New York students face many challenges to achieving academic success, but here’s one you might not be aware of: the air they breathe. A recent NYCLU analysis found that about one-third of New York’s students go to school near a major highway. The vast majority of those students are people of color. And it turns out that the pollution students breathe has a major impact on their success and livelihood.
In this episode, we discuss the problem of highway pollution near schools as well as legislation designed to help stop it with Johanna Miller, Director of the NYCLU’s Education Policy Center, and Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, director of the Education Policy Center’s Environmental Justice Project.
You can tell Gov. Hochul to sign the SIGH Act – which we discuss in this episode – here.
For more on everything we discuss in this episode, visit nyclu.org.
For transcripts and additional information on the episodes, visit nyclu.org/en/rightsthisway.