Letter to the City: Clean Air for all SFUSD schools

Respected Mayor London Breed and San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 

We’re writing from the San Francisco Parent Coalition (formerly Decreasing the Distance) to ask you to work with SFUSD staff on an urgent public health & air quality issue to ensure that the district has sufficient funding and other resources it needs to install or upgrade high-quality HEPA air filter systems and to ensure that there are MERV-13 air purifiers in ALL SFUSD classrooms. We are seeing a very inequitable situation with schools and classrooms at random addressing this issue on their own accord. Nobody can blame them as they are frantic, however this is not the solution. ALL of our children and educators deserve a safe quality of air in their classrooms, especially during the added concern of COVID. The solution must come from SFUSD and the City.

We learned that OUSD communicated with all of it’s districts families on July 27th that it had already upgraded all of their filter-based HVAC systems AS WELL AS installed air purifiers in all classrooms and common spaces, in time for the start of the new school year, both to protect its students and educators against particulate matter and Covid. 

We are asking you to move as fast as possible to address this emergency situation and cut through bureaucracy and other obstacles so that all public school children are safe from both bad air and COVID-19 during peak wildfire season, which is now upon us. If there are not district funds, are there city funds? Is there a philanthropist willing to support? Our children and educators cannot wait.

SFUSD staff have been preparing a plan and testing critical components of that plan to ensure all schools have clean air in the coming months. Please ensure they can move forward without ANY further delay so they can procure and implement. Wildfire smoke is especially dangerous to children, and our city’s public school children have already been through far too much already.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Meredith W. Dodson

Parent Leader for Movement

San Francisco Parent Coalition