Quality, and high outdoor ozone concentrations.
- Personal PM2.5 level measures: By monitoring personal air quality for 48 hours, we found that PM2.5 concentrations were consistently higher at home than in school classrooms. PM2.5 concentrations were also significantly higher in the fall compared to other seasons across all locations. There is a consistent pattern of PM concentrations peaking after 6 pm during all seasons. This effect is especially pronounced in the fall.
- Classroom thermal comfort: We concluded that temperature and humidity in classrooms fell outside of OSHA workplace recommendations for thermal comfort during the school day. In particular, students are exposed to the driest conditions and warmest temperatures in winter, and both indicators exceeded thermal comfort recommendations.
- Modified effect by SES: Lower SES schools tended to be more vulnerable to the impacts of mold, vermin, humidity, and HVAC systems on low test scores, as well as asthma and high absenteeism. Meanwhile, high SES schools were more vulnerable to the impact of pipelines or skylights on test scores.
- Mediation effect: We found that poor respiratory health may be one of the most crucial issues to address with regard to improving student attendance and academic performance. Future research should continue to explore the mediating effect of other social or parental factors on the path from school SES/SBCs to academic outcomes.
- Methods handling highly correlated variables: Another interesting finding is that advanced variable selection methods, such as regularization and BRT, which allow a mixed type of independent variables can be very useful in constructing multipollutant models in school environmental studies. Choices between different variables selected by different models should be made with these methodological characteristics in mind.
- Predictive models: Based on the self-reporting survey data and using machine learning methods, our predictive model found that pollen trigger, bedroom carpet, and family history of rhinitis were significant predictors for both asthma and allergy symptoms. Additionally, children exposed to tobacco trigger, wood fuel, older homes, and those with public insurance predicted the increased risks of asthma prevalence, while those having carpet in house, having parquet flooring in the bedroom, being exposed to spiders, or using glue solvents are associated with allergy symptoms. According to the objective BCS data and using machine learning methods, we found that the top school building factors that contribute the most to childhood asthma rate were the conditions of wetponds, athletic and play fields, use of an HVAC system, number of full-time custodians, pavement, ventilation system, and outfalls. In addition, the factors that contributed the most to students’ attendance were the building age, the condition of the stadiums, energy system, number of part-time custodians, fire suppression systems, and use of an HVAC central system.
- Policy/program’s impact on school building: We found that the schools utilizing the EPA TfS and other environmental programs significantly improved up to 50% of the school building factors, compared to the schools that did not use these programs. Unfortunately, the trend for utilization of the EPA TfS has been declining over time in NYS public schools.
- Policy/program’s effect on students’ performance: Compared to those schools who never implemented the EPA TfS program, our results showed significantly increased rate ratios of students receiving high scores in six subjects (Algebra, Chemistry, Earth Science, Living Environment, Physics, and Trigonometry) in schools after implementing EPA TfS Program. Similarly, schools that used other environmental policies/programs also showed significantly beneficial effects and increased the ratios of the students receiving a high score in five subjects (Algebra, English, Geometry, Global History, and US History).
- Mediating effect on policy-test score association: We found that the relationship between TfS policies and test scores on science tests (Trigonometry, Chemistry, and Physics) were highly mediated by school attendance rate. In addition, the relationship between TfS and students’ academic performance is partially mediated by school pesticide usage. We also found a similarly high mediating effect of attendance rate with regard to the effect of other environmental policies on improving students’ academic performance. In addition, we found that the relationship between other environmental policies and students’ poor academic performance is also partially mediated by a BCS variable, i.e., poor roof and skylight condition.
Conclusions:
In summary, this study produces many outputs including: a strong team with all expertise required for this project, a comprehensive relevant literature review and summary, primary and secondary datasets (including school environmental factors linked with children’s health outcomes), geocoded respiratory ED cases and all public schools in NYS, school attendance and test score datasets by school district, indoor and outdoor measurements of PM2.5 and its components in all the participating schools, and school walk-through data. In addition, we have multiple datasets for 130 participants from six primary schools and two colleges regarding personal air quality measurements, including self-administrated questionnaires, daily activity and symptom diaries, and 48-hour personal, real-time measurement of PM2.5 and VOCs from Aim 1. From Aim 2-4, we have obtained the stratified analysis results and a mediation chart using different statistical methods, as well as developing predictive models. The short-term outcomes include identifying school environmental problems in public and private schools in NYS; utilizing the newest and the most effective statistical methodology in exposure assessment; understanding the mediators and biological pathways by which school hazards or policies affect school buildings and students’ outcomes; describing the findings and magnitudes of the effects of various school environmental factors on children’s outcomes; evaluating how environmental programs affect school environments and children’s health outcomes; and creating a comprehensive predictive model by considering all in-/out-door factors in schools and at home. The intermediate outcomes include 11 published papers and nine papers either submitted or under preparation, a PhD dissertation derived from this grant, 15 presentations at national or international conferences, and providing an educational sheet highlighting key findings to each participating schools. The long-term outcomes include future effort to integrate our study findings to enhance current school environmental health policies or programs, development of intervention strategies to target current school EH problems, and eventually minimizing the effects of school environmental hazards and improving occupants’ health/ performance.
Journal Articles on this Report : 4 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
Other project views: | All 24 publications | 11 publications in selected types | All 11 journal articles |
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Deng X, Thurston G, Zhang W, Ryan I, Jiang C, Khwaja H, Romeiko X, Marks T, Ye B, Qu Y, Lin S. Application of data science methods to identify school and home risk factors for asthma and allergy-related symptoms among children in New York. Science of the Total Environment 2021;770:I44746. |
R835636 (Final) |
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Qu Y, Zhang W, Ryan I, Deng X, Dong G, Liu X, Lin S. Ambient extreme heat exposure in summer and transitional months and emergency department visits and hospital admissions due to pregnancy complications. Science of the Total Environment 2021;777. |
R835636 (Final) |
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Qu Y, Zhang W, Ye B, Penta S, Dong G, Liu X, Lin S. Power outage mediates the associations between major storms and hospital admission of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. BMC Public Health 2021;21(1). |
R835636 (Final) |
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Zetlen H, Cao K, Schichlein K, Knight N, Maecker H, Nadeau K, Rebuli M, Rise M. Associations Between Ambient Extreme Heat Exposure and Emergency Department Visits Related to Kidney Disease. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF KIDNEY DISEASE 2023;81(5):507 |
R835636 (Final) |
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Supplemental Keywords:
children, school-related hazards, school environment, private schools, public schools, personal monitoring, environmental factors on children’s health, school environment and attendance and test scores, environmental policies or programs’ impacts on school environment and performance.Progress 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
- 2019 Progress Report
- 2018 Progress Report
- 2017 Progress Report
- 2016 Progress Report
- 2015 Progress Report
- Original Abstract
11 journal articles for this project