CIVIC-PG Track B: Community Knowledge-Inspired Decisions for Schools (Community KIDS)

Children spend significant time inside school buildings. Therefore, the environmental conditions in the schools impact the learning environment and directly influences both the health of kids and their educational outcomes. The loss of academic achievement and cognitive performance due to exposure to environmental toxins like lead (Pb) in drinking water and airborne pathogens is difficult to reverse.

Thus, improving school building environments and infrastructure can impact a community’s future by improving the health and learning outcomes of its children. This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) research evaluates technologies that create healthy water in Flint, Michigan, schools with similar activities to improve air quality in a follow-on Stage 2 project.

The research also involves working with parents, guardians, teachers, and school administrators to develop communication and information sharing methods to build trust and knowledge around the technologies put in place to protect children while they are in school from various toxins and contaminants. Work in this Stage 1 project focuses on removing lead in drinking water because it is a known neurotoxin that is harmful to childhood brain development, even at low concentrations.

Traditional methods used to remove lead are linked to increases in bacteria in drinking water, thus posing other potential harmful impacts. Project research focuses on identifying the broad range of technical and social elements that lead to unhealthy water in school environments. It employs novel, community-resident panels for the co-production of knowledge to inform and improve the understanding of researchers and school administrators of parent and student concerns and the questions they have about the Flint school system's environmental safety.

The panels and other community outreach activities will be used to develop community support and trust in solutions to keep the air and water of the public school system healthful so children can thrive and learn. Broader impacts of the work include new technology for the early warning of contaminant/toxin breakthrough in drinking water filtration systems and the testing and documentation of novel community-interaction processes for rebuilding trust in municipal services that have lost the trust of the community.

Results of the study, if successful, have the potential to scale to other communities with similar problems.

This research focuses on community interaction and the development, installation, and use of filtration technology and methodologies for school building hydration stations that creates a healthy learning environment for school-aged children using the Flint, Michigan school system as a pilot. It will also explore the potential and value of student/staff/parent learning using community-trusted, transparent methods for getting the word out and building trust in civic service providers.

The work will initially focus on performance and development of technology for an early warning systems indicating the need for filter changes for 78 advanced point-of-use drinking water hydration stations that were installed in Flint Community Schools February 2022. Researchers from the University of Michigan and groups of students, teachers, and parents will participate in a process to design practical and sustainable maintenance and monitoring plans for the stations and guide how timely hydration station performance information is shared with the community.

The community piece involves creation of a Project Planning Advisory Council that generates interview questions to understand concerns and thoughts of individual, organizational, and institutional stakeholders. Although being used initially for Flint, the approach can be scaled and deployed nationally. Interview questionnaires will help identify major gaps in our knowledge about the use and performance of drinking water filtration stations, understanding negative perceptions regarding school drinking water in areas with a history of poor water quality, and gaps and themes across different interviewees with a range of ages, roles, and expertise.

The process will provide a better understanding of the perceptions and tensions that exist around safe water in school buildings. The approach recognizes the critical, sustained involvement and local knowledge of trusted community individuals that is required for technical solutions to municipal problems to be effectively implemented and maintained over time.

This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.