HEFN

About our work

As the founder and national leader on environmental health at school, Healthy Schools Network focuses on effective, measurable state and federal policy reforms. Our work is designed to provide models and to be replicated nationally. Recognizing children’s special vulnerabilities to environmental health hazards, we address all facets of the school environment through our three program areas:

1. child-sensitive standards for school siting, design, and construction
2. child-sensitive standards for greening existing schools (nontoxic supply, purchasing, and maintenance, including green cleaning, IPM, and reducing disinfectant use)
3. new environmental public health services and interventions for children in harm’s way.

We have won federal, state, and city laws, policies, and funds to improve facilities and ban toxics and received multiple national awards for our work. Our expertise is routinely sought by the White House, federal agencies, legislators, and NGOs, as well as parents and personnel nationwide.

Unlike traditional environmental or health groups, we organize horizontally (not vertically), engaging advocates from the fields of health, environment, and labor; parent and disability groups; and many others. We network them via the national Coalition for Healthier Schools, which we convened in 2001. We are also distinguished by our longtime refusal to endorse products sold to schools or accept support from carpeting or chemical companies.

We have thousands of members nationwide and have provided technical assistance to parents and schools in every state through our Healthy Schools/Healthy Kids Clearinghouse, which also disseminates the many groundbreaking technical reports we have researched, commissioned, and/or edited. 

Recent wins

In 2009 and 2010, we led a series of successful meetings with EPA and CDC, which helped us win these and other victories:

• Securing a new EPA-led interagency Healthy Schools Initiative to work with states and with districts nationwide
• In January 2011, releasing a survey of school nurses, in conjunction with the National Association of School Nurses; more than 40 percent of over 350 respondents reported knowing children adversely affected by pollutants in schools, but also reported that virtually no agencies help children, their parents, or the schools.
• Securing restoration of a federal executive order on risks to children’s environmental health
• Prompting the convening of the President’s Inter Agency Task Force on Risks to Children’s Environmental Health and Risks to Children’s Safety, co-chaired by HHS and EPA
• Prompting EPA to write guidelines on environmental health at school, as required by the federal law won in 2007
• Coordinating a foundation-funded facilitated expert panel brainstorming session (spring 2011) to keep EPA on track

• As coordinator of the National Collaborative Work Group on Green Cleaning and Chemical Policy Reform, presenting an invited session on “greenwashing” at the November 2010 conference of the American Public Health Association
• Publishing collaborative articles in three peer-reviewed journals in 2010
• Winning renewal of a highly competitive four-year cooperative agreement from US EPA to advance healthy indoor environments in schools
• In April 2010, holding our most successful-ever National Healthy Schools Day (supported by the EPA agreement), with more than 70 events. CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health and the National School Boards Association co-sponsored; in February 2011, CDC/ATSDR signed on
• Conducting independent research on EPA’s monitoring of air toxics near schools, which showed that all children in all schools are at risk

• After the BP oil disaster, documenting how children’s health was ignored by the federal programs set up to protect them and issuing a guide to help parents keep kids safe. 

Our goals

• Sustaining and expanding EPA’s Healthy Schools Initiative with appropriate federal resources for EPA and for state agency grants. On the chopping block is the Healthy Schools Initiative (a page-one priority in President Obama’s FFY11 budget), which could be cut by half, and the successful IAQ Tools for Schools program, slated for elimination.  Although the bills do offer to restore funds to the agency’s Office of Children’s Health, overall, the proposals would drastically weaken the agency’s ability to protect children.

• Sustaining and expanding collaborative work and resources for state and national partners of the national Coalition for Healthier Schools  The spring 2011 meeting of an expert panel of state and national groups with a facilitator will address how to improve this work

• Transforming our Healthy Schools/Healthy Kids Clearinghouse of direct services and technical assistance established in 1996 into an independent, professionally staffed national public health information and referral service for parents of school children in harm’s way 

Other key interests:

• Organizational transformations for the national Coalition and for the Clearinghouse are priorities for moving ahead
• Schools buy green. Promoting high-quality state laws on green cleaning; combating industry green-washing and EPA’s deceptive chemical product labeling program; segueing green cleaning product procurement into wider green procurement in schools nationwide   
• Children at risk. After gaining access to files on schools maintained by the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health, we initiated discussions with two universities and are determining how best to mine the data and create a research agenda for children; with allies, we are pressing two or more states to pilot public health services for school children in harm’s way, using existing authority to inspect schools  
• State policy groups. Fostering two new state-based policy coalitions (joining a dozen under way), in anticipation of EPA offering state agency grants