Illinois' public health department plans to distribute 60,000 HEPA filters to public schools.
"Improving classroom ventilation with air purifiers is a proven method we can use to reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses, including COVID-19, the flu, and RSV, and, at the same time, reduce absences related to illness."
Still, that'll be enough to cover only about two-thirds of all schools in the state.
#SchoolsAreSuperspreaders #Covid #LongCovid #Education @novid
Seems like a good place for a periodic reminder that there's ~$200 BILLION in federal government money sitting out there, for nearly two full school years now, designated for air quality in schools and as of the last accounting that I saw only ~15% of it has been actually used.
https://www.ed.gov/improving-ventilation-schools-colleges-and-universities-prevent-covid-19
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7123e2.htm?s_cid=mm7123e2_w
https://khn.org/news/article/covid-funding-pries-open-a-door-to-improving-air-quality-in-schools/
All I know for my local school district, for example, is that they claimed about $36 million as a "federal cash advance" in March of 2021 and gave themselves until November of 2024 to tell us how they used it.
A portion of it could be used for "learning loss" and of course that's a big one for the people who claim that three weeks out of school in 2020 have irreparably harmed the local kids. So, of course, they used the maximum amount allowed, which ended up being about $8 million, for tutoring and whatnot.
I can't find anything on the other $28 million to this point. This is from a school district that spent years telling us how urgently they needed to upgrade the leaky central ventilation systems in the local schools. A district in which, when my wife was in the classroom, the air conditioning system continually dripped water onto the ceiling of her classroom and she spent years in a constantly moldy room. Apparently there's no urgency to actually fix that when the money comes from the federal government.
@BE At our last school board meeting, one of the bean counters mentioned how the district has $750,000 allocated for contact tracing in 2024. There's no evidence that they're even doing contact tracing. I thought they stopped in 2021. Something smells rotten…
@BE Right. Lately I've been wondering how much of this cash is going right into administrators' pockets. A lot, I bet.