Health and Environment
Environmental Services
Our Mission:
To improve the quality of life for the students and staff in our buildings
by providing a healthy and safe environment for learning.
Did you know that there are volunteer environmental teams monitoring
the environment in each school building?
A few years ago, the Operations (now Facilities) Department established a district-level Environmental Management Team
consisting of school operations and city health staff. Their objective was to impart knowledge to personnel within each school community. Most schools' teams consist of the principal, senior custodian, school nurse, a teacher or two and a parent. These teams are responsible for monitoring the environmental quality inside the building and on the property.
When there are environmental quality problems, the team often handles the issue by investigating the problem and making a recommendation for a simple change.
For example, if the air quality in a classroom is a complaint, the team will make sure that the air vents are not blocked by classroom items. Should the problem be more complicated, the team submits a work order (via the custodian) in the school’s electronic work order system which alerts Joseph Crossen, the Facility Manager in the Facilities Department.
The types of issues that the school teams have focused on in recent years have included:
•Improving air quality in the classroom,
•Removal of cleaning chemicals and replacing them with approved “green” cleaners
•Pest management utilizing simple integrated pest management (IPM) techniques, such as removal of food from classrooms which may
attract ants and mice
Annually, school teams attend training on various environmental topics. At the high schools teams receive more
extensive training regarding the storage and use of chemicals by the science and technical education staff.