Video Transcript: Tiffany Delcour, Louisiana Recovery School District of New Orleans

I am the indoor air quality coordinator at the Recovery School District, which means I do a lot of environmental assessments of facilities, and trying to reduce environmental triggers to asthma and other chronic, respiratory illnesses in the schools. I think a lot of people think indoor air quality is something very specific – that I do something very, very specific. And I do, but it is a really holistic approach to the way we manage facilities, to the way we run facilities, what we put into them, what we allow in them. And so it’s just really environmental care and consciousness about a facility. It can be a teacher using a plug-in in her wall because she thinks it smells really great, but what it does to an asthma student, its making sure the filters get changed appropriately, the custodial services are performing the services they are supposed to, and why it is not just getting on somebody to do their job but it actually has an impact on health. The biggest thing I think is when you look at the district level, it’s a lot of fear of if we hire this indoor air quality coordinator, she goes into a facility, what if she finds something? What if she finds something we can’t fix, or it is going to cost a lot of money, and we don’t have a lot of money? And so I think that was a big fear of getting an indoor air quality program established. But I have to give it to the district to really praise them because they did it anyway and we’ve found some things, some very costly things. But the thing is they found it before it became a huge health concern and causing students to be in poor health. As I was going into these schools to do my environmental assessments and to reduce some triggers, I started realizing that we have a big asthma problem. And we are reducing those environmental triggers through our program, but there are a lot of other aspects to asthma. There are a lot of social and cultural issues that relate to the case management and case care. And it really created a core team, that it’s not just me; it’s a whole district level approach to indoor air quality which is how you get the buy-in and how you get the promise from other stakeholders to carry the system on. 


8/26/11

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