About 600 students in Windham County will start the year remotely because local school officials decided the district’s air quality systems needed work before students come back into classrooms amid the pandemic.
But many more students across Vermont could be in a similar situation. Schools around the state are worried about whether obsolete air-handling systems could spread the coronavirus, and are planning urgent projects.
In the months before Covid-19 arrived in Vermont, districts had been tackling issues resulting from deferred maintenance in aging schools. Multimillion-dollar modernization projects were being planned, and lawmakers were ready to put over $1 million into a statewide analysis of building needs.
Then the pandemic made HVAC systems a top priority, and earlier this year legislators set up a $6.5 million grant program to help schools repair and upgrade their heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems to meet Covid-19 health guidelines.
About 300 schools are interested in applying for the $6.5 million, said Jody Lesko, the director of programs and implementation. That’s about three-fourths of all schools in Vermont.
The project prices run the gamut, depending on the severity of the problem and the size of the school. But Eveline Habermann Killian of the Burlington engineering firm Cx Associates, which is working with about 20 schools, said she’s frequently seeing costs ranging from $40,000 to $60,000 per school.
At $40,000 per project, 300 schools would need $12 million.
“It’s probably more than the Legislature had hoped for,” she said. “But nobody really knew until we started going into the buildings.”
It’s unclear if air quality concerns tied to the coronavirus could actually shutter more schools. But ventilation and air filtration have emerged as a top concern in the puzzle over reopening, and hundreds of schools are scrambling to get work done before Vermont students return on Sept. 8.
Ventilation cannot replace masking or social distancing, but public health authorities strongly encourage proper ventilation and air filtration to help mitigate the risk of the virus indoors.
Older schools, particularly those built in the 1920s, sometimes rely on baseboard heating and aren’t ventilated at all. Killian said her firm is recommending that those schools install an energy recovery ventilator.
Because the grants are funded with federal CARES Act dollars, they must be spent before the end of the calendar year. But many projects the districts want to pursue won’t be finished before students return.
“HVAC projects are not often super-quick to implement. They’re pretty detailed. They can be quite technical. They can sometimes involve structural stuff,” Lesko said.
Killian, associate principal of the engineering firm, said she was “pleasantly surprised” to find that many of the box ventilation systems commonly found in union high schools built in the 1950s and 1960s can meet today’s standards. The problem? Many aren’t functioning the way they should be.
“Because the funding has been scarce, we’re finding that there’s a lot of maintenance that’s required for these systems,” she said.
That’s the situation in the West River School District, which includes three elementaries in Jamaica, Townshend and Newfane, as well as Leland & Gray Union Middle and High School.
The school board voted last week to delay in-person learning until as late as Thanksgiving. The move came on the advice of the school nurse, according to Windham Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Bill Anton, who said the district needs more time to ensure the schools’ ventilation systems meet the state’s recommended standards for reopening.
Anton said the district has about $170,000 worth of work to do on its HVAC systems. It’s possible students could be back in the buildings much sooner if all goes well, he said, but the district preferred to under-promise and over-deliver rather than the other way around.
“We didn’t want to raise hopes and then make it more painful in October saying that (remote learning is) going to continue,” he said.
