Denver Public Schools equips every classroom with air quality, heat sensors

Denver Public Schools now have the ability to measure or track things like temperature, mold levels, and other air pollutants that can harm students. They're one of the early adopters of this technology and among the first districts in the country with the ability to monitor every classroom.

"It's doing it every second," said Joni Rix, the district's environmental program manager. "So it's a lot more pieces of data and information about the temperature and kind of what's going on than what we had before."

The idea for the sensors originated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and thanks to federal funding, the district now has more than 5,000 of them in every DPS classroom. 

"If rooms are over 87 degrees or start to continue to warm up, they're sent a message out to facility management to know something's going on otherwise," said Rix.

For schools like Asbury, which are still not fully equipped with air conditioning, the temperature monitoring is particularly important. 

Rix added, "Another application for it, too, is we are impacted by wildfires, like last week, right? It was really smoky, right? So, you could look at the outside particulate levels, and then you could look at the inside and make that determination, should kids go out to recess that day?"

The uses for the technology are vast. This is the first year the district is fully equipped with sensors, and they're only just beginning to uncover the ways the technology can help DPS students and staff.  

"We're still kind of in the process of building the dashboards and kind of getting everything online and working and figuring things out," Rix said. "We want our best schools that we can possibly have so that they're not impacting learning."

An additional 4,500 sensors were installed just this past summer. DPS has poured millions of dollars of federal funding into this project, but it's one they believe will have an enormous impact.