On November 10, 2021, the Office of the City Controller released a dashboard displaying asbestos abatement projects in school buildings in the School District of Philadelphia. The dashboard shows the number of asbestos abatement projects at school buildings in the district since 2016. For more information about the dashboard, see this press release from the Office of the Controller and the dashboard's About page.
The presence of asbestos in Philadelphia School District buildings has been a topic of concern in recent years. Lea DiRusso, a teacher who taught in the district for twenty-eight years, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2019, reported the Inquirer in May 2020. The story claims that nine schools closed in the district because of asbestos exposure between the time of DiRusso’s diagnosis and the time of reporting.
In a 2018 investigation, reporters from the Inquirer tested surfaces in Philadelphia schools and found alarming levels of asbestos. At the time, the district claimed that the Inquirer’s testing methods deviated from the industry standard and regulations at the local, state, and federal level.
Teachers at Julia R. Masterman school protested in August of 2021, holding their professional development day outside, due to concerns about asbestos in the building.
As the City Controller’s dashboard demonstrates, the number of asbestos abatement projects since 2016 varies by school. When examining this dashboard, I wondered just how much asbestos was slated to be removed in these projects, as well as whether the amount of asbestos to be abated in each school correlated with the district’s budget allocation to the school or the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school.
All of the data manipulation logic to produce the csv’s underlying these visualizations can be found in this GitHub repository. All visualizations were created with datawrapper.
This visualization depicts the total linear footage of asbestos-containing material mentioned in asbestos removal project descriptions per school from 2016 to present. “Asbestos-containing material” is defined in the dashboard’s about page as “any material or product that contains more than one percent asbestos.” Zoom in to get a closer look.
The size of the circles corresponds to the total linear footage of asbestos-containing material: the larger the circle, the greater the total linear footage of asbestos-containing material mentioned in project descriptions for that school.
The color of the circles corresponds to the district budget allocated per student at the school, according to the 2021-2022 school budget book. Note that the enrollment numbers on which the numbers are based are projections from prior to the 2021-2022 school year. The darker the circle, the more money allocated per student at the school.
The following visualization is the same, except it depicts square footage instead of linear footage. The asbestos removal project descriptions mention both linear footage and square footage of asbestos-containing material, so I aggregated these separately for each school.
In addition to examining the school budgets, I wanted to investigate whether the schools with higher amounts of asbestos documented in abatement project descriptions also had higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students.
I created similar maps. Again, the size of the circles in the following two visualizations corresponds to the total linear and square footage of asbestos-containing material, respectively. However, the color of the circles now indicates the percentage of students who are economically disadvantaged; the darker the circle, the greater the percentage of projected enrolled students in the 2021-2022 school year.
Here is the same information represented in a scatter plot. Each dot is a school.
Finally, I was also interested in visualizing the total amounts of asbestos described in abatement projects for schools opened in different years. The Inquirer reported in their 2018 investigation that asbestos can be found nationwide in schools built before 1980.
There are several important considerations regarding the data used to generate the visualizations above:
- The data in the dashboard from the Office of the Controller reflects asbestos abatement projects from 2016 to present. The data source is notification forms submitted to the Public Health Department as required for asbestos abatement projects. These forms are submitted before a project starts, and the completion date on them is an estimate, not the actual date.
- The enrollment counts used to determine the percentages of students at each school who are economically disadvantaged and the budget allocated per student are based on projected enrollment numbers from the 2021-2022 school budget book.
- As stated on the Office of the Controller’s about page for the dashboard: “The description field for each project reflects the descriptions listed on the notification form and may not sufficiently represent the entirety of asbestos identifications and removal work done.” In these visualizations, the total linear and square footage of asbestos to be removed in these projects comes from these descriptions. Furthermore, the numbers of linear and square footage I present here are automatically extracted from these descriptions using a simple regular expression, then aggregated; please note that parsing mistakes are possible. In addition, “...the dashboard excludes asbestos projects that occur at buildings owned by the School District of Philadelphia that are not listed as schools on the ‘School Information’ page on the School District’s website.”
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