Improving the school building may well be the most overlooked means of improving student health, safety, and academic performance. Yet in conversations about factors that lead students to academic success, only rarely does the role of the physical environment come to the fore. By downplaying the importance of the building, policymakers and parents…

This paper discusses a variety of school safety and security measures that may be implemented at little or no cost and without the use of complex technology. Measures are presented according to these categories: (1) General; (2) Outside the Building; and (3) Inside the Building.

Ways in which school facility planners, managers, and others can guard against the potential indoor air quality (IAQ) problems presented by paint are covered in this bulletin. It opens with an overview of paint formulations and the functional quality of different paints, paying special attention to the volatile organic compounds present in some…

Indoor air quality is a growing problem in aging school buildings. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offers an Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools kit which is being used at schools nationwide to improve school maintenance. Profiles an aging school in Connecticut in which teachers were becoming ill to illustrate the use of the kit to…

Adequate school plants are essential to a modern educational program. The school plant that is not properly maintained soon fails to provide the service for which it was intended. The total program of maintenance, including repairs, renovation, remodeling, rehabilitation, and modernization should be carefully planned. Some tasks will recur at…

School fires endanger pupils' lives and take annually a heavy toll in school property losses. If not controlled, these potentials may be changed quickly into serious losses. School officials, teachers, parents, and the public have an interest in school fire safety. Because of other interests and a lack of assigned responsibility in this area fire…

The attrition of both new and experienced teachers is a great challenge for schools and school administrators throughout the United States, particularly in large urban districts. Because of the importance of this issue, there is a large empirical literature that investigates why teachers quit and how they might be better induced to stay. Here we…

With the increase of population, the lengthening of the school life of children, and the consolidation of small into large schools, often with many hundreds of children in one building, the care of the health of children while in school becomes correspondingly more important. Since the health of school children depends to a large extent on the…