Science in the schools
In canvassing Medford for votes, I've stood on the porches of residents ranging from vaccine skeptics to scientists and biotech workers. One resident was a Tufts professor who studied the hereditary basis of autism, which I was interested in because it was loosely related to a project I was involved in in grad school, and another was a man who was so concerned about climate change that he hadn’t mowed his lawn in months (he thought that forest fires permanently removed oxygen from the atmosphere). I enjoyed talking to both of them.
Last week was Nobel Prize week, which I always like because I get to read about three areas of science totally outside my own — this year, the winners were the team behind quantum dots, which are used for the coloration of TVs and LEDs; scientists that used really, really brief flashes of light to study electrons; and the developers of the mRNA vaccines that have been administered nearly a billion times in the US for COVID. I've had a lot of conversations this week, as well, about the Medford Public School system, and, interestingly, the prize most relevant to that is the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded for the discovery of chlorofluorocarbons' destructive effects on ozone.
Chlorofluorocarbons are a chemical used in air conditioners. They’re compressed, and cool air results. I referred in a previous post to the fact that air conditioners in Medford High School are broken. They can't be fixed because they rely on a type of chlorofluorocarbon called R22, which was banned in 2010 by the Environmental Protection Agency because it was contributing to the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. This initiative was part of a wider treaty called the Montreal Protocol, which was adopted by every country on earth, to phase out chlorofluorocarbons.
The Montreal Protocol was actually very successful; the hole in the ozone layer is smaller now and continues to decrease in size. This global success also means that Medford Public Schools has had obsolete air conditioning systems for thirteen years, so replacing the units would require implementing an entirely new system. This would cost about $5 million for the high school alone. This is part of a broader lack of preventative maintenance — the budget of Medford Public Schools that can be applied to maintenance is between $600,000-$700,000 a year, which covers things like painting and routine housekeeping, but it would need to be over a million in order to effectively replace complex machinery as it breaks in the school buildings.
It's hard to say if air conditioning at MHS will be installed — it would be a waste of money if we were to build a new high school, which is a popular demand I hear at the doors. Two new municipal buildings are desperately needed in Medford: a new HQ for the firefighters and a new high school. Medford High School was built in 1970, and building a new one to replace the 53-year-old building would cost at least $300 million (though this number is difficult to estimate exactly due to inflation — it could be much more). 40% of this would be covered by the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), and the rest would need to be covered by a loan, which would require a chunk of our annual budget to pay off over a 20-to-30-year period. (Most other cities have a permanent spot in their annual budget for projects like this.)
All of this is another way of saying that Medford needs to change its mindset: think ahead, get out of the wait-till-it-breaks mentality, and budget appropriately.
