School locations and traffic emissions—environmental (in)justice findings using a new screening method.

Philine Gaffron,Deb Niemeier

doi:10.3390/ijerph120202009

Abstract

It has been shown that the location of schools near heavily trafficked roads can have detrimental effects on the health of children attending those schools. It is therefore desirable to screen both existing school locations and potential new school sites to assess either the need for remedial measures or suitability for the intended use. Current screening tools and public guidance on school siting are either too coarse in their spatial resolution for assessing individual sites or are highly resource intensive in their execution (e.g., through dispersion modeling). We propose a new method to help bridge the gap between these two approaches. Using this method, we also examine the public K-12 schools in the Sacramento Area Council of Governments Region, California (USA) from an environmental justice perspective. We find that PM2.5 emissions from road traffic affecting a school site are significantly positively correlated with the following metrics: percent share of Black, Hispanic and multi-ethnic students, percent share of students eligible for subsidized meals. The emissions metric correlates negatively with the schools’ Academic Performance Index, the share of White students and average parental education levels. Our PM2.5 metric also correlates with the traffic related, census tract level screening indicators from the California Communities Environmental Health Screening Tool and the tool’s tract level rate of asthma related emergency department visits.

Highlights

As McDonald aptly noted [1], schools are a “long-lived and spatially fixed infrastructure” (p. 184).As such, factors key to successful school siting have been given considerable thought over the years, which is fully evident in the plethora of U.S state and local guidance on the planning, construction and renovation of new and existing schools
The results do show, that while our methodology is the approach with the highest spatial resolution, all related CES measures of air pollution from road traffic we looked at indicate the same spatial trends in emission burdens
Our study has shown that in public K-12 schools in the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) region of California, there is a direct positive correlation between the proportion of Black, Hispanic/Latino and multi-ethnic students as well as students qualifying for subsidized meals and the level of PM2.5 from road traffic that the schools are exposed to

Summary

Introduction

As McDonald aptly noted [1], schools are a “long-lived and spatially fixed infrastructure” (p. 184).As such, factors key to successful school siting have been given considerable thought over the years, which is fully evident in the plethora of U.S state and local guidance on the planning, construction and renovation of new and existing schools (e.g., see [2]). Despite the existence of a significant body of evidence that links a number of important health issues in children to the locational aspects associated with a school, more than 20 U.S states lack legislation ensuring that schools will not be built near manmade hazards, and only 10 states prohibit school siting near health hazards [3] The latter group includes California, where Senate Bill 352 [4] was passed in 2003 to prevent new schools from being sited “within 500 feet from the edge of the closest traffic lane of a freeway or other busy traffic corridor” (ibid., preamble) among other hazardous activities. Because of this, screening processes have been developed to identify key health hazards—

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Conclusion