Tales of schools filled with disgusting smell from rotten building materials, as well as schools built on former industrial sites or in the shadow of chemical factories, can be found all across the country. And research such as one study underway at the University of Michigan suggests that the problem of school environmental hazards may disproportionately endanger poor children and those of color. Preliminary findings of the ongoing study, led by Paul Mohai, suggest the scope of the problem of school pollution and its impact on performance. Their team divided their state into 10 zones based on the concentration of pollutants, and found that 56 percent of white students attend schools in these zones, while 69 percent of Hispanic(西班牙裔的)children and a shocking 92 percent of black students do. They also found that children in schools with higher concentrations of pollutants tend to score lower on standardized tests than children in less polluted schools, though they cannot say with certainty to what extent the pollution is the cause.
The increased vulnerability of children of color, says Daria Neal of the Lawyers’ Committee, is the legacy of discriminatory housing policy and zoning laws. People of color were historically confined to undesirable neighborhoods, which were often near sources of environmental pollution, like highways and electrical facilities. Schools in polluted neighborhoods would, therefore, be expected to be polluted as well.
But another one of Mohai’s early findings in Michigan suggests that something even more disturbing contributes to the problem:the schools located in the most polluted zones tend to be in spots that are even more polluted than their surrounding neighborhoods. In other words, schools are often put in toxic spots or polluters are allowed to move in next door. This is likely because often in urban areas the only real estate available to cash-straped(缺钱的)school districts is polluted land that no one else would want.
Part of the problem is that schools fall into a regulatory gray area. Even if the EPA(Environmental Protection Agency) steps up its emphasis on school quality, it has no direct supervision of how schools are built and operated. And in many states, health and environmental-quality departments have limited authority over schools that operate under independent school boards. Occupational safety agencies may step in to protect teachers in their workplaces, but there is no official agency charged with protecting children at school. All of that may help explain why resource-limited school districts sometimes turn deaf ears to parents’ complaints of environmental hazards in their children’s schools.