Missoula Public Health pursues grants for schools' wildfire and heat resiliency, Seeley-Swan High School on the list

Mike Fowler brought a small temperature sensor with him from Seattle to a presentation he was a part of held at the Foundation Building in Seeley Lake. On that Wednesday, with outside temperatures in the nineties, Fowler said his sensor showed 78 degrees in the Foundation Building.

Fowler is the sustainability integration leader for Mithun, an architectural firm in Seattle. He and other members of his team came to Montana in May to tour five schools to start thinking about potential design upgrades that could help the schools maintain energy efficiency while being resilient toward climate changes, like extreme heat and wildfire smoke. Fowler said he heard reports of some classrooms getting into the upper eighties or low nineties when he visited in May.

"Kids don't perform as well in a situation where it's a hot environment," Fowler said.

Three companies, Mithun included, are working with Missoula Public Health as part of a technical assistance grant, which provides personnel hours for those on the design team. The design team, made up of consultants, engineers and architects, is meant to help Missoula Public Health prepare an additional application to receive up to $20 million from the Environmental Protection Agency's Inflation Reduction Act Community Change grant program.

Three out of the five originally considered schools were chosen as the focus for the EPA grant: Russell Elementary School in Missoula, Frenchtown's kindergarten through fifth grade school and Seeley-Swan High School.

Schools can serve as community hubs, officials said, and there are efforts statewide to support the creation of clean air spaces in centrally located areas.

In January, the state Department of Public Health and Human Services was awarded over $600,000 to improve wildfire smoke messaging and outreach, improve heating and cooling system maintenance and develop a clean shelter recognition program. Six counties, including Missoula County, and two tribal nations were identified by the state to receive "focused support" over three years in these efforts, according to a DPHHS spokesperson.

"We really just want to create good community hubs that people can go to," Kerri Mueller, air quality specialist with Missoula Public Health who applied for the technical assistance grant, said, whether that focus is on having a place for people to find reprieve from heat or to be comfortable during a basketball game.

Both Frenchtown and Seeley Lake tend to score higher than national and state averages as far as exposure to wildfire smoke and extreme heat.

Jake Minden, landscape architect with Mithun, said Missoula County is within the 92nd percentile of national vulnerability for wildfire, the 98th for air quality vulnerability and 91st for extreme heat events.

Mueller said Frenchtown and Seeley Lake tend to have higher concentrations of particulate matter 2.5, or very fine particles in the air that pose the greatest risk to human health, than Missoula.

The designs the technical assistance team are working on focus on filtering air and regulating temperature inside each school. Specifically for Seeley-Swan High School, that focus is on single-pane windows.

Fowler said a really good triple-pane window doesn't let a lot of hot or cold air make its way into a building. Making sure a school is air tight instead of focusing on air conditioning can save a lot of money, Fowler said.

Burley McWilliams, director of facilities and operations for Missoula County Public Schools, said there are a lot of single-pane windows through the district. Before covid-19, he said the district priced replacing single-pane windows with double-pane windows in just a third of Lewis and Clark Elementary School in Missoula and it would have cost $700,000.

"This is a gigantic opportunity for the school district to do some serious upgrades," McWilliams said. "We've had a lot of conversations about windows. A lot of our schools' (windows) are old. They're super, super expensive and they're usually not in the budget unless you run some sort of a bond where you affect taxpayers, and so we try not to do that."

McWilliams said they did pass a bond in 2016 that allowed the district to upgrade heating and cooling systems, but they weren't able to get everything done they hoped, like upgrading insulation and windows.

The EPA grant is due in November and awards are offered on a rolling basis. Once grants are awarded, they have to be spent within three years. Mueller with Missoula Public Health said the goal is that there wouldn't be any cost to a school if a design is chosen and implemented.