Saline parent Cathy Synko said she had never heard any complaints about the building's air until her daughter, now in seventh grade, brought a note at the end of the last school year. My daughter did mention that there was a funny smell in some of the rooms. There were good smelling rooms and bad smelling rooms. The Okemos Public Schools in Ingham County also beat back a Stachybotrys outbreak this summer. Mold is alive, it rides the air currents.
Poor maintenance is the main cause of poor air quality.
London said he has heard of instances where building maintenance workers changed air filters for the first time ever after hearing about the clean air drive. Hamtramck has hired an air quality company to inspect its buildings, and it has already moved to replace the faulty heating system that was choking the air in the high school. It's cheaper to prevent air problems than to clean up after a full-blown crisis. So far, more than 2,000 schools have requested the EPA's Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools Kit. The EPA's own estimate that half of the schools in the nation are polluted comes from a 1995 General Accounting Office estimate, which randomly surveyed schools across the nation and came back with that estimate.