By Lynette Martins
Amid the ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis, investments in better ventilation and air filtration in schools are critically important to the health of students and communities. In this article I offer policy proposals through which communities may improve indoor air quality in school buildings.
By James G. Hodge, Jr.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, now entering its fourth year in 2023, legislators, executives, and judges at every level of government have sought measures to derail efficacious public health interventions. Despite clear risks of excess morbidity and mortality, these law- and policy-makers, often in more conservative jurisdictions, intentionally chose to push laws, guidance, and decisions prioritizing rapid “returns to normalcy” over the health and lives of Americans.
Casual observers of these collective trends may see the end of public health powers and services as we know them in the United States. And that’s where they are wrong.
By Jennifer Bard
One of the most persistently frustrating aspects of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as currently applied to schools and workplaces, is its emphasis on the eligibility of qualifying individuals for accommodation, rather than on population-based removal of barriers to participation.
This individualized approach has always been an uncomfortable fit, given the reality of changes in physical function throughout the lifespan, and is a particularly unsatisfying model for the collective threat of COVID-19, a novel virus that has not only caused at least a million deaths in the United States, but is likely to trigger a variety of disabling sequelae in many (perhaps most) of those who recover.
So far, however, there is mounting evidence that individuals who seek to protect themselves from infection with COVID-19 in school or in the workplace (very much including those who work in schools) are going to have to do based on their individual susceptibility to contracting COVID-19 or to being disproportionately affected by an infection.