Just beyond the front door of the Montessori School at Five Canyons, a square glass-walled foyer is brimming with verdant houseplants in clay pots. Garden sculptures and glazed ceramic art are interspersed throughout. Above it all floats the looped sound of softly chirping birds. This lush tableau provides a fitting transition between the world outside and the carefully controlled atmosphere within, where child care director Meher Van Groenou has made environmental health one of her top priorities. The school serves 120 toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners in Castro Valley, California.1 Within its five classrooms, most toys and utensils are made of wood, glass, or stainless steel. Ample windows welcome natural light and permit cross-ventilation on warmer days. The carpets contain no glue, nor does the tongue-and-groove wood flooring. Van Groenou helped design the building 11 years ago, drawing from her experience seeking to provide a healthy home for her own children. Green construction was by then already being embraced in California’s residential and commercial sectors, and in many schools—but not child care centers. There were few child care–specific resources to support her, no local standards to lead her, and hardly any other centers to offer a model. Research has proven that infants and toddlers, who spend more time on the floor and experience the world with their hands and mouths, are not merely in closer contact with many indoor pollutants2 but also more sensitive to them.3 Yet environmental health standards in child care settings nationwide—which can include not just centers but also private homes, workplaces, universities, and places of worship—still lag behind those of schools, where children are older, larger, and somewhat less susceptible to environmental exposures. Unlike with more uniformly regulated schools, child care licensing, permitting, and oversight occur on a variety of levels, resulting in a fractured regulatory landscape. A host of other factors, many of them specific to child care, contribute to the challenge. For example, licensing guidelines and quality rating systems—which often emphasize infection control and cleanliness—can steer centers toward bleach or other potentially toxic sanitizers and disinfectants that are now recognized as asthma triggers,4 says Ellen Dektar of the Alameda County Childcare Planning Council; even the Five Canyons center disinfects with diluted bleach. For similar reasons, other facilities may choose pesticides over prevention-based approaches to pest management. Tight budgets and slim profit margins in the child care industry leave little room for pricier green products and hazard mitigation or removal. Meanwhile, licensed child care providers must meet growing requirements pertaining to disaster preparedness and care of children with special needs, says Hester Paul, national director of Eco-Healthy Child Care® (EHCC),5 a green child care endorsement and training program. Teaching child care staff—who may be poorly educated, nonfluent in English, and/or already challenged by the demands of their jobs—about environmental exposures “can be a formidable task,” says Vickie Leonard, a researcher at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, who is working to develop child care–specific resources on green cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting. The same can be true for credentialed child care directors, says Karen Teliha, community and environmental health coordinator for Indiana’s 5-Star Childcare program,6 the nation’s only comprehensive statewide environmental health certification program for such facilities. “For most child care providers, environmental health is a newer area,” Teliha says. “Educating them about pest control and proper pesticide usage, that’s not something that’s necessarily taught when you go to become a child care director.” In each case, the first step is to learn more about what, exactly, infants and toddlers are being exposed to. But the deeper one looks, the more complex it gets.
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Apr 8, 2024
Morgan L Schachterle + 4
Open Access
