Roger Silveira is the Director of Facilities Maintenance and Operations at East Side Union High School District and the Founder of We Need Fresh Air. We Need Fresh Air is an organization focused on reducing the health problems caused by indoor air pollution and poor ventilation in the classroom.
He has been in the construction and building maintenance industry for over 30 years. Roger found his true calling in education and helping to deliver a healthy learning environment for students.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Roger Silveira talks about working in the public sector of facilities management
- How proper CO2 ventilation systems can be used in the classroom
- Using grants to fund and improve classroom airflow
- Roger discusses how proper ventilation can lower the risk of infections
- How can you monitor air quality and energy?
- What dysfunction in the system can do to your energy bill
- Roger shares what data reveals about student behavior in relation to CO2 levels
- How Roger got started in the facilities maintenance industry
- The importance of assessing air quality in residential and commercial buildings
- What is now required before building a new classroom: a CO2 monitor
In this episode…
What is the importance of building proper ventilation in classrooms? What are the benefits? Do school CO2 levels matter when it comes to education?
For Roger Silveira, proper ventilation and monitoring of CO2 levels have been at the forefront of his work, especially as we navigate through the pandemic. According to Roger, there is a correlation between student achievement, attendance, and the levels of CO2 in the classroom. Air quality can play a role in your feelings and cognitive abilities — and in the classroom environment, mental sharpness is essential for children. When the air is properly filtrated, test scores and student performance increase.
In this episode of Watching Paint Dry, Greg Owens talks with Roger Silveira, Director of Facilities Maintenance and Operations at East Side Union High School District and Founder of We Need Fresh Air, about the importance of recirculation systems inside the classroom. Roger discusses funding the filtration systems, the correlation between CO2 levels and the student environment, and techniques to promote the education of air purification systems.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- McCarthy Painting Contact No.: 415-383-2640
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- Roger Silveira on LinkedIn
- We Need Fresh Air
- Collaborative for High Performance Schools
- “Carbon Dioxide: The Invisible Indoor Air Pollutant in California’s Classrooms,” reported by the UC Davis Energy and Efficiency Institute
- UC Davis
- ASHRAE
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, where we serve commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay area.
We’ve been in business since 1969 and served companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie & Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:10
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we feature today’s top leaders, industry experts and more to discuss issues affecting facility managers and property owners. Now let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:29
Hello, everyone, this is Greg Owens with the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we have been interviewing business owners, facilities, managers, property owners, construction companies, and all the services that support this entire industry. This podcast is sponsored by my company McCarthy Painting, we do painting throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. We do all kinds of projects, both interior, exterior, residential and commercial. We are doing a bunch of work in the city right now for different high tech companies. It’s nice to see things are turning around, and there’s a lot more activity going on. And it feels really good to be be back in the flow of things. And Spring is here. With me right now is Roger Silveira, that I get that right? Yes, this summer, Andras of our he’s the Director of Facilities Maintenance and Operations for East Side Union High School. But he’s also very passionate about this subject of high co2 levels in classrooms and why we need fresh air. And so welcome to the podcast today. Roger.
Roger Silveira 1:46
Thank you for having me on. The pleasure. Yeah. And
Greg Owens 1:48
tell me a little bit like are you so East Side High School, your you guys are on spring break right now? Are you in the middle of class? Still,
Roger Silveira 1:56
I know, spring break will start in a couple of weeks, the second week of April will be on spring break. Right now. We’ve been open since August. We haven’t missed a day. Even through Romney Cron. Through the peak, we managed pretty well. A lot of it has to do with the ventilation and work that we do with all revolving around co2 and monitoring air quality.
Greg Owens 2:17
Wow. That’s, that’s impressive. Because I mean, most companies that we do work for closed down because of Omicron. I mean, almost everything closed down did seem right. Well, that’s really right. That’s really cool. And how are you how you’ve been doing in this whole time.
Roger Silveira 2:30
I’ve been personally I’ve been really busy. I mean, school, our buildings didn’t cease to operate. Even though there’s no occupants, you still have to manage the buildings. You know, there’s there’s still power and water and painting and roofing and projects that needed to happen. So even though kids were in classroom, the maintenance didn’t go away. The grass still grows. So we still have to maintain everything. They still come and pick up the trash, you know, lesser amounts. So operations still exist, you know, went on, even though COVID was was here, and we shut down a quite a bit for the first year. But operationally, we still were here in full force. My entire crew was working.
Greg Owens 3:06
Yeah, that’s yeah, I mean, people don’t realize that, but the weeds still definitely grow on buildings, and things deteriorate still, even though they’re not being used. Yeah.
Roger Silveira 3:16
I mean, we’d like to give irrigation systems going, making sure that even even in Terry, you got to keep the poet’s blushing, you got to keep all the infrastructure going. It doesn’t like to sit idle.
Greg Owens 3:26
Right. Right. It has so true. It’s so true. And what is so you’re the first school district facilities manager I’ve had on the podcast, what are they and you’ve worked for other companies and things like that? What are the unique challenges, I can only imagine when I was a high school student briefly, I ended up dropping out of high school. But I can only imagine, like all the things that you have to do that’s and consider can compared to sort of a high tech company or something like that, that’s out there. And you’ve done both kinds of jobs. So what do you see as the primary sort of differences there?
Roger Silveira 4:02
You know, of course, you know, you’re gonna run kids. And so you have to be a lot more sensitive, their needs, their schedules, you know, you can’t disrupt the classroom, when you want to. Everything has to be scheduled differently. People have to be fingerprinted, managed. We want to keep our kids safe. So there are some challenges. Of course, with public procurement. There’s a lot of bureaucracy around public work. A lot of our projects are preventing wage things cost significantly more, sometimes two to three times more in the public sector than I did I paid for in a private sector. And you know, I’ve been in the building trades and facilities for you know, 30 years now. And I’ve worked high tech, I’ve worked, you know, even track homes in the previous life. I’ve done quite a quite a few different areas of construction. And one of the most challenging is public works, you know, contracts take a long time to get Board approval. You have to go at low bid It makes it difficult to choose a good contractor sometimes is very unique compared to my experiences in the private sector.
Greg Owens 5:07
Yeah, that’s so true, what you it’s, we’ve done work for governments and cities and things like that and schools. And it is such a longer process, right. And there’s so much more hand holding on our part as the contractor, and then all of you doing your due diligence to make sure that you’re getting all the same bids are all lining up the same way and then having to choose that lowest bid.
Roger Silveira 5:30
Yeah, there are some provisions that allow us to select but very little, we’re required to mostly take low bid. And it doesn’t always produce the best product. But that’s what what the state requirements are. And as a public entity, you have to Blyde by whatever the state requirements we have the it makes it more challenging. But there are creative ways to run projects, like for example, pre pandemic, when I really got heavy into air quality in schools and co2. There was no funding available for air quality, not like COVID today where there’s a lot of money for air quality and filtering products and different masks and shields, and you know, all the different things. Four years ago, when I got started trying to improve co2 levels and classrooms and air quality, there was no funding. So I took energy dollars, there was no shortage of energy money. And so we looked at how do we leverage energy dollars to look at air quality. And so we bought products that saved energy, but had positive aerial results. And I give an example. So we started installing co2 monitors four years ago before COVID, because our energy saving device, and they graph co2 level. So we took the information from the graphing of the devices and use it to analyze the air quality. And so the way they save energy is they only run the fan when co2 levels get high. So it recognizes that the room has occupants in it based on co2 levels. So it knows there’s people in space, then it’ll run the ventilation. And so it saves energy by turning it off. And there’s nobody in this space dad. So it’s an
Greg Owens 7:05
it’s a I was wondering where you’re going with that, right? It makes so much sense. As soon as you say it, it’s like, oh, yeah, you don’t want the you want you want it to run when there’s people in there creating co2. And then when there’s no people in there, there’s no reason to run it too much. Maybe it’s still months, maybe it circulates a little bit, but every once in a while, but it doesn’t need to be at the same level at all. Right? And if it’s monitoring, because because your environment, like all busy, all buildings, environments are changing throughout the day, co2 levels, right, like they’re peaking at a certain time and then dropping off depending on the usage. Correct? Correct.
Roger Silveira 7:41
Yeah, there’s been unloading classrooms are very unique as compared to normal office buildings. So your typical classrooms, 1000 square feet, and we’ve put 30 kids in there plus a teacher, typically, typically, then you go up to 30 to 34, depending on the space. And Elementary is a little bit less, but you have 1000 square feet with 30 occupants, roughly in that little space for long periods of time. And so without good ventilation that the co2 levels build up really high and do too and stuff is a problem. But then when COVID came around, co2 monitoring was an indicator of how much COVID is floating in space, the more co2 The more breaths there are in the space floating around, right. So we use that data to actually keep our schools open. And so during the peak of the pandemic, we had testing centers throughout our schools, you know, the schools are closed. So we’re using some of our spaces for testing centers, and the county reached out said, Hey, can we use some of your spaces? We said, Sure, because it helps with the public, by all means, use our spaces. So we put in this was
Greg Owens 8:39
this was COVID, Tet, this was COVID testing in the school, since you have class. Yeah, buildings. You have a you have a public building, and they’re like, hey, we need places to do this. Right. We need to place our parking lot is people can drive up, get out, get their tests go move on, right. Yeah,
Roger Silveira 8:55
exactly. Exactly. So people are coming in the public general public is coming into our spaces and testing. Yeah, and this is all run by the County, the county, county health department, but we just provided the space. So we of course, we put in monitoring and all this basis due to monitoring, we had the doors open. And then we had roughly in some space 1000 People they come through in the year long testing were closed. We didn’t have a single case traced back to anyone of our space, which is pretty amazing that we kept the ventilation going, we kept the filters going. And we knew we’re providing enough fresh air to these spaces that we can keep people safe.
Greg Owens 9:28
Wow. That’s that’s that’s such needed data out there. Right. Like they keep saying we need to follow the science right. And here’s some, you know, here’s some data that they should be definitely looking at and and moving forward right for everybody.
Roger Silveira 9:42
Yeah, I got really into air quality in schools about going on five years now. I was triaging buildings, where teachers are complaining from being having symptoms of health symptoms where they’re fatigued, tired, headaches, there’s odors, I was triaging a few buildings. Is that
Greg Owens 9:58
how it started for you? You were Getting this sort of information from teachers that were saying, Hey Mike, can we do something about like more air or something, I keep getting headaches like, I don’t feel well when I’m at school is that odor?
Roger Silveira 10:10
Yeah, odors was a big one. Fatigue was another one headache, drinking six cups of coffee a day. And so you start to triage buildings. And I used to triage air quality problems prior to East Side. So I knew a little bit about odor issues and ventilation. And so I started doing a lot of research on air quality and co2. And so I read an article from Lawrence Lawrence labs, and it showed how high levels of co2 in classrooms are impacting student attendance. So the more co2 in a classroom, the more sick days kids have. And then I found some information on a study from Harvard on influenza. So the better ventilation schools had, the less influenza kids had. Wow. So it’s another virus similar to COVID. So I was doing this research, study this analyzing the research before COVID.
Greg Owens 10:59
Wow, you’re looking around, you’re way ahead of the game here on this. That’s amazing, right? Like you were looking at the science, looking at the data from these really respected sort of, you know, universities, right, and Lawrence Livermore Labs and figuring out that, hey, there is a definite correlation between air quality, and people getting sick.
Roger Silveira 11:20
Yeah, there’s, there’s no shortage, if you want to know I have 1000s of pages, I pulled every white paper and every research paper that that exists that I can source I have. And so I read through all the data, and it made sense that hey, you know, here’s what I’m seeing the field. And it makes sense with the science that I’m reading about by these, these well respected universities that are doing this research. So I kind of tied it together. And then we started okay, how do I mitigate that problem here at East Side? Yeah, I started buying the co2 monitors the demand ventilation, and putting them in every classroom. And so when we opened up school in August, we had every space tested, make sure we had ventilation, we had the better filters installed in all the units. And then we had the monitoring everywhere. In August, and schools open full time. 1000 Kids
Greg Owens 12:07
20,000, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of bodies.
Roger Silveira 12:13
So you know, just to give a little history on these, like, these side, we start with 20,000 kids currently, and a little over 2000 staff. So we’re about 24,000 people that are on our property. Our portfolio is 2.6 million square feet under a roof. We’re all high schools. So they’re a little more complex than Elementary, and junior High’s, we have 6 million gallons of water in pools. You know, it’s the infrastructure wise, we’re a big place. Yeah. 100 acres. That’s, that’s massive. And we’re spread over 20 Miles though, we have a portfolio.
Greg Owens 12:46
And I can only imagine the diversity of of that school, right? Like you have like a very diverse cultures coming through the school on a daily basis and the amount of people I mean, just just it’s just mind boggling.
Roger Silveira 12:58
Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, of a 16 registered with the call layers schools of the of the 16. Tanner are considered disadvantaged though 10 are in poorer neighborhoods, while six aren’t considered average neighborhoods. Mm hmm. But we have a wide variety of different, you know, students and backgrounds and cultures, and partly because we span 20 miles, we get a little bit of everybody. Yeah,
Greg Owens 13:20
yeah, that. Wow, that’s so that’s lots of things to consider there. And so, before COVID, you were saying it was much more difficult, and I loved how you like, were able to figure out how to get budget money for, you know, for clean air through saving savings of energy. Right. And, and So walk me through like a little bit of like, now, how that look. I mean, this must be people must be calling you all the time and asking more questions about this. And you’re, you know, you’re a subject matter expert in this area. So what’s now how is it? And is it easier? Is it harder? Or is it a lot of bureaucracy to
Roger Silveira 13:57
go through? Especially gotten easier, because I was I was part of a committee that we created funding a funding source, we lobbied with lobbyists at the Capitol. We got $600 million for ventilation in schools through a program called Aba 41 to two hours and better than that part of the study and work that I do, I was able to introduce that into the bill with a lot of help from other smart people. UC Davis was was on that panel. He said we have 100 million 600 million. Yeah. Wow. And that the net 600 million pays for assessing so the assessment so that they look through your systems and make sure that they’re providing fresh air, it provides the better filters, so you get free filters for schools, and then you get the free co2 monitoring in every classroom. They just have to apply for the grant. So it’s a lot easier than when I was doing it because I was looking for ways to fund it when there was no state money. And so you know, there was a lot of there was programs and state money and even through the utilities or programs with utilities to help pay for energy saving. You just have to be very selective with the devices you buy to save energy and how they use use those same devices to improve air quality. And that’s how we did it at the beginning.
Greg Owens 15:03
And then so and then what types of filters are is? Are they HEPA filters? Or are they something different,
Roger Silveira 15:09
so we’re using a MERV 13, as a MERV 13 is about the highest you can put in most of your equipment without having huge pressure drops. So you have to be careful with what you put in. But number 13. And this is all research from UC Davis, UC Davis that we have, we have a we do work with them quite a bit. And so a MERV 13 captures 90% of everything floating in the air. So it’s not 100% it’s 90%. So even though COVID virus itself is really tiny, and it can get through a MERV 13, but the viruses have needs a carrier, it needs a dust bunny or carrier stumping to move it around the air, an aerosol and he’s dumping, Mercury will capture 90% of whatever’s floating the air does, they’re not 100%. But they’re very effective at lowering that number down. And so you you do add the 90% filtering with purging. And so ventilation is just basically purging, removing fresh air and purging stale air out. That’s all ventilation is really Yeah. And so you get,
Greg Owens 16:05
it’s not recycling the air, like you have that button in your car where you can hit the button that says recycle air, it recycles a percentage of it. Yeah, that’s right, because you’re trying to equalize the pressure to
Roger Silveira 16:17
whatever was gonna have to go back out. Right, right, you know,
Greg Owens 16:21
but you’re also but also like, what my understanding of COVID Not much understanding of it, but that it, you know, they even say this, like you need to be six feet apart, and that kind of stuff that it doesn’t have a very long life outside of a host. Right? It takes you know, it’s like traveling through the air for a little while, it’s not gonna necessarily like, well, you want to travel through the ductwork, for example, and right and expect your neighbor. Um, but
Roger Silveira 16:45
if you’re in a room, like kids are in there, even at six feet apart, and you fill this room up with 30 kids, which you can’t and six feet apart, but without the bar and you putting in 30, eventually it starts to accumulate in that space that you’re in. So by filtering and purging, you’re moving that air. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t stick around long enough for you to inhale it. Because it can float around for some time, even though it dies off fairly quickly. But it does. It does float around the room and the laser.
Greg Owens 17:15
And you’re not saying like, once with 25,000 people or 24,000 people moving through the school, it had to be like on a daily basis, somebody was getting COVID. But then there was no outbreaks at the school that necessarily close the school down. Which that’s that’s phenomenal, right? Because there are still people like testing positive, they went on a trip, they came back, they don’t feel well, they don’t go to school, they test positive and in school gets notified, hey, this kid was sick. So it’s probably I mean, without many I can only imagine every single day.
Roger Silveira 17:45
Yeah, so we have a dashboard on our website. And you can see what our daily numbers are because we have to report them. Every time somebody calls in says, Hey, I was tested positive they do they get put in quarantine whatnot, we have a procedure for every time somebody tested positive. But if you look at our numbers from August, on a month to month basis, we’re about a half a percent reporting positive of the district court per month. And so we had during Omicron, we’re peaked in January, it shot up to almost 5%, roughly 5% was the peak of what we saw. But from August, even right now, right now it’s about three tenths of three tenths of 1%. Right now, so our numbers are really low right now. Yeah, but we average half a percent throughout most of the year, the school year from August till today. And then only during the peak of Omicron. In late January, do we see a spike up to 5%? Which makes
Greg Owens 18:34
sense because it was like right after Christmas. I mean, all the families were together, there’s all the cold, wet outside, we’re not really outside enjoying, you know, and you’re being around family.
Roger Silveira 18:46
Bonding, you know, people forget residential homes don’t have the ventilation system like commercial buildings, they’re not the requirements to move air and filter air like we have in commercial buildings. And so you know, at home, once somebody gets it brings it home, the whole family gets there on a confined space.
Greg Owens 19:02
Is there is there something people can do a better job with their home ventilation? And what would you recommend? If so,
Roger Silveira 19:09
um, if they can get a MERV 13 for their home, I would recommend putting one in if they can get one to fit in, there are all kinds of really neat, you can buy a box ban and strap into the back of it. If someone’s sick,
Greg Owens 19:21
I’ve done that a lot. Because you know, in construction, it’s a great quick filtering device.
Roger Silveira 19:27
Yeah, there’s actually one that they actually the health department recommends, you type four filters together with tape, you make a box with taping, put the box then in front of it. And they’re very effective if you have somebody that’s sick and you just want to provide some temporary filtering really cheap is
Greg Owens 19:43
for 20 by 20 inch, yet regular normal filters and you’ll get better. Yeah, yeah. And then so then you get it like four of those taped together to a box so that you get some airflow through that on one of those box fans. And then and then which side you put the front excited they put the filters on. Would it be the you wanted on the intake side? Intake side? Right? That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. And that’s a quick or fast and dirty sort of, well clean to clean your room, right? Like they clean out the air if you have somebody sick in your house or something like that, or if you’re a homeowner, he was gonna say, awesome. Yeah. Also with the smoke, like we, you know, we have this challenge that we have this fire season, that’s way more extended than it’s ever been. And this technology and this sort of thought process around co2 levels and clean air is gonna be helpful in that in that situation.
Roger Silveira 20:38
Yeah, cuz I actually got the the County Office of Education that controls all school districts across the county, they call me during the fire last year, go, Hey, we, we need to do a webinar, because how are we going to triage the fires and COVID all at the same time, because we’re told to ventilate. But now there’s fire and we want to bring all the smoke into the classroom? And how do we triage all that. So we put together a plan, I got a little help from UC Davis, we kind of put together a webinar on how to how to deal with the smoke, how to close your windows, when they’re in, watch the pen, there are numbers that you can get there after you can get to tell you how bad the outside is. And so you know, really watching it, watching those outside numbers. Again, make sure you have the MERV 13 filters, and then when in 95, inside if you’re exposed a lot of smoke. And so there were ways that we can help with the smoke temporarily. Because the fires don’t last more than a few days, but they’re around so we can over the plan, you know, mask Michigan, right filters, close your doors and windows, right? Keep the minimal amount of refresher coming in. But don’t don’t over ventilate either.
Greg Owens 21:40
Did you see when during the peak of the fire season, did the classroom co2 levels change with you with your monitoring? Or is it not affect that as much because you’re closing windows and all of that.
Roger Silveira 21:51
So I set all ours up a little different than most. So our monitors actually control the ventilation. So whatever number I tell it, the vent that is going to control. So during the pandemic standard, for example, ASHRAE with what sets the standards for ventilation, Mm hmm. American Standard, the American Society of heating ventilation engineers, right. And they set the ventilation requirements. So they recommend keeping rooms that below 1100 parts per million as the safe number. And so we we used to tell our systems, pre COVID Hey, start turning the fans on and getting ventilation when you get the 800 we don’t overshoot? Well, during COVID, I dropped those numbers to 600. And so we want to vent early in the cycle, right? So you
Greg Owens 22:35
see you’re you’re ramping it up, as more students come into the room, as co2 levels go up, you’re like, hey, parts per million of air quality, we want it to start, we want the system to start working harder, or