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BMS Board Meeting Minutes — Current Academic Year

Indiana Department of Health – School Indoor Air Quality Response

October 29, 2024

Thank you for your support in helping Bloomington Montessori School (BMS) to improve our indoor air quality. Since your visit on August 29th, BMS has taken several steps to investigate the cause of the higher carbon dioxide levels, including changing thermostat settings and increasing fresh air intake through our dampers. Unfortunately, these experiments did not have enough of an impact.

To permanently address the air quality, we have chosen to partner with the HVAC company HFI who is working to build two Heat Recovery Ventilators. Each unit will have a control system, duct heater, and sensors to consistently provide airflow during the extreme cold and hot/humid weather. In the meantime, the humidity decreasing outside has allowed us to use opening the windows as a short-term solution without worrying about increasing the humidity.

Indiana Department of Health – Air Quality Testing
August 29, 2024

Hello BMS Community! We reached out to the Indiana Department of Health to ask them to come test school air quality earlier this week. They tested on August 29, 2024 during a peak time (when children had been in the spaces for several hours) and we wanted to share the results:

Brief Summary-We had no citations, but two areas where he recommended improvements; he gave us some great suggestions for lowering carbon dioxide and humidity in the building. Since this is peak outdoor humidity season, we suspect this is only an issue for a brief window of the year (now). We have been working with our HVAC team to implement the suggestions. This includes resetting temperatures on thermostats to increase dehumidification and decreasing the amount of time we leave windows and doors open as well as exploring different air exchange increase options (opening HVAC dampers more or installing ERVs).

We really appreciate the state’s expedient help with helping us check our air quality and their continued support and offer to do further testing to experiment with different ways to hit ideal numbers (CO2 and humidity) for the healthiest air possible for your children! Stay tuned-we’ll update you with actions once they are completed as we continue to work with HVAC contractors.

If you’d like to review the full report we got from the Indoor Air Hygienist, you can find it below. I also included a list of the guidelines for school air, so you have some context.

Let us know if you have any questions! -BMS Administration

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