Delaware currently has no statewide standards to track safety and cleanliness in school buildings, which some educators say hinders keeping up with vital repairs.
State Sen. Stephanie Hansen seeks to address the issue with a bill establishing new standards for air quality and other measures of structural safety in the state’s more than 200 public schools and other facilities.
She says she started working on the measure five years ago after a touring a middle school riddled with mold in the Christiana school district. "There was a bucket sitting on top of a copier collecting drips of water coming down from the ceiling covered in mold," she said. "I asked how we could get on top of this, because students and teachers were getting sick students. It turns out that the way to get at it is by regulating the underlying conditions that allow mold to grow, and that means setting standards for air quality."
Without any statewide standards—though federal law requires school districts to track the presence of asbestos in education facilities—Hansen says many similar health and safety problems in Delaware's public schools have been left unchecked, and school districts struggle to find money to repair their existing buildings.
"It’s much easier today to build a brand-new school than it is to repair the schools that we have," she said, "so we wind up in a position that’s almost demolition by neglect because we’re not paying to the minor capital expenditures that are necessary in our schools.”
She says statewide standards will help prioritize school capital improvement funding by identifying how severely a school needs repairs and directing money to those with the greatest need.
The estimated cost of the capital improvements needed in Delaware public schools tops $1 billion, but the state only budgets $15 million per year for repairs. Hansen hopes to add another $40 million to that annual budget.
"The schools are very concerned," she said. "Now that they would have to look hard at these issues, quantify them and do an assessment, they want to know that there would at least be funding they could access to make repairs and improvements.”
If passed, the bill would require Delaware schools to launch routine air quality monitoring programs by January 2025.
