Every morning, when I walk my children toward the school entrance, I feel my eyes begin to sting, a familiar burning now—sharp, persistent and undeniable—and by the time we reach the doors, they are overflowing with tears that are not emotional in origin but physical, involuntary and deeply unsettling. I carry medicated eye drops in my pocket not for seasonal allergies or cosmetic dryness but because the air near their school has become so thick with exhaust, particulates and the sour odour of the nearby chicken-processing plant that my body quite literally cannot tolerate it without intervention.
This is where my children are expected to concentrate, to breathe deeply, to move their bodies freely during gym class and to regulate their emotions and behaviour in a space that does not regulate even its air.
When we refuse small changes, we make a large decision
The refusal to provide clean air is rarely acknowledged as a decision. It masquerades as policy, resource constraint or administrative burden. But what unfolds in schools across British Columbia is neither accidental nor benign: it is a slow, routinised form of exclusion that hides behind spreadsheets and policy documents before displacing the burden of harm onto the bodies of children who can least afford it.
We have constructed a system in which a child who cannot tolerate fragrance becomes dizzy from stagnant air or begins coughing during wildfire smoke season is not regarded as someone whose environment must be adapted but as someone whose presence is conditional. And when those conditions cannot be met—often they are not—the child is quietly expected to stay home, with no ceremony, no official notice, only the unstated understanding that their needs are inconvenient and that unofficial exclusion will be tolerated.
Protecting air quality in schools requires urgency, not delay
While British Columbia’s government has invested significantly in ventilation upgrades, the current pace and scale of implementation fall short of what science demands and what children’s health requires.
Current investments are a start, but insufficient
Since 2020, the province and federal government have allocated $219.4 million toward ventilation and filtration improvements in BC schools—$194.4 million from the province alone—resulting in over 343 completed projects across the province. During the 2021–22 school year, the ministry provided $11.9 million through the federal Safe Return to Class Fund, prioritising standalone HEPA filters for 1 218 classrooms without mechanical ventilation; $2.5 million purchased 1 914 units, with additional funding for MERV-13 upgrades and associated utility costs. Yet thousands of classrooms remain unfiltered, and many schools lack clear timelines for portable HEPA deployment.
Filter requests remain “extraordinary” rather than standard
In spring 2020, at the height of pandemic anxiety, a parent’s offer to supply a HEPA filter was declined by classroom staff; this isolated refusal reflects a broader reluctance to treat clean-air interventions as routine. Schools often require formal budget allocations, lengthy policy approvals or administrative sign-off—processes that lag behind evolving public-health guidance and leave vulnerable students to breathe polluted air.
Science clearly supports portable HEPA filtration
Portable HEPA air cleaners can reduce exposure to simulated SARS-CoV-2 aerosols by up to 65 percent and by 90 percent when combined with universal masking; laboratory studies demonstrate up to 99.97 percent removal of airborne virus particles over repeated ventilation volumes. Public-health agencies—including the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC)—recommend adding portable HEPA cleaners wherever existing HVAC systems are insufficient to mitigate airborne transmission.
The cost of waiting is borne by children
While incremental upgrades proceed, climate-driven risks—wildfire smoke, urban heat islands and air stagnation—will only intensify. Each day without portable filtration is a decision to tolerate preventable harm: reduced concentration, increased respiratory distress and the quiet exclusion of students whose bodies recognise threat rather than safety.
This is not what equity looks like
We already know how to protect children. So why not the air? Why is the child who reacts to volatile organic compounds or scented products asked to manage their own exposure, when the child with an allergy to nuts is protected by a building-wide ban? Why is the child who faints during gym class sent home with a note about dehydration, when we know the air quality on site was never safe to begin with? Why are requests for HEPA filters treated as extraordinary when wildfire smoke now blankets entire regions for weeks at a time?
In Judith Butler’s terms, grievability—the capacity of a harm or a life to be publicly mourned—and legitimacy—the social recognition that a harm warrants remediation—are two sides of the same coin: where a vulnerability is deemed legitimate, swift policy responses follow; where it is not, invisibility reigns. “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not,” Butler writes, observing that an ungrievable life “has never counted as a life at all” and therefore never merited protection or care (Frames of War: precariousness and grievability). In our schools this logic persists: nut allergies become a sanctioned crisis, warranting building-wide bans, while chronic exposure to polluted air remains ungrievable—too “invisible” to be deemed a legitimate ground for systemic change, leaving vulnerable students unprotected and unheard.
This will not pass—it will deepen
It is important to understand that climate change will not make this better. In Canada’s ten largest cities, 16.3 percent of public elementary schools sit within 75 metres (roughly one city block) of a highway or major road and when the threshold is extended to 200 metres, 36.1 percent are (see Proximity of public elementary schools to major roads in Canadian urban areas). There is air pollution already, invisibly poisoning our children while they play.
Still what is coming—and in many places what is already here—is a slow shift in baseline conditions that will make current inaction not only unjust but dangerous. Wildfire smoke now stretches into the fall. Urban heat islands are growing. Air stagnation in low-lying school sites is worsening. HVAC systems in older schools are outdated, often non-functional and unable to handle the demands of a warming planet.
And yet, in the face of all this, school districts continue to plan around the past. They continue to suggest that children should simply try harder to stay regulated—should focus, should participate, should breathe calmly—even when the very air around them is signalling threat.
Clean air is not a luxury; it is a baseline condition of justice and inclusion
When we talk about exclusion in schools, we often think about it in terms of discipline, of policy, of behaviour. But exclusion also happens through infrastructure, through air, through the decision not to respond. It happens when parents are told that a $400 filter is too much. It happens when staff wear fragrance in buildings that claim to be scent-free. It happens when we pretend that children who stay home for health reasons are simply absent, rather than forcibly removed by systemic neglect.
We cannot wait for capital upgrades. We cannot wait for building replacements. What is required is adaptation now—portable filtration now, enforcement of scent policies now, recognition of exclusion now—because the cost of waiting is borne by children who are already being told, with every decision not to act, that their safety is negotiable.