Ecological perspectives on a healthful school environment: A Delphi study

The need for a clear identification of the areas of concern associated with the construction and maintenance of healthful school buildings resulted in this Delphi study involving ecologists nationwide. The 53 ecologists from 24 states and two foreign countries identified the primary areas of concern which are reviewed in the literature. Most of these ecologists had backgrounds in Clinical Ecology or Environmental Medicine. They ranked each element of each area of concern on its desirability in school settings. Their responses relating to building issues were compared to those of 11 experienced school architects.;Delphi. The Assessment of Healthful Schools (AHS) was developed through the Delphi technique. Of the 10 most important areas of concern, five related to building or remodeling: floors; heating, cooling & ventilation; lighting; remodeling school building; and site selection. The other five related to maintaining a healthful school: art supplies; cleaning; chemicals; fragrances; and pest controls. Concern about building and remodeling a school had equal value with the maintenance of the school in providing a healthful school environment.;Research questions. The first question related to the identification of the 10 most important concerns was accomplished by tallying the rankings of the subjects. The second question was examined through a null hypothesis projecting no difference in the distributions of responses from ecologists and architects. The Mann-Whitney U was used to compare the data. Fifty-seven of the statistical tests were nonsignificant, and 95 of the tests were significantly different. The third question delineated the preferred maintenance practice and the mode was selected as the best descriptor of these ordinal level data.;Conclusions. The ecologists in this study developed a consensus on the ten areas of concern with the top five rankings remaining the same for all rounds: heating, cooling, and ventilation; pest controls; cleaning; chemicals; and fragrances. Overall the ecologists were consistent from one round to another in prioritizing the concerns although they added important elements up a total of 232. Ecological concerns in school environments are particularly critical because of the vulnerability of children who spend extended hours there.