Here’s a contribution toward reopening schools; and I’d better make it fast, since schools open soon.
In fact, that’s its name, FAST: Fresh Air Seven Time.
I taught English in a public high school in Vermont for 25 years, so I feel qualified to speak on this matter.
First, some background: The federal Government Accountability Office published a report in August about school ventilation, saying 36,000 school HVAC systems “need updates.” Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says schools should “ensure that ventilation systems operate properly” and should increase ventilation by opening windows and doors unless it creates concerns for students with asthma.
That’s my suggestion.
Schools have lunchtime, study time, homeroom time and detention time, so they can certainly have Fresh Air Seven Time (FAST) and do it for pennies a day anywhere in America, from the Bronx to Boise, Amherst to Anchorage. I suggest that the entire school open its windows and doors for the first 7 minutes of every hour.
I regularly opened my window over my 25-year career, 24 of which were in the same building and same rooms. I had grown up with a mother who threw open the bedroom windows for 20 minutes every morning to “clear out the germs” as she put it. So I understood the principle.
I understand another principle too: one teacher opening one window occasionally is not going to help in a school with hundreds of students and dozens of classrooms.
This is where FAST comes in. Why 7 minutes? For the same reason that 7 minutes was the time I gave students for a break every class: 5 was too short for the students to go to the bathroom and 10 would be objectionable to the administration as excessively liberal.
Seven was the magic compromise. And it allows just enough time in the winter to dilute the indoor air, without freezing the place out. Also, the average school day is seven hours.
Why every door and every window? Because COVID-19 is less contagious in the outdoors and since classrooms can’t be moved outdoors all year, the outdoors can be invited in.
But it will work only if the dilution occurs regularly and in quantity.
Fuel prices are low and whatever the increase in heating costs by instituting FAST, it will be pennies compared with shutting the school down.
And consider this: Many rooms in the school don’t have windows that open. My school’s enormous library had two tiny windows and was an oven in the spring and summer. Only the administration and guidance offices were air conditioned. The rest of the school, including the cafeteria, gym, auditorium and classrooms, were not air conditioned.
Hence, my mother’s remedy. Up with the windows even in winter and in with the germ-diluting air. In case you think this is anecdotal and unscientific evidence, recall the CDC’s own directions: open windows and doors.
And know this too, Eleanor Roosevelt, before she was First Lady, used to put her baby daughter Anna out the window in a basket to get fresh air. Wealthy friends of mine who grew up in Little Rock, Ark., still have “sleeping porches” off their bedrooms so they can sleep in the fresh air until winter came. Fresh air is not a crackpot idea.
FAST has another virtue that will become evident if the entire school does it for 7 minutes at the beginning of each hour: It will fortify agency.
Folks will feel they are not passive blobs waiting for the virus to invade, but are active agents diminishing the impact of the foe.
Plus, this is one strategy that won’t need to be legislated and that no one could possibly object to on political grounds. No one is going to say my rights are being violated; I want my stale air. You are forcing me to breathe fresh air!
Perish the thought. Or, perhaps, simply, perish.
Paul Keane, a retired high school English teacher, lives in Hartford.