How toxic is the air at our schools?

President-elect Barack Obama is already having a effect on environmental issues.

From USA TODAY's special report on toxic air and America's schools. “The smokestack effect”

"USA Today used an EPA model to track the path of industrial pollution and mapped the locations of almost 128,000 schools to determine the levels of toxic chemicals outside. The potential problems that emerged where widespread, insidious and largely unaddressed”.

Factories, chemical plants and other industries are the lifeblood of many towns, providing the jobs and the tax base that sustain communities. The industries and the schools nearby often have co-existed for decades. For just as long, residents in cities large and small have tried to accept — or simply ignore — the tradeoffs: air pollution that leads to breathing problems or worse.

To identify locations where dangers appear greatest, USA TODAY used a mathematical model, developed by the EPA, called Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators. It estimates how toxic chemicals are dispersed across the nation and in what quantities.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency promised Wednesday that she would deploy federal regulators to check air quality around schools in response to a USA TODAY investigation that identified hundreds of schools that appeared to be in toxic hot spots.

The nominee, Lisa Jackson, told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that she would "send investigators and samplers out to verify the extent of the problem" and "mobilize" agency efforts within 30 days of her confirmation. Parents, she said, "have a right to know their children are safe when they are in school.

The exposure to toxic chemicals in the air at some schools is so high that students are at risk of suffering a range of ailments, from asthma to cancer".