SPECIAL REPORT
often are they going to need to be replaced? … Again, those are well placed concerns. But if school districts do their homework, they will find out that after the initial purchase, their annual maintenance requirements are basically very, very minimal,” he said, adding that United Safety’s Active Air Purification technology has an annual maintenance requirement of about $75 a year. The system claims to eliminate more than 99 percent of germs, microbes, viruses, bacteria, and volatile organic compounds in the air and on surfaces. “The real key is that we now realize in pupil transportation, that we have another element of safety that was never considered before, and that is the healthy environment on the interior of a school bus,” Hedgecock explained, adding that it’s not just COVID-19. But there are still colds, flus and bacteria concerns. Dan Fillenwarth, president of Lumin-Air, added that the Omicron variant caught a lot of people off guard. He explained that there’s a growing demand to use the federal dollars to navigate the current pandemic as well as protect against future ones. The U.S. Depart- ment of Education announced last month that all $122 billion of the American Rescue Plan Elementary
and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds have been distributed to states, but he noted that as of last month many districts had yet to spend it. “… I think we finally understand that COVID is
similar to the flu in that it is a respiratory virus that spreads mainly through airborne droplets and aero- solized particles carrying virus cells breathed out by infected people and inhaled by others,” Fillenwarth said. “The difference is that COVID is many times more dangerous, more transmissible, and mutates more quickly. We’ve never been able to eradicate the flu, and we likely will never be able to eradicate COVID. While vaccines play a part in the strategy to protect against COVID they will always be playing catch up to the next mutation and are not them- selves a final solution.” He explained that if school bus air quality
levels don’t improve to that of school buildings, many parents might choose another way of transportation. The Lumin-Air system shelf life basically
mirrors the life of the bus, Fillenwarth said. “We retrofit our system on buses with and with- out air-conditioning and treat all of the air that moves through the HVAC system, so we have
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24 School Transportation News • FEBRUARY 2022
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