My last sixteen years of teaching took place at Nogales High School in La Puente, California.
Nogales was built in 1961. By the time I left teaching, Nogales was forty-four years old.
During the last few years when I entered my classroom in the mornings, I started to wheeze and sinus infections were an annual school year occurrence.
Years earlier, in the 1990s, the flat roof above my classroom had sagged resulting in a pool of water when it rained, which leaked into the room.
The year the roof first leaked, I taught four sections of ninth grade English and my fifth and last section of the day was journalism. There were tables along the back wall that held journalism’s Mac computers, a printer and scanner. Because the worse leaks occurred above the computers, I bought a sheet of plastic to cover them and placed trashcans around the room to catch water from the worst leaks.
By then, the brown, industrial grade carpeting was worn and spotted with dark blotches where gum had been ground into the fabric by unruly students. After the rain, a large portion of the carpet at the back of the room became a spongy mass as it absorbed water from the leaks.
One summer early in the 21st century, the school district removed the old leaky roofs, rafters and all, until the classrooms were open to the sky. Then new roofs that were not flat were built on the old walls. However, that brown carpet remained.
According to BEST (Building Educational Success Together), school districts in the US have an estimated $271 billion of deferred (which means they don’t have the money and have to put it off) building maintenance in their schools, excluding administrative facilities…
Many of America’s public schools are aging and causing health problems adding another challenge to teaching.
Near the end of my teaching career (1975 – 2005), I often came down with sinus and respiratory infections but not during the summers when I was not teaching.
The last few years, the indoor air quality in my classroom was so bad that minutes after entering the class, I started to wheeze and then get a low-grade headache that stayed with me all day. Nogales had more than a 100 people working there. When I asked if anyone from the staff was having health problems similar to mine, about 20 to 25% said yes and the symptoms were similar.
BEST says, “A national survey of school nurses found over 40% knew children and staff adversely impacted by avoidable indoor pollutants.”
I didn’t plan to retire at sixty. My goals were to teach until I was sixty-five and leave teaching in 2010. However, I left five years early due to the wheezing, sinus infections and headaches that all happened or started in my classroom.
I left teaching in 2005, I haven’t wheezed or had a sinus infection since.
One study found that unsatisfactory buildings in need of improvements/repairs influenced test scores, attendance and suspension rates. Another study revealed a 4 to 9% difference in achievement between students in schools in worst/best condition and a 5-9% difference between students in oldest/newest schools in addition to a 4% difference in graduation rates between students in schools in worst/best condition. Source: 21st Century School Fund
The quality of school buildings affects the ability of teachers to teach, teacher morale, and the very health and safety of teachers.
Despite the importance of the condition of school buildings, serious deficiencies have been well documented, particularly in large, urban school districts (see for example, GAO 1995). Moreover, since school buildings in the United States are, on average, over forty years old—just the time when rapid deterioration often begins—we should expect problems with school facilities to worsen.
For example, poor indoor air quality (IAQ) is widespread and many schools suffer from “sick building syndrome” (see, for example, EPA 2000), which in turn increases student absenteeism and reduces student performance (see EPA 2000; Kennedy 2001; Leach 1997; Smedje and Norback 1999; Rosen and Richardson 1999).
Since current student-focused asthma studies show that students lose considerable school time because of the poor conditions of schools, it is not surprising to find that poor IAQ also affects teachers’ health. In one study, fully two-thirds of Washington teachers surveyed reported poor indoor air quality in their school. Source: ncef.org
In my school district, teachers were given 10 sick days a year. By the time I had taught 25 years, I had about 180 sick days saved. I used up about half the last three years I taught.
Discover how Sewer Teaching is a Smelly Art or learn from HEPA Filters Do Not Work Miracles
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 