State legislators in Rhode Island are taking action to ensure cleaner indoor air in schools, proven to improve learning, reduce sick days, and prevent the spread of airborne illnesses such as COVID-19, RSV, and influenza. Legislation (House Bill H5597) recommends standards for indoor air quality and calls for regular assessments of air quality in schools.

The bill builds on Rhode Island’s ongoing efforts to modernize school infrastructure, including $5 billion in approved funding for school infrastructure and nationally recognized initiatives from the Rhode Island Department of Education School Building Authority to expand indoor air quality assessments and monitoring. 

The bill, the focus of a recent public hearing of the Rhode Island House Committee on Education, seeks to enhance indoor air quality through three key actions:

1. Publishing state indoor air quality guidance.
2. Setting higher filtration standards. Higher-quality HVAC filters will capture significantly more air particles and protect against dust, mold, allergens, bacteria, and viruses. The higher-quality filters (MERV-13) are nationally recommended and capture 85% of small particles, compared to only 20% with filters commonly found in Rhode Island schools.
3. Conducting regular inspections: Indoor air quality and HVAC inspections are crucial to ensure ventilation systems in school buildings operate as designed.

Rhode Island’s forward movement on this issue sets an important precedent for improving air quality in schools and protecting public health. Clean indoor air is vital to student success, from improving test scores to reducing sick days, absenteeism, and asthma and allergies. Increased ventilation and filtration prevents the spread of airborne illnesses like COVID-19, RSV, and influenza. 

“Bill 5597 is a really important and cost effective way to improve air quality,” testified Dr. Georgia Lagoudas, Senior Fellow at the Pandemic Center who leads the center’s work on indoor air. At the hearing, she described how this bill would improve schools in Rhode Island: “We build buildings often. We build them and we design them once for air quality, and then we never go back and assess. [W]hat this bill does is, yes, set a building and make sure it meets design standards when you build it, but then every five years, let's just check that the air quality ventilation level is what it should be at.” 

Indoor air quality monitoring is a way to “turn the invisible into [something] visible,” using particulate matter and carbon dioxide measurements to assess the air quality, described Dr. Lagoudas to committee members at the hearing.

In her testimony, Natalie Kopp, Director of Strategic Priorities at the Brown School of Public Health, spoke to the committee's questions regarding costs associated with the bill. “It's the same [principle] as owning a car. You have to give your car a tune-up, you have to put gas in it, you have to change the oil. These are not emergency items. Schools should automatically have this in their operational budgets because this is part of what it means to own a school in a responsible way.” View their full testimony here and read letters of support here.

The Pandemic Center’s ongoing work to advance cleaner indoor air nationwide, includes hosting a December convening with the Texas A&M Biosecurity and Pandemic Policy Center focused on identifying policy priorities for indoor air quality.