Our mission is educate and motivate private, corporate and government funding sources to provide full or matching funding for schools and public day-care operators to purchase technology that is proven to reduce the level of airborne particulates, allergens, toxins, mold, dust and pollen from classroom air in schools and daycares. We also focus some of our time and money on implementing an educational outreach to help parents, teachers, school board members and school administrators know more about the critical role that cleaner classroom air quality can play in student and teacher wellness, health cost savings and also help improve attendance, learning, standardized test scores.

Why We Chose This Mission: We chose this Mission because we know that providing healthier, cleaner classroom air quality will also improve the short and long-term respiratory health for children and teachers. If we require teachers and students to spend 7 hours a day in public schools with an extremely well documented problem with indoor air quality, we think it is our mission and everyone's mission to at least do the simple steps and programs that have proven to substantially improve this widespread and serious health problem.

The Size and Scope of This Problem: 

This Problem Impacts the Health of 60% of School Children and Ignoring the Problem Costs Society Much More Than Preventing It. Recent statistics by reputable sources indicate there are about 99,000 public school buildings, 4,100 charter school buildings and 33,700 private schools with approximately 49.8 million students and 3.3 million teachers. That means there are about 136,800 school buildings, and many more daycare centers. The estimated five year costs to properly equip just 50% of these school buildings, and operate the technology would be would be about $3.4 Billion dollars, or an average of about $684 million per year. Just the 99,000 public schools will spend about $543 billion in the 2009-2010 school year, or about $10,844 per student per year. Over just the next five years, this will be more than $60,000 per student. In those five years, school districts and teachers will spend approximately $60,000 per teacher for out-of-pocket health costs and insurance program costs. Medicaid provided children's health insurance programs will spend about $14,000 per child covered, and recent statistics indicate approximately 30% of children in schools are covered by Medicaid health insurance programs. Studies show for both teachers and students that as much as 60% of their health costs are driven by respiratory related health costs. Recent EPA studies report more than half of public school buildings suffer from indoor air quality problems.

It is Not a Building Problem Schools Can Fix. It is the opinion of the Clean Air for Kids Program that this is not a health issue that can be fixed by building new schools or increasing building maintenance budgets. The best solution is better vacuum sweepers and a full-time in-the-classroom air purification system that is constantly filtering out these harmful allergens, toxins and particulates. Basically the children bring the dirt, dust and allergens with them from home, or Mother Nature creates them from plants, animals, dust storms, agriculture, industrial pollution and traffic pollution.

The Clean Air for Kids Program proposes spending about $200 per student over the first five years to install and operate a proven wellness technology solutions that can reduce the costs to the families, employers and insurance providers. After the average cost of only $30 to $40 per year spent for the first five years the annual cost per student drops to between only about $8 and $13 per year to maintain the technology installed.

Reducing Sick Days Lowers Health Costs and Missed Work Costs. In a typical year the average student misses about 6% of their 185 school days, or about 11.1 missed school days per year. Studies show that about 50-60% of these sick days in grades pre-K to grade six will require a working parent to miss work, costing their employer the lost work value and in some cases the cost of paid personal leave. Even though studies have proven improving the indoor air quality can reduce sick days by 50% to 60% which would save about 5.5 to 6 sick days per child per year, our payback ROI below is based on saving an average of only 4 sick days per child per year. In some schools the cost per student to equip the school, can be lower and the paybacks can be much higher based on the demographics and salary levels of the families served.

The Medicaid payback ROI can be much higher in some schools that serve low-income families where Medicaid covers 90% of the students compared to the 27-30% of students, or the national average for all schools, used in the Medicaid payback calculations shown below.

Technology and Energy Savings. Other savings include keeping dust from clogging cooling ports on expensive computers, smart boards and ceiling mounted LCD projectors. Teachers also report a much more comfortable working environment created by the air movement provided by classroom air purifiers. This classroom airflow has been a problem with energy efficient school construction that eliminates windows that can be opened and shuts off HVAC fans more often to save energy because well insulated buildings maintain the temperature better without as much HVAC provided air flow in the classrooms. Some teachers report adjusting classroom thermostat settings 4 degrees that saves 10-12% of heating and cooling costs. Moving the air in the classroom creates a better working environment and offsets some of the issues created by energy efficient building designs.

Legal Cost and Liabilities. We also know preventing a child's Asthma related death, or brain damage and the legal liability to the school district can add many millions of dollars in savings to any school that avoids such an event.

Test Score Improvement and ROI Compared to Other Wellness Program Costs. The other payback consideration is how much money is being spend on education improvement programs and other wellness programs that won't begin to offer the real test score improvements and wellness benefits at such a low cost per student.

Basically children who feel better in class, have fewer sick days, take less mind-numbing allergy medicine will learn more in class, test higher on standardized test, have higher grades, build the next years education on a stronger base and have a much healthier respiratory system for the rest of their life after they leave the school system. That is quite a payback for a $40 per year investment in an education system that is spending $10,844 in 2010 to try to achieve these key education goals.

Here are the ROI calculations on a $5 million in CAFKF funding to programs serving 25,000 students and about 1,800 teachers or school adminstrators in 100 school buildings.

Our Long-Term Vision: 

This is a big problem in the United States, and the World, but so is the ROI. The immediate vision of the founders of the Clean Air for Kids Program is to raise 30 million dollars in the first few years to fund clean air technology for thousands of schools.  The long term need to fix all the U.S. schools with serious indoor air quality issues will cost billions of dollars, but the health cost savings will be many times the implementation costs. We believe as more evidence of the huge ROI that is available from solving this problem government provided school funding will be provided from tradtional sources, but there will always be schools who cannot get the needed funding from budgets, state grants, private grants, PTO/PTA groupls or other sources and will need to ask for help from our Program. Many studies have proven that cleaner classroom air will create a dramatic reduction in the absenteeism for children and teachers because most of their illnesses are caused by the symptoms from allergies, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. 

The ROI includes improvements in health costs, education outcomes and in the long-term health of students and teachers. We know that keeping students and teachers in school will improve their learning performance and raise test scores on key standardized achievement tests.  The payback to families and their employers from lower health care costs and missed work day costs for parents will provide a more than 5 to 1 return in the first year, and 25 to 1 over the first five years. The annual savings from these air quality improvements will provide a tremendous total return on the investment in cleaner classroom air quality. The reduced levels of indoor particulates will reduce the rate that children’s allergies turn into full-blown asthma, which is now the number one cause of hospitalizations in children age 5 to 15.  Respiratory illnesses typically represent more than half of the health care expenses for families, teachers and their insurance programs.  Reducing the number of respiratory illnesses can slow down the rapidly rising cost of health-care for these families and teachers.  We believe the technology exists today to create this vision, and with funds raised from companies, foundations and government sources we believe we can help many schools and day-care operators dramatically improve their indoor air quality.  We need to make people aware these kinds of benefits can be achieved, and help them with the needed funding to implement these proven solutions.