Last August, when Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools began upgrading air filters in their K-12 buildings, the event was so significant that to document one of the first installations, at a Tampa elementary school.

When RAND Corp. researchers last spring with a list of 13 items that would make them feel safe about in-person schooling this fall, parents’ top priority wasn’t teacher or student vaccines, social distancing or regular COVID testing.

It was ventilation.

Perhaps that’s because COVID-19 has made our most basic act — breathing — newsworthy.

But therein lies the problem: In 2021, with an airborne virus still infecting Americans at a rate of , the heating and cooling systems in many U.S. public schools are nothing short of awful. Whether billions in new federal aid will be enough to help school districts upgrade an aging system anytime soon remains an open question.

While data on the scope of the problem are scarce, what little there are suggest that schools are looking at billions of dollars in deferred maintenance. A few examples:

• In Worcester, Mass., the district last summer said it would spend to upgrade heating and cooling systems in its 44 schools, some of which date back to the 1800s. Nearly half of its schools were built before 1940;
• In Denver, the school board spending $4.9 million to upgrade school heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in more than 150 buildings after former Superintendent Susana Cordova said parents had been asking her specifically about HVAC upgrades.

Like many issues, this one hits low-income students hardest.

In a of school facilities by the National Center for Education Statistics and Westat, researchers found that schools serving the largest percentage of low-income students also had the largest percentage of air ventilation/filtration systems rated “fair or poor” in permanent buildings.

The study found that in schools with the highest concentration of low-income students, 33 percent had such troubled systems. In schools with the lowest concentration, it was 27 percent.

In the RAND survey, nearly three in four parents put school air quality at the top of their school wishlist. Even among a subgroup of parents who were unsure whether they’d even send their kids back to school, ventilation came in as the most important safety indicator.

The dilemma is resonating beyond parents: Last fall, the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), with the New York State Labor Department on behalf of 44 employees in nine public school campuses across New York City, saying most school buildings were improperly ventilated. It also said the city’s “minimalistic” ventilation standards don’t prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. The group wants inspectors to determine whether schools are ventilated and filtrated to adequately protect teachers, students, and staff.

Kyla Bennett, the group’s New England director, said the conditions in these schools were “pretty horrifying.”

“The inspections that they had done, most of the schools did not have windows that opened (in) the classrooms. They didn’t have the correct supply ventilation or exhaust ventilation in the rooms. I mean, some of them literally had zero ventilation.”

She understands why windows in some cases don’t open. “There’s noise out there. There’s pollution. …There’s danger, especially for small children, if the windows open wide enough. But the bottom line is that in order to make the schools safe for not just the students, but for the staff and the teachers, we need to improve the ventilation in the schools.”

Nathaniel Styer, a city schools spokesperson, said the district’s public schools “were some of the safest places to be during this pandemic because of our focus on ventilation and safety. We ended the year with a .03 percent positivity rate, which never went above 1 percent and was consistently far below the city average. Our schools are safe and if any repairs need to be made to ventilation systems the impacted classrooms are closed until the problem is fixed.”

Styer said the district only uses classrooms in which ventilation systems are working and operational, with the means to bring fresh air inside, circulate it, and ventilate the air outside. He also said every room was inspected multiple times by professional engineers and union inspectors.

The high costs of building repairs — as well as other priorities and the political gridlock gripping Washington, D.C. — likely mean that most families won’t get their school ventilation wishes granted by the time students return this fall.

Last December’s Covid-19 stimulus measure, as well as President ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s proposed infrastructure legislation, could change conditions in schools. The stimulus includes $54.3 billion for states and school districts to shore up school facilities, including HVAC systems. But schools’ total price tag could be billions more, recent estimates suggest.

”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s could help as well. It proposes $50 billion in direct grants and another $50 billion leveraged through bonds to upgrade and build public schools. While its fate remains up in the air, a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers last week of the proposal. A summary of the “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure” plan by the Problem Solvers Caucus endorses upgrading schools’ internet systems, but school ventilation.

Needed: $1 million — or more — per building

Much of what we know about school infrastructure these days comes from a 2020 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which and found that 54 percent needed to update or replace “multiple building systems” including HVAC. An estimated one in three schools needed to update their systems, it found. And 41 percent of districts needed to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, totaling about 36,000 nationwide.

The price tag for upgrading these systems: about $1 million per building. If half of the 36,000 buildings get upgrades and the rest get entirely new HVAC systems, it could cost schools about $72 billion, the non-profit Learning Policy Institute .

Among educators themselves, the problem is hardly hidden — actually, most of them would agree with RAND’s findings, calling ventilation an urgent problem. When the American Society of Civil Engineers earlier this year graded infrastructure systems nationwide, ventilation upgrades topped schools’ most pressing concerns. More than half of districts — 53 percent — reported that they need to update or replace multiple building systems, including HVAC. The report estimated that schools need a in repairs. Taxpayers are currently investing only $490 billion, the group said, leaving a $380 billion shortfall.

While the engineers’ group gave the nation’s overall infrastructure a , it was even tougher on our public schools, handing them a .

It noted that in the decade between fiscal years 2008 and 2017, state capital funding for schools fell 31 percent, the equivalent of a $20 billion cut. In that period, 38 states cut school capital spending as a share of the state economy.

One of the report’s authors, California civil engineer Dan Cronquist, said in an interview that HVAC upgrades and replacements topped all other school officials’ concerns, including roofing, lighting, safety, plumbing, and even asbestos, lead, and mold remediation.

Air quality, he said, is “a big issue,” but he acknowledged that educators have a lot on their plates. “School buildings are not as a high-priority in some districts as other expenses.”

When GAO researchers visited school districts in six states last year, they found that security “had become a top priority,” often taking precedence over spending on building systems such as HVAC. It also found that in about half of districts nationwide, funding for school facilities came primarily from local sources such as property taxes.

In most cases, schools can’t rely on federal funding for ongoing, needed repairs, unless they’re located on military bases, receive federal Impact Aid, or are charter schools.

Upgrades don’t necessarily mean better air quality

suggest that schools use “multiple mitigation strategies” to lower the risk of exposure, such as improving building ventilation, as well as masks and distancing. While most buildings won’t actually require new ventilation systems, CDC says, upgrades or improvements “can increase the delivery of clean air and dilute potential contaminants.” In buildings that are already up to code, it suggests using window fans, improving filtration, and using portable high-efficiency particulate air filtration systems, among other measures.

Even if they get upgrades, schools may not automatically enjoy better air quality if they don’t maintain and operate the systems properly.

In a study , before the pandemic hit, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, visited 104 California classrooms that had recently been retrofitted with new HVAC units. About half had high CO2 concentrations, researchers found, and many were “under-ventilated,” likely due to improperly selected equipment, poor maintenance, or other issues.

The researchers concluded that better oversight of HVAC installation, as well as periodic testing and CO2 monitoring, would improve ventilation.

As for conditions in New York City schools, the PEER complaint is on hold after the state Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau said it didn’t have jurisdiction over COVID-19 cases, Bennett said. “We’re looking at our options, but there’s no quick solution here.”

She added, “The bottom line is that this pandemic, this isn’t the end. This is something that’s going to be hanging over our heads — whether it’s COVID-19, that still hasn’t gone away, or whether it’s the next pandemic — we need to make sure that the ventilation in our schools is better than it is, because it’s not a safe working environment.”

But new findings suggest that among many families, demand for remote or hybrid learning may not be so great.

More than eight in 10 parents surveyed (84 percent) now say they plan to send at least one of their children back for in-person schooling this fall, with another 12 percent unsure of their plans. Just five percent plan to keep their children home for the upcoming school year.

But the findings, released Thursday by researchers at the RAND Corp., come with stark differences between white parents and parents of color, among others.

Black and Hispanic parents “are the ones who are least sure they’re going to send their kids back to school in person,” said RAND researcher Heather Schwartz. While just 10 percent of white parents said they’re “not sure” of their plans or that they plan to keep their kids home, 28 percent of Black parents and 27 percent of Hispanic parents said the same.

If they do send their children back, she noted, most want mask mandates. That’s true of 86 percent of black parents, 78 percent of Hispanic parents, and 89 percent of Asian parents. By contrast, just 53 percent of white parents feel the same way.

Parents of color also want regular COVID testing — the split between black and white parents, for instance, is nearly 40 percentage points (74 vs. 36 percent).

In many districts, researchers have noted, Black families have been reluctant to let their children return to in-person school, often citing distrust in schools’ or discipline policies. In Chicago earlier this year, average in-person attendance for white students was 73 percent, the reported. For Black students, it was less than 50 percent.

Even the that parents of color are “more concerned about some aspects of school reopening, such as compliance with mitigation measures, safety, and their child contracting or bringing home COVID-19,” than were white parents.

In a New York Times op-ed this week, RiShawn Biddle, a fellow with the non-partisan think tank , said recent announcements by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to end remote instruction in the fall are “bad news for a majority of the country’s Black, Latino and Asian students and their parents who wish to keep virtual learning as an option.” The move, Biddle said, “exacerbates already-existing educational and health care inequities.”

Despite the differences, however, Schwartz said one finding seems fairly consistent: “Across the board, parents want ventilation,” she said.

Classroom ventilation is the top measure parents say schools must put in place for them to feel safe sending their children back to school in person — it’s more important than masks, social distancing and even teacher vaccinations, the data show.

Schwartz said the survey suggests that schools could allay parents’ fears by “communicating very clearly about what specific safety measures they are putting in place.”

Overall, two-thirds of parents want schools to keep COVID-19 safety measures, though rural and white parents are much more likely to prefer that schools “reduce or discontinue” their pandemic-related safety precautions. Black, Hispanic, Asian, and urban parents are much more likely to prefer that schools keep them, according to the survey, which was administered to 2,015 parents from April 30 to May 11.

Among parents who don’t plan to send their children to school this fall, the top reasons are safety-related. Nearly one in three (31 percent) said, “My child(ren) feel safer in remote school,” while nearly as many said they’re concerned about their child transmitting or contracting COVID-19.

Twenty-two percent said they’re staying home because their children “like remote school better.”

And just five percent said they prefer homeschooling their children, while only two percent said their children either have a job they’d have to quit or that they must care for younger siblings.

For Maritza Guridy, a mother of four in Philadelphia, safety is a big concern. She plans to send her children back to in-person schooling in the fall — Guridy is a secretary at the school that three of them will attend. But she understands that nervous parents want choices, especially those in multi-generational homes or with immunocompromised family members.

“The fact that some states are deciding not to even give parents a choice is very unfair,” she said. “There are a lot of parents that are still very scared and very worried because they’re still not even sure with certainty as to whether or not other children or even adults in the building have been vaccinated or are COVID-free.”

At her school, Guridy said, adults have been tested weekly since April. “Not every school district, not every school across the country, has had that possibility,” she said. “And there are still adults that for their own personal reasons have chosen not to vaccinate themselves.”

The new survey results also suggest that children’s vaccinations, while a game-changer for many families, aren’t finding universal acceptance among parents. Just 52 percent said they planned to vaccinate their children, while another 17 percent were “unsure.”

The Biden administration has pushed to get 70 percent of eligible Americans vaccinated by July 4, last month announcing a partnership with the ride-sharing companies Lyft and Uber to provide free rides to vaccination sites. Biden also said the nation’s largest community colleges will host vaccination clinics through the end of June. In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will fund “on-the-ground efforts” to promote vaccination, such as phone banking, door-to-door canvassing, and pop-up vaccination sites in workplaces and churches.

The new findings stand in stark contrast to this spring. One, from NPR, found that 29 percent of parents were “likely to stick with remote learning indefinitely.”

A by the National Parents Union found similar results to NPR in most regions: in the Midwest, 21 percent of parents said they preferred hybrid instruction to in-person instruction.

RAND’s Schwartz noted that her data have a large, 12 percent “undecided” group to consider. She also said a portion of the difference in findings could be due to how the survey questions are worded. Unlike others, hers didn’t ask parents about preferences — it asked about actual plans. “It’s a little more cut-and-dried,” she said. “It’s not ‘What would you like? Would you like an option?’ When you think about it, who doesn’t like an option?”

Brooklyn, N.Y., parent Amanda Zinoman said she’s ready for in-person schooling to resume. “I’m very excited for my son to go back to school full-time,” she said. “But I understand that if you don’t want to send your kid to school, there should be an alternative.”

Zinoman, whose 11-year-old, Jonah, has attended his small public middle school from home all year, said she has all but written off 2020-2021, which she said “feels like a bit of a lost year” for him.

“I think it’s a tough situation all around,” she said, “but my feeling is that kids need to be in school. I think that kids who thrive at home are a small minority — especially at my son’s age, adolescence. They need the social [interaction], they need the attention, and they need to be with people other than their parents.”