SAI: Strengthening the Built Environment of Schools

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Society expects school infrastructure to be safe and to protect children. Yet, the infrastructure of schools can be vulnerable to acute hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and to chronic hazards such as mold and inadequate ventilation. These hazards can make school infrastructure unsafe and adversely affect children's health, school attendance, learning, and future prosperity. These risks disproportionally affect children in lower-income and minority groups. This SAI research project converges community, engineering, and scientific knowledge to assess vulnerabilities, mitigation strategies, and mechanisms for empowering stakeholders to take action to strengthen school infrastructure and, thus, improve safety. The project focuses on Puerto Rico, but recognizes that schools in many areas deal with similar challenges. This project aims to transform how society addresses school infrastructure safety by studying community co-production of infrastructure knowledge, conducting engineering and policy assessments, and investigating engineering mitigation and policy solutions. To do so, this project centers community knowledge and action by first convening stakeholder groups to determine community perceptions of school vulnerabilities and safety. These community-identified perceptions drive the project’s new locally-driven engineering and scientific analyses, which are used to assess risks to school safety and to propose effective and cost-appropriate mitigation interventions. In parallel, the project is developing recommendations on opportunities for policy interventions aimed at strengthening school infrastructure. These efforts produce assessments of threats to school infrastructure, demonstrate community-specific solutions, and identify new opportunities for school infrastructure safety policies. This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.