National Day Golden Week has come and gone and once more we fade to greige; a thick blanket of heavy smog has enveloped Beijing, trapping superstar international soccer players in their hotel rooms, and garnering the usual press.
While the city’s international schools have air quality monitoring processes, effective filtration systems, and state-of-the-art facilities, not so Beijing’s local schools. However this may be set to change; China Daily reports that two Beijing schools have signed up for a pilot program which sees a total of ten monitoring sites administered by the Beijing Health Inspection Institute on their campuses. One of the schools is Fangcaodi International School, (the other school did not want to be identified in the article).
According to Vice-Principal Liu of Fangcaodi, "We installed the air quality monitoring system in early September in the school according to the requirement of the health authorities. There are signal lights on the display so the lights will show different colors, such as green or red, to correspond to different air conditions. It makes it easier for teachers and students to understand and identify the monitoring results."
According to Cai Changjing, a press official at the Beijing Health Inspection Institute, air quality will be monitored both inside and outside the pilot schools. One of the main reasons for this, as stated in the China Daily article, is to determine whether children should exercise indoors or outdoors on polluted days.
Good news for the many international families who send their kids to Fangcaodi.
Read the full article here.
Photo by Jerry Chan
