NSF R2I2: Cultivating School Heat Readiness in the Southwest

The increasing impacts of extreme heat on health are intensified for children. Impacts extend to negative effects at schools, such as lowered physical activity, heat illness, missed class, and impaired learning ability. However, schools lack practical, localized, and effective heat adaptation solutions to fully prevent these negative impacts. The HeatReady Schools Southwest Regional Resilience Innovation Incubator addresses heat-related concerns to enhance school heat resilience in the Southwest U.S., a region where heat poses significant challenges. HeatReady Schools are those that can identify, prepare for, track, and mitigate the negative impacts of heat based on a set of resilient HeatReady recommendations. The project efforts are designed collaboratively with schools in Los Angeles, California, and Tempe, Arizona, to have direct relevance in practice to those who can benefit most including schoolchildren, staff, and faculty. The project will create new school-level solutions for the Southwest region and other heat-prone regions, expand heat illness prevention and response training across all HeatReady Schools, and promote greater awareness and action around solutions that lower heat illness issues by promoting safe activities to improve learning. The project’s broader impacts lay the groundwork for improving school heat readiness and policies across the southwest. School stakeholders desire more actionable heat protection guidance to support schoolchildren who are vulnerable to extreme heat. However, minimal data and cross-collaboration exist to support comprehensive school heat adaptation efforts, which seldom include on-the-ground experts in planning and decision making (e.g., school nurses, coaches, teachers, and administrators). The HeatReady Schools Southwest Regional Resilience Innovation Incubator brings together researchers and school community members to motivate, clarify, and refine existing knowledge surrounding school heat impacts and adaptation. The project supports heat readiness at schools, with a specific focus on developing new physiological play limits that quantify safe activity levels during outdoor play. Key scientific contributions include: 1) advancing the understanding of how unique school communities can practically adapt to heat extremes; 2) creatively applying a human biophysical model to quantify the impact of various sustainable, outdoor passive cooling strategies and their efficacy in protecting children from heat; and 3) offering a socio-technological solution––the HeatReady Schools program––that integrates inputs from engineering, urban design, education, behavior, biometeorology, and heat-health advances for resilience. The project also contributes to resolving underlying mechanisms that drive heat risk and vulnerability indoors and outdoors in schools and proposes solutions that could interrupt the causal heat exposure pathways, thereby minimizing adverse outcomes. 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.