Air pollution from industrial sources near Michigan public schools jeopardizes children’s health and academic success, according to a new study from U-M researchers.
The researchers found that schools located in areas with the state’s highest industrial air pollution levels had the lowest attendance rates — an indicator of poor health — as well as the highest proportions of students who failed to meet state educational testing standards.
The researchers examined the distribution of all 3,660 public elementary, middle, junior high and high schools in the state and found that 62.5 percent of them were located in places with high levels of air pollution from industrial sources.
Minority students appear to bear the greatest burden, according to a research team led by Paul Mohai of the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) and Byoung-Suk Kweon of the Institute for Social Research (ISR).
The researchers found that while 44.4 percent of all white students in the state attend schools located in the top 10 percent of the most polluted locations in the state, 81.5 percent of all African-American schoolchildren and 62.1 percent of all Hispanic students attend schools in the most polluted zones.
The study results are reported in the May edition of the journal Health Affairs. Mohai and Kweon presented their findings at a Washington, D.C., forum sponsored by Health Affairs.
“Our findings show that schools in Michigan were disproportionately located in places with high levels of air pollution from industrial sources. In addition, we found that Michigan’s minority students bear a disproportionately high share of the air pollution burden,” says Mohai, a professor at SNRE. Mohai also is a faculty associate at ISR.
The majority of the most-polluted sites in Michigan are in the southern half of the state’s Lower Peninsula, although several places in the Upper Peninsula fall into the most-polluted category. In the Lower Peninsula, the most-polluted locations form a horseshoe-shaped band stretching from the Thumb region south to the Ohio border, then west to Lake Michigan and north to Grand Rapids and Muskegon. Locations with the highest levels of industrial air pollution include the Detroit metropolitan area, the Grand Rapids area and the Muskegon area.
The authors conclude that Michigan and other states should require an environmental-quality analysis when education officials are considering sites for new schools. “While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft of voluntary school-siting guidelines in November, those guidelines might not be strong enough and could be ignored by many school districts,” says Kweon, a research investigator at ISR and an adjunct assistant professor in SNRE.
In addition to Mohai and Kweon, the authors of the Health Affairs paper are Sangyun Lee, a postdoctoral researcher at SNRE, and Kerry Ard, a graduate student at SNRE and the Department of Sociology.
