Environmental Justice and Green Schools—Assessing Students and Communities’ Access to Green Schools

Objective We investigate equity in the distribution of green schools, what kind of student populations they serve, and what kinds of communities host them. Methods Leveraging national school enrollment data (2000–2014), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design data, and communities’ characteristics data from 2010 U.S. Census, we estimate logit models to examine the association between green schools and student and community demographics. Results Higher percentages of minorities in both student population and hosting neighborhood are associated with greater likelihood that new schools are green. New schools in more affluent and less educated communities are less likely to be green. Conclusion There is a lack of evidence for environmental injustice in students’ and communities’ access to new green schools in the United States. New schools serving lower‐income and minority families and children are more likely to be green, although environmental justice indicators such as education show somewhat “unjust” patterns. ____________________________________________________ This is the author's manuscript of the article published in final edited form as: Zhao, S. , Zhou, S. , & Noonan, D. S. (2019). Environmental Justice and Green Schools—Assessing Students and Communities’ Access to Green Schools. Social Science Quarterly, 100(6), 2223–2239. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12715 2 School environments, as an important environmental amenity for both children and communities, can be a crucial issue in the arena of environmental justice (EJ). Although there is an emerging EJ literature focusing on environmental amenities, the majority of these studies investigates inequitable access to urban parks and green space. The systematic evaluation of inequities in children and community access to green school buildings is still rare. Given the critical nature of schools, more attention has gone to improving schools’ physical environment through healthy and green design and operations (Baker & Bernstein 2012). Among public infrastructure spending, K-12 facilities receive a large share of government infrastructure investments. A report by the Center for Green Schools of the US Green Buildings Council (USGBC) estimates that the nation has spent an average of $99 billion annually on school maintenance and operations, new school construction, and school improvement projects between 2011 and 2013 (Filardo 2016)0F1. The enormous capital investment in school environment conditions is likely to impact students and communities inequitably (Filardo 2016). Given previous evidence that minority students are more likely to attend schools near hazardous facilities (Pastor, Sadd, & Morello-Frosch 2002), and to suffer disparate health impacts and diminished school performance (Pastor, Morello-Frosch, & Sadd 2005), EJ scholarship stands to advance the understanding of the inequalities in the processes and outcomes of siting and building new green schools. In this paper, we investigate the spatial distribution of new schools in the United States and how the demographic characteristics of those new schools’ students and their host communities differ by whether the school is classified as green or not. We focus just on new 1 It is more than a third of total local and state government’s spending, details see http://www.governing. com/govdata/state-local-government-construction-spending.html