Sixty-four stand-alone HEPA filtration units are being deployed in classrooms in the New Westminster school district in the face of the continuing Omicron surge.
The commercial-grade units are designed to provide “an extra layer of protection for staff and students due to the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant,” school board chair Gurveen Dhaliwal said at the Jan. 25 board meeting.
The district picked up and deployed the first 40 units last week in all its portable classrooms.
“While the portables did have ventilation units, the systems were not as robust as the main school building,” Dhaliwal said.
Most of the district’s school facilities run HVAC systems with MERV-13 filtration, the Ministry of Education’s recommended standard.
The remaining 24 units in New Westminster are for classrooms in the two facilities that don’t meet that standard.
One of those is Skwo:wech Elementary School, which uses MERV-8 filtration in its HVAC system due to the age of the building. A new school is under construction and had been planned to open to students in January, but the project suffered delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the B.C. floods in November. At this point, a move-in date for the new facility has not been announced, but the district has said it will take place sometime after March break.
The other facility getting a HEPA filtration boost is the leased office space at Columbia Square that houses the RCAP and POWER alternate secondary programs. A school district ventilation report for the site notes that the district lobbied the property management company for an upgrade from MERV-8 to MERV-10 filtration.
The new units for Skwo:wech and Columbia Square are being put into place tomorrow (Feb. 2).
“As we adapt to the evolving challenges of new variants, this new investment is providing us with an additional, very targeted layer of protection in spaces without the more robust mechanical ventilation systems,” secretary-treasurer Bettina Ketcham said in an email.
Ketcham said the HEPA units were being implemented thanks to “targeted financial support” from the province.
A Ministry of Education press release today (Feb. 1) said that, since the beginning of the pandemic, B.C. has put $114.5 million towards ventilation upgrades in school districts. It also said “additional support” was available to implemented targeted improvements, with a focus on deploying portable HEPA filtration units in classrooms with no access to mechanical ventilation systems. The press release didn’t provide a dollar value for that additional support.
New West's 64 units cost about $112,000, according to the school district.
The New Westminster school district has publicly posted ventilation documentation for each school. You can check out the individual school reports online.
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