Pandemic money was meant to clear the air in Ontario schools.  Did it work?

By January 2022, Heather Hanwell was at her wits’ end. Like many mothers she was bearing the bulk of the burden of education disruption in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a parent, she was angry and overwhelmed; as an epidemiologist she was puzzled by the province’s approach to keeping schools open, and students healthy.  

“They were making decisions that didn’t make sense,” she says of the Ontario government from her home in York Region, north of Toronto. Those decisions included ending case reporting in schools, data that could have provided valuable insight into how successful the government’s investment in health and safety measures were.  

As it cycled through school closures and reopenings, the Ministry of Education cited investments in improving air quality as making schools safer. But Hanwell wanted to see supporting data. She started asking questions about her daughter’s elementary school.  

Hanwell knew schools with mechanical systems were at an advantage compared to those with only partial ventilation systems or none. In general, mechanical ventilation systems support indoor air quality by bringing outdoor air in to dilute indoor air pollutants. 

A February 2021 air quality audit done by the Toronto Catholic District School Board on three schools illustrated how air quality in schools with mechanical ventilation had significantly lower carbon dioxide concentrations when compared to those without. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is a proxy measure for air quality indoors because its concentration is a rough indicator of the ventilation rate per person and can be used to indicate whether a building is in compliance with suggested air quality standards. The Catholic school board report showed a Grade 7 and 8 class in one school without mechanical ventilation spent nine hours with carbon dioxide concentrations above what’s considered good and 4.5 hours above acceptable levels, and noted having the windows open did little to clear the air.

Portable high-efficiency particulate air filters, better known as HEPA filters, can also improve air quality by filtering infectious disease particles as well as carbon dioxide, mould, bacteria and outdoor pollutants that are brought in, including from car exhaust or wildfire smoke. The Ministry of Education only requires portable air filters in schools without mechanical ventilation, as well as in kindergarten and childcare spaces. Hanwell’s daughter’s classroom didn’t qualify. 

In the fall of 2022, Hanwell accelerated her concerns about a lack of HEPA usage with the school’s facilities manager. Hanwell says he assured her portable air filters in most classes weren’t necessary. The school’s mechanical heating, ventilation and air conditioning, or HVAC, system exceeded minimum air quality standards, he said, and matched both industry and public health advice. 

Hanwell asked to see an air quality audit to support the claim. When her request was ignored, she made a freedom of information request for it. 

The audit, which she shared with The Narwhal, confirmed what the facilities manager said: the school’s system did offer the suggested average of six air changes an hour. (Air change rates are another way to measure ventilation based on how many times the total volume of air in an indoor space is exchanged.) But it also revealed the complexity of assessing indoor air quality in a school building, where rates can vary in individual classrooms and over the course of a day. One classroom had only three air changes an hour.

For Hanwell, these are nuances that make a difference. 

“If you’re sending your kid to school, do you care what the average air change per hour is? You care about the air in their specific classroom,” she says. 

Hanwell isn’t the only parent-turned-indoor-amateur-air-quality-investigator to emerge from the pandemic. In the past four years, a small-but-active parent-led movement has cropped up in Ontario, acting as a bug in the ear of principals, boards, trustees and the Ministry of Education as they push for greater transparency about the scope of the government’s pandemic-era investments. They’re asking for carbon dioxide monitors in order to measure air quality in classrooms. They also want a healthy maximum carbon dioxide threshold, publicly reported data and an expert-led strategy that establishes measurable indoor air standards for all schools, in line with the most recent ventilation industry standards.

The new, COVID-driven parent movement joins experts and environmental organizations that have been advocating for improved air quality in schools and childcare spaces for much longer. 

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The pandemic has given new purpose to this “time-worn” concern and its direct relationship to children’s health and wellbeing, Erica Phipps, executive director of the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment, says. 

“Those of us working on children’s environmental health have known for forever that children are more susceptible to the harm of exposure to adverse air quality and other toxicants and pollutants,” Phipps tells The Narwhal.

The impact of poor ventilation in the spaces where children spend the bulk of their days is a well-established risk factor for poorer outcomes in education and health. 

Kids in low-income neighbourhoods are more vulnerable to the cumulative effect of these impacts especially during extreme heat events, Jacqueline Wilson, counsel for the Canadian Environmental Law Association, says. 

They’re more likely to live in neighbourhoods with less tree cover, she says, and in homes that don’t have air conditioning; schools therefore become a critical public health intervention. 

Aside from higher rates of infectious diseases, poor air quality in schools is linked to absenteeism and lower cognitive performance, including standardized tests results, University of Toronto professor Jeffrey Siegel says.

“Forget COVID,” Siegel, an air quality expert, says, “poor ventilation is a problem in itself.”

The need to tackle air quality issues in schools will only grow exponentially as the impacts of climate change increase. 

Data from the 2023 Lancet Countdown report underlines how much more often Canadians are exposed to wildfire smoke these days — a 220 per cent increase in 20 years.

Wildfire smoke’s complex mix of toxic gases and fine particulate matter are harmful to the heart, brain and respiratory system and have a direct impact on respiratory conditions. In 2023, exposure to wildfire smoke in Ontario was causally related to a 23 per cent increase in asthma-related emergency department visits. 

The long-term health implications of increased exposure to wildfire are the subject of ongoing research, including the link to increased incidences of heart disease and other chronic conditions. 

Protecting people from the harms of wildfire smoke and ambient air pollution includes plans for indoor air, says Angela Yao, a senior scientist at the Environmental Health Services at BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver. 

“Just being indoors is not enough. You need to be indoors with cleaner air,” she says.

The prospect of increased lifetime exposure to wildfire smoke poses both short-term and long-term health effects for kids, who are also more vulnerable to the effects of air pollution from diesel bus fumes, for example, because of their rapid respiration rate, activity levels and growing lungs. 

Indoor air quality is a public health issue, says Wilson, counsel for the Canadian Environmental Law Association, but it’s one that clearly intersects with environmental policy.

“There’s an immediate need to protect people’s health, and we need to act now,” she says.

Funding for ventilation rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic. But where did it go?

Since August 2020, Ontario schools have been able to access around $660 million to improve indoor air quality by replacing ventilation system filters, windows, repairing systems and purchasing portable HEPA filters. The federal government kicked in 80 per cent of the funds and the province the remaining 20 per cent.  

In 2022, the Education Ministry told TVO less than 10 per cent of schools in Ontario lack mechanical ventilation. It’s unclear whether this encompasses older schools with newer additions, where some wings or buildings have updated ventilation and others don’t. The ministry did not respond to inquiries for comment on this story. 

On its website, the Toronto District School Board, Ontario’s largest board, says it received $81.6 million from the federal government to undertake various projects related to promoting health and safety measures and facility conditions. According to Jatin Amin, a senior manager in facility services and planning, Toronto’s board had spent $75.43 million of that money as of Aug. 31, 2024. 

But figuring out how much of it went directly to air quality upgrades is tricky. Amin confirms information found in documents advocates shared with The Narwhal, which indicate the cost of many HVAC projects were bundled with other pandemic-related upgrades like touchless entry points.

“The $81.6 million was for projects including ventilation, windows, water bottle-filling stations, Wi-Fi, outdoor playground sitting areas, etc.,” Amin says. 

For anyone wondering how that money was spent, or where more investment is needed, each board’s publicly available ventilation report provides basic information on which schools have partial or full mechanical ventilation, if it’s been assessed, as well as if there are portable air filters in the school and how many. 

It doesn’t post a system’s age, capabilities or air quality assessment publicly or indicate whether the filters are still in use. So regardless of where or how that pandemic-related funding for ventilation was spent, there are scant details on how effective it was and still is. Understanding the reality of the work undertaken — and its impact — requires more information, argue parent-advocates.

“It’s not a report,” Farheen Mahmood, a parent-advocate based in Toronto, says. “It’s just a checklist.” 

In some schools, staff members have taken on the task of tracking just how effective pandemic-era investments have been at clearing the indoor air.

Andrew Dobbie, an elementary school teacher in southern Ontario, says his school was able to do a full retrofit of its HVAC system with the government’s pandemic funding. In 2020, Dobbie started bringing a monitor to work to check the carbon dioxide levels and even measured the presence of harmful particulate matter like that found in vehicle exhaust, and says the overall air quality has vastly improved as a result of the retrofit. 

“But we still have areas in the building that have relatively poor air quality,” he says, which could be helped with portable air filters, which the school relied on prior to the upgrade. The filters were noisy, which made teaching difficult, and are now gone. He’s not sure where they went. 

Anecdotally, many parent-advocates complain about the use, misuse or non-use of portable air filters.

Mahmood says in her experience use comes down to individual teachers. Her youngest child’s teacher understood the value of keeping hers on and even allowed her to put a carbon dioxide monitor in the class. But at her older children’s middle school and high schools, she says it’s entirely different. 

“The filters aren’t on. They are used as coffee tables, or they are out of place.”

Investment information is one thing, but transparency about how effective that investment has been is another, parent-advocate Mary Jo Nabuurs says.

“How well is it working?” Nabuurs, who co-founded the advocacy group Ontario School Safety, says.

Parents have little recourse when it comes to pinpointing accountability. But blaming teachers or principals is counterproductive in the view of Siegel, the University of Toronto professor. He’d like to see an autonomous body put in place, either federally or provincially, to do the hard work of oversight when it comes to maintaining healthy air in schools.

Joey Fox, an HVAC engineer for an Ontario school board and chair for the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers Indoor Air Quality Advisory Group, says in addition to funding, school boards got basic guidance about optimizing air quality that aligned with minimum industry standards from the province. Those minimum standards don’t apply to infection control, but are mostly designed to ensure there’s no strong odours present, Fox explains. 

“If these measures were implemented, it is likely they improved the air quality, but we really do not know how much and if it was substantial or minimal. There were no standards applied, no oversight and there was no system to test the air, so we do not know how effective it was,” Fox says. 

He says it’s also unclear if places are still taking the same measures they were at the height of the pandemic, though he believes some are.

Both Fox and Siegel are sympathetic to the scope of the task governments faced in 2020, a challenge that remains daunting now. “This is not easy stuff,” Siegel says, and indoor air quality is not yet part of building codes in schools.

The province hasn’t publicly acknowledged changing standards when it comes to improving air quality either. 

In 2023, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers introduced an air quality standard designed to support the challenge of airborne disease transmission. In a Medium post that July, Fox broke those standards down for typical classroom spaces based on occupancy. For elementary school classrooms with a maximum of 20 kids in the class, the recommended air change rate is equivalent to 6.7 air changes an hour; in high schools, it’s equivalent to nine air changes an hour.

And while this standard is designed to tackle airborne disease transmission, the combination of increasing ventilation and filtration efforts it demands could “theoretically” confer overall benefits to air quality, including reducing pollutants, Fox says. 

Fox characterizes Ontario’s pandemic-era scramble to address schools’ ventilation issues as “here’s money, do what you can,” but says the province deserves credit for trying. “To be fair,” he says, “other provinces didn’t have unified strategies. Ontario did take steps.”

While the complexity of addressing air quality isn’t to be underestimated, Siegel argues the amount spent was wholly insufficient to address the scope of undertaking such a project across Ontario’s 4,500 aging schools.

The amount of investment “has been low, the quality of that investment has been poor and the effect is probably minimal,” he says. 

How do we clear the air in Ontario schools?

To bring schools up to standard would necessitate an investment in the billions, akin to the investment needed to reduce class sizes, Siegel says. That level conflicts with a decades-long trend of underfunding education in Ontario. 

As a result of underfunding by both Liberal and Conservative governments, Ontario schools have accumulated a significant maintenance and repair backlog of at least $16.8 billion. 

Chandra Pasma, NDP Education critic, believes the number is “undoubtedly higher.” 

The province’s response has been to commit $1.4 billion a year through its combined school condition improvement and school renewal funding, which Pasma says isn’t even “enough to fund the repair backlog of a couple years ago. We’re going to have this gap continuing to grow.”

Pasma has pushed forward a private member’s bill. The goal of Bill 140 is to have carbon dioxide monitors installed in classrooms, with an established maximum level, and a comprehensive expert-led air quality action plan. 

She’s unsure whether the bill has a future. There are so many pressing needs in education, she says.

A December 2024 report by the provincial Financial Accountability Office underlines the need for greater investment in Ontario schools. According to that report, nearly 40 per cent of Ontario’s schools are in a state of poor repair, ventilation systems included.

The Toronto District School Board is cited in the report as one of the boards with the greatest need for investment, with 84 per cent of its schools falling short of the good repair threshold. The board has a $4-billion repair backlog, nearly half of which can be attributed to its mechanical repair and maintenance needs, says Richard Christie, senior manager, sustainability for the Toronto board’s facility services and planning. 

“Parents want this to be solved. But people need to be more forthcoming about what effort is required to achieve it,” Christie says. “It’s not a few years of funding for projects. What we need is significant sustained funding over a long period.”

Unfortunately, the tap has slowed to a trickle as pandemic-related funding dries up. 

That doesn’t bode well for schools’ ability to factor in the need for building out their climate resilience in the coming years. While few could have predicted COVID-19 and the rapid upgrades and shifts it required, we know extreme heat and wildfire smoke are certain to become more frequent and deadly occurrences, Siegel says. 

Ontario’s 2023 Climate Change Impact Assessment concluded southern parts of the province could face more than 60 days with temperatures of 30 C or more by 2080, compared to an average of nine extremely hot days currently. Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy has identified extreme heat as the deadliest weather event in Canada, Wilson says, adding these events are often coupled with exposure to wildfire smoke. 

“Three things get worse, certainly duration and number of extreme temperature events, frequency and severity of wildfires, and also frequency and severity of ambient air pollution events,” Siegel says.

Keeping indoor air healthy during these events will become more challenging and require more established knowledge about best practices, Siegel says.

Prompted by increased concern over prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke, in November 2024, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers introduced new guidelines that underline the importance of prioritizing filtration as well as the use of sensors that monitor indoor concentrations of harmful particulate matter.  

Yao, the B.C. environmental scientist, agrees that understanding the capacity of individual mechanical ventilation systems within individual schools — what these systems are equipped to filter out and to what degree — is imperative. They may have to be supplemented by portable air filters appropriate to the space, she says, adding air particulate sensors in classrooms would even better equip us to understand the quality of air in classrooms. 

Robert Lepage, a building science engineer based in Waterloo who focuses on climate resilience, says there needs to be a sea change in how we assess the health and safety of schools, moving from historical concerns about heating to cooling. 

“The predominant focus in Canadian building codes has been that of cold- dominated climate concern, i.e. people freezing,” he says. 

Climate change challenges that guidance for design, and going forward, “every single building everywhere in Canada will probably need some sort of mechanical cooling, at least in one room or so.”

Even schools that do have mechanical ventilation systems may not have central air conditioning. The need for schools to address a lack of sufficient cooling is urgent. As with rental units, Ontario has a legally mandated minimum temperature in schools, but no mandated maximum. And as with rental units, many would like to see an acceptable maximum established, and enforced.

Kimiko Shibata, an elementary school educator in Kitchener, Ont., says many of the schools she’s worked in have had primitive mechanical ventilation and no air conditioning. In addition to making kids miserable and feel unwell, extreme heat in poorly ventilated spaces affects their ability to focus and learn. 

“Kids are literally sticking to the seat. They’re crying. It’s a write-off,” she says.

Samantha Green, a family doctor at Unity Health in Toronto, says her child’s school doesn’t have air conditioning either. When temperatures reach extremes, classes rotate in and out of the air-conditioned gym. 

Her concern for her child’s well being led her to dig into the literature around extreme heat and children’s health. Underlying medical conditions like asthma can worsen, and learning outcomes often take a nosedive, she says. 

Christie, who authors the Toronto school board’s annual Climate Action Report, says this will be the first year it moves from discussing long-term mitigation efforts like reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to stressing the urgent need for immediate climate adaptation in school buildings. 

“We need to think about it now, plan for it and sort out the funding,” he says. “We can’t sit on our hands.” 

“We really need a partner with the Ministry of Education that understands that investments are required for ventilation but also cooling.”

Last April, the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment released a report on indoor air quality that called on governments to establish clear and comprehensive policy addressing both longstanding concerns about schools, including radon and exposure to diesel bus fumes, as well as the impacts of climate change. And, it said, it’s time to plan accordingly. The tools to make these changes already exist, the report said, listing occupational health legislation, public health mandates and human rights codes that could be deployed to protect students and teachers. 

Some advocates are seeing change, like Waterloo’s Clean Air For All. Through sustained parent-led activism, it helped push the Waterloo Region District School Board to establish an air quality committee and, in 2023, use carbon dioxide monitoring to investigate the air in three schools to determine the usefulness of placing monitors in classrooms. 

In October 2024, the Waterloo board ratified its first clean indoor air policy, probably the first in the province. 

The policy is still beholden to Education Ministry standards. But it marks a baby step in the board’s willingness to make the conversation public — and to protect students.

Hanwell’s 11-year-old daughter Jane has caught the air-quality investigating bug. She takes a carbon dioxide monitor to class in her pencil case each day. 

A few of her classmates are curious, she says, and come to her desk asking to know the readings and what affects them. “Fresh air makes the numbers go low,” she tells them. “The bad air that we breathe makes the numbers go high.”