Temporary Classrooms Are Bad For the Environment, and Worse For Kids

tcd004 (134130) writes "You've always suspected those trailer-type portable classrooms are no good, right? It turns out you're right. Analysis of prefabricated classrooms in Washington shows the structures often don't allow for proper ventilation, leading to terrible air quality for kids. Students in temporary classrooms have higher rates of absenteeism than those in standard classrooms. And the energy-inefficient structures often become permanent, sucking on school energy bills for decades, and requiring more upkeep than permanent classrooms. What's needed are new designs for healthy, sustainable temporary classrooms."

Comments

Flawed?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What's needed are new designs for healthy, sustainable temporary classrooms.

No. What's needed are more permanent classrooms.

Re:Flawed?

[Trepidity]

You'd almost think the humans who came up with the idea of "buildings", durable structures intended to last for a significant period of time while sheltering their occupants from the elements, were on to something.

Re:Flawed?

[MightyYar]

Yes, but if land is at a premium, then sometimes you need to relocate while the new structure is built. My district is replacing every single school in the system one at a time, and so they need to use trailers for the students who are currently having their school rebuilt. No one thinks this is ideal, but no one has suggested a better idea, either.

Re:Flawed?

[PongStroid]

Define old. At my son's school, across the street from our house we had a classroom in a portable. And not just *any* portable: Built in 1941 for the army, and installed at the school in 1943 to temporarily help with overcrowding in the regular classrooms. Our neighbor, who is 95, lived here when it was installed and her kids (who are now great grandparents!) attended class in it. My son, now 13, also enjoyed this classroom. This "temporary" portable, literally spitting distance from the Hayward fault, wasn't even anchored to the ground - elevated by four feet of stacked blocks of wood . Even crazier... the thing was riddled with asbestos tiles, and had a mold problem. The portable went away last year - 70 years after it was installed. I'd like to think that the paperwork I submitted to the city and state to have the portable declared a historical landmark worthy of preservation had something to do with it.

Re:Flawed?

[sumdumass]

Its not really vacations and stuff, it is trust and poor stewardship.

An example, about two decades ago the local schools asked for a levy citing infrastructure nerds and specifically the hvac system at one middle school. About two years later, they put a bond issue on the ballot for a new hvac system. Some people asked questions and found that 90% of the levy went to administration salaries and benifits and the bond was actually tied to fixing the out dated hvac at ths school. Now schools in my area get a lot of fubding from property taxes so as property values increase, minus a bit of lag in the assesment, their funding increases. But they put another levy on the ballot a few years ago and the prople overwhelmingly rejected it. This happened for about 10 years strait then one of the directors retired and was replaced. The levy finally passed- it appeared that the money was going to the schools.But what they did was primarily soak teacher salaries which i don't have too much a problem with but the gave them raises highr than what the levy would cover. So they picked a school snd dropped most of the maintinence on it. In about 10 years, the parents started complaining about the school. The board put yet another levy on the ballot claiming the school wasn't fit so the needed to expand other schools. They even got kids to hold signs saying "kids matter" just down from all the polling offices. The levy passed and to date, it has been the last one

What they did with the nw levy was repair the condemmed school and make offices there that still arent used with a good portion being turned into a rec center for district teachers. It turns out that because of demographics shifts, the school easily fit into the other 5 elementary schools and money wasn't really needed.

Now of course when you ask ceertain people, they will paint that all rosie with built in excuses but it is factually correct. This also happened in a disrict right next to another that got busted altering NCLBA or ACES test scores in order to get federal money and the administrator had to be removed because she refused to step down even after federal charges where filed against her.

No, it isn't always about you spending yoyr money, it is also trusting that your money is needed and being spent properly on the kids.property values go up, funding does too.

Re:Flawed?

[sumdumass]

One of the problems with additions is similar to these trailers.

As demographics shift, you might need more room for 3-5 years then it could be too much space then need it again a decaid later. What ends up happening is that maintinence costs stay the same but the money comming in changes with the number of students and more gets allocated to yhe infrastructure instead of teaching.

Of course this could be aleviated if infrastucture costs came from a separate funding source or they could lease out the unused portions.

Terrible ventilation v. heat exhaustion

[JJJJust]

When I was in high school and they were adding on and renovating, everybody wanted as many classes in the portables as possible because they had air conditioning and our 50 year old school building didn't.

I'm sure more was learned in them than could have been learned in a 90 degree classroom.

Re:Global warming is causing bad grades now

[impossiblefork]

No, it's actually quite right.

Just yesterday I happened upon a presentation by a company called Swegon, which designs and manufactures ventillation system equipment, in which they showed a material from a British researcher who (I believe on their proposal) had arranged measurements of student performance as a function of class CO2 levels and classroom temperature and the effect on the speed with which students performed diverse simple tasks, like adding numbers, multiplication, etc. and overall it turned out to drop by 30% as CO2 reached the worst levels.

In some schools the CO2 levels reached about 2000 ppm. The idea that this doesn't affect people is ridiculous and properly designed ventillation systems are important.

Re:Oxymoron

[king neckbeard]

They want an environmentally/economically sustainable way of having temporary classrooms when they need them. A similar example would be disposable cutlery. Petroleum based plastic cups are intended to be temporary, but they are not sustainable because they deplete natural resources and do not biodegrade. By contrast, there are now cups that fit that role made from plant products, but will break down after a month or two of environmental exposure. These cups are intended to be temporarily used, but their design is at least intended to be sustainable.

Re:Oxymoron

[gstoddart]

Some of these old school building have inefficient boilers that are over 40 years old... they aren't exactly winning any efficiency awards. Moving students to a temporary location and then rehabilitating or replacing the old facility can be a net environmental gain.

Sure, that's one possibility.

But, allow me to offer another.

Where I live, schools seem to be going up quite fast. Without exception, within a few months of the school opening (if not before), they truck in the portables.

Brand new schools, with portables.

So, either school boards are uniformly stupid, and can't add. Or cities are failing to make the developers pay enough to build adequate schools for the amount of houses they build. Or school boards are so under funded, they start off designing a school they know will be outgrown before its even open.

In any case, from what I see, they're being used to compensate for short-sighted planning or too-small budgets on brand new schools more than they're being used for generating any net environmental gain due to remediating old heating systems.

But every single school near me, some built withing the last 3 years, most built in the last 10, has portables. And they more are less going to be there permanently.