Environmental hazards near schools

Matthew,

what's the background of the study?

I'm a former public school teacher, and my research has largely focused on education policy.

But more and more lately, it was becoming obvious that the core work of teaching and learning in schools was being impacted by the environment.

we started to just ask really basic naive questions about how prevalent were these types of challenges.

And what we learned was that there was really compelling evidence that schools that were exposed to air pollution or toxins, nearby facilities that manage chemical wastes, and other carcinogens could have severe negative impacts for children's health and development.

And so we set out to just try to better map how common it is that kids in all types of schools across the United States, both public and private, go to somewhere that is in very close proximity to a known environmental hazard.

Tell us about the kinds of hazardous waste sites that you studied.

The approach we took was we will take very well-defined registries that are maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency.

There's three main categories.

Super funds, which a lot of people have heard of, the very large, intense, polluted areas that we are designating as a national priority to address.

And then there are a larger category of sites called brownfields, where they are handling different chemicals that may, in the process of that business, leach, spill, be absorbed into the soil surrounding water.

The third category is actively polluting facilities known as toxic release inventory facilities.

And these are places that release different types of emissions in the air and the water.

And these can be a huge range of different substances.

that can have real negative consequences for human health when people are exposed in close proximity for prolonged periods of time.