# Indoor Air Quality and Healthy Schools Act of 2024

The air you breathe inside buildings—at home, work, school, or daycare—can contain harmful substances like dust, mold, carbon monoxide, and chemicals. This bill creates a nationwide program to identify these indoor air problems and help people fix them, with special focus on schools and childcare facilities where children spend significant time.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will lead the effort by identifying the most common and dangerous indoor air pollutants and publishing guidelines on how to reduce them. Within five years, the EPA must create an official list of priority contaminants—things like particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and radon. For each one, the EPA will publish science-based recommendations for building owners and operators on how to improve ventilation, filtration, and maintenance. These guidelines will be voluntary, not mandatory rules, but they'll give people clear direction on what actually works.

The bill also establishes a certification program so buildings that successfully maintain healthy indoor air can be recognized and labeled as such. This gives building owners an incentive to improve conditions and lets occupants know which buildings are taking air quality seriously. The EPA will provide grants and technical assistance to schools, childcare centers, local governments, and nonprofits to help them assess their indoor air and make improvements. The federal government will cover up to 75 percent of the costs for these projects.

Perhaps most importantly for families with children, the EPA must conduct a national assessment of indoor air quality in schools and childcare facilities within three years, then update it every five years. This will tell us which buildings have problems and which are doing well. The bill also requires federal agencies to coordinate so that when money is spent on school construction or repairs, it supports these indoor air quality improvements rather than working against them.