4.9 million children – nearly one in ten – attends a school within a mile of a chemical facility. Children attending schools in communities with too few resources to modernize buildings are at higher risk of exposure to lead and other toxins. We know that there are no safe levels of lead exposure. We know that living and learning near industrial plants, busy highways, and within ill-maintained schools and housing increases the risk of asthma in children.
Overwhelmingly, these schools posing health risks are serving low-income children and children of color. Parents in these communities cannot easily move to places with cleaner air and newer school buildings. School districts in these communities cannot easily acquire land and funding to build new schools further from the toxins. These communities alone cannot wield the political power to demand safe air and water, over and above the interests of corporations, landlords, and their investors.
The E.P.A. offered one level of regulatory protection for vulnerable communities, both in enforcing clean air and water standards and in community-based grants for technical assistance and local organizing, but in these past weeks, we've seen the leadership of the E.P.A. focus instead on energy production and deregulation. Links to the E.P.A.'s years of environmental justice projects that sought to mitigate decades of health risks inflicted on low-income communities are all now dead.
As Terry Jones of Floodlight wrote last week, this deregulation places children at the steepest risk. Young brains and young lungs are not equipped to fend off toxins in the air and water, and these children deserve protection. The federal government has decided that this protection is no longer their priority.
Young people in these communities who do make it to college may find it puzzling to be applauded for their resilience by kind staff once there, as if requiring children to overcome public indifference to their communities' health and well-being was merely a speed bump in service of them building personal character.
It's understandable that young people from these communities may be wary of promises that playing fields will become equal if only they work hard to get their degrees, when the lives of younger siblings and neighbors and cousins just got worse at the hands of highly educated people.
