1. Songs as artifacts,
2. Faith in God enables their forgiveness: how does the belief in God and in Amis ancestor co-exist? (阿美人有祖靈概念嗎?)
3. 遷徙的過程: 從美山，新莊到新竹，從打漁到打零工，這一路轉換對阿嬤個人，她的家庭以及部落代表著什麼?以及這段小歷史如何被鑲嵌在大歷史的脈絡中?
The authors structure their argument around three metrics: student health, student thinking, and student performance. They define these as follows:
Through their review of more than 200 studies, they conclude that there is unambiguous evidence for negative effects of low environmental quality on all three of these metrics. Although it is discussed in less detail, they also reference studies that provide evidence for the improvement of these three metrics when issues with school infrastructure are addressed.
"Millions of K–12 students in America spend several hours a day learning in schools that are more than 50 years old and in need of extensive repair and where children may be exposed to mold, poor ventilation, uncomfortable temperatures, inadequate lighting, and overcrowded, excessively noisy conditions."
Emphasizes the scale of the issue--this is not a Philadelphia or Santa Ana or Azusa problem, it is a national issue for all public schools. Also emphasizes the breadth of the issues--there are so many different forms of environmental hazards in schools.
"We recognize that beyond the four walls of the school building there are many environmental and social contexts that can adversely affect students’ well-being and undermine their academic potential. Inequities persist in the distribution of the social determinants of health, and students bring these influence with them every day when they walk through the doors of their school building."
Environmental injustice can't be an either/or issue of hazards inside or outside schools, it needs to be a both/and issue where hazards in schools are being addressed in conjunction with hazards outside of schools.
"The chronic impacts of a poor school environment often do not get the same type of attention as cases like these, because the links between building quality and health are subtler and less overt."
"These" is referring to a list of dramatic incidents where students were suddenly exposed to some kind of environmental hazard. This quote captures one of the biggest challenges of environmental justice work--in the many, many cases where it is not visible, it is hard to mobilize support, attention, and emotion because the links aren't flashy. This connects to ideas about slow disasters in Anthro 25A.
"School facilities represent the second largest sector of U.S. public infrastructure spending after highways, and yet no comprehensive national data source exists on K–12 public school infrastructure. Even at the state level, school facilities information is often scant. The death of official data and standards for our nation’s public school infrastructure has left communities and states working largely on their own to plan for and provide high-quality facilities. According to the Healthy Schools Network (2015), the U.S. Department of Education has never had any in-house staff with expertise in school-facility management or child environmental health. Moreover, there is no federal regulatory agency with the authority to intervene in schools to address known environmental health hazards; Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention health hazard evaluations and guidance are designed to protect the health of adult employees, such as school teachers and staff, but no agency has the overarching responsibility to ensure that children’s health is safeguarded at school. This must change. A National School Infrastucture Assessment, and National Director of School Infrastructure, are needed."
This quote does a number of things. It draws attention to the critical lack of data, especially publicly-available data, on school facilities. Without this data, it is nearly impossible to know the scope of the problem, prioritize actions across and within districts, or make connections between districts dealing with similar issues. Collaboration will be critical to our response to the challenges presented by environmental hazards in order to make sure we are not duplicating efforts in different locations. It also draws attention to the fact that no government agency is directly responsible for the health of children in school buildings and proposes the creation of a government agency to solve this problem. This is an interesting solution and is one I have not seen proposed elsewhere.