All school are offered a core set of services: Outdoor Metal No-Idling and No-Smoking Signs; Asthma & Environment Parent and Teacher Trainings; Environmental Assessment Walk-around; Year-round Print Materials (Eng/Sp/Chin); School-wide Health and Safety Support. By arrangement, we may go beyond and work with some schools in a site-specific way.
AFSZ utilizes multiple interventions, which target different stakeholders and offer specific strategies for how to reduce environmental pollution. Target stakeholders include school personnel (teachers, administrators, and staff), parents or guardians, students, the general public, and policy-makers.
It is the custodian's job to install the outdoor AFSZ No-Idlng and No-Smoking signs. We generally walk around the school grounds with the custodian to determine the best location(s) for signs, thinking about pick up and drop off points of the school. The signs can be posted anywhere on the school property - but not on the DOT green metal street poles. There is generally a two-four sign allowance, depending no the footprint of the school.
AFSZ personnel conduct face-to-face sessions with teachers and administrators. Trainings occur once a year or as needed. The main goal of the session is to train teachers how to recognize and manage asthma in the classroom. Given that many schools do not have a protocol for dealing with asthma attacks, teachers learn about asthma warning signs, how to prepare for an asthma emergency, and what steps they should take to help a student having an asthma attack. Teachers are provided with solutions for trigger reduction in the classroom, including using safe cleaning chemicals, improving ventilation, and strategies for eliminating pests. By arrangement, AFSZ trainers guide school staff on a school walk-through to assess environmental risks within the school. During this process, administrators, health workers, and custodial staff accompany AFSZ trainers both identify current risks within the school that need to be remediated and learn to identify risks on their own.
Trainings are also designed to begin a dialogue within the school about how to create policies and behavioral changes to reduce triggers and aide asthmatic children. AFSZ personnel encourage discussion during the trainings between school health workers, teachers, and custodial staff to discuss what they each recognize as environmental risk factors for students with asthma, and how best to manage those risk factors.
AFSZ also provides support for parents to improve management of their children’s asthma. AFSZ personnel conduct face-to-face trainings for parents at parent association or parent-teacher association meetings. When necessary, trainings are conducted bilingually in English and Spanish.
The parent trainings are designed to educate parents about reducing asthma triggers in their homes. Many families of New York City public school children from lower-income backgrounds have fewer financial resources to invest in solutions. AFSZ suggests simple behavioral changes and low-cost, easy-to-implement interventions. For example, the program provides recipes for safe household cleaners as alternatives to more expensive “green” cleaning products.
In addition to trainings, AFSZ has sampled for particulate matter using a cut-point of 2.5 µm (PM2.5) and black carbon outside several New York City school sites along with recording observations of idling and passing traffic by vehicle type. This information can be used to inform the school staff trainings on reduction of mobile source emissions that can trigger asthma attacks.
It is the custodian's job to install the outdoor AFSZ street signage. Walk around the school grounds with the custodian to determine the best location(s) for your signs. Think about the pick up and drop off points for your school. The signas can be posted anywhere on the school property - but not on the DOT green metal street poles. There is generally a two to four sign allowance for English; one to two in Spanish.
Tailored interventions and support is offered to those schools that have identified specific environmental problems and are motivated to solve them.
Aside from air sampling research, the site-specific interventions follow an Accentuate the Positive-Eliminate the Negative approach. We work with the school parents association and local community groups to make improvements, i.e., adding street trees, creating gardening space, enriching on-going classes and activities. We work with the Parents Association to reduce dangerous and unhealthy conditions, i.e., unsafe traffic patterns, changing traffic flow, adding crossing stripes or street signs.
Learn more about the AFSZ Expansion Model Program.