The past two years have been tough on schools, which are now heading into months in which COVID-19 cases have begun to rise. Districts are preparing for possible increases, doing their best to make sure students can stay inside the classroom.
In Warren County, that’s meant the installation of more air purifiers. The county has helped purchase multiple units for each of its local schools.
In Queensbury, that’s meant the installation of 36 units spread throughout the district’s four buildings.
“What this is doing is pulling in 360-degree air, cleaning it through a filtered system and re-releasing fresh air,” said Dan Miller, Queensbury School District’s coordinator of facilities.
Each unit can cover about 700 square feet. In Queensbury, the district has targeted specific high-trafficked areas, such as the nurses office and meeting rooms.
The Warren County Department of Public Health says the devices are an easy way to upgrade existing infrastructure to better combat COVID and other illnesses.
“We know that one of the biggest things with COVID is air changeover, having new air, fresh air, coming in and a lot of our schools, like this area has, are very old. They’re dated systems,” said Dan Durkee, Warren County public health program coordinator.
Each purifier costs about $800. The funding was made available through a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The county says it’s optimistic the air purifiers will make a difference.
“We ultimately asked the schools, ‘what do you need,’ and they came up with a lot of different ideas. The one that really stuck out was the air purifiers because we knew they had been used in other counties already,” said Durkee.
Durkee expects the district will be able to see the real impact in the weeks ahead.
“The areas that we are using them in, you can tell that they’re not as dusty, especially sitting over the weekends. We’re running them on a higher volume at night, which is turning the air over a lot quicker. Hopefully, this will continue on and we’ll get some better feedback from some of the staff where these are being ran,” said Durkee.
The district is hoping to add more air purifiers in the future.