Guidance and Tools for Schools

Safeguard Against Chemicals in Your School: EPA’s Schools Chemical Cleanout Campaign (SC3)

From school maintenance closets to high school chemistry labs to vocational school classrooms, schools house a variety of chemicals. These chemicals can have many useful applications: they help keep school areas clean, demonstrate chemistry lessons and teach students new mechanical skills. But when these chemicals are mismanaged, they can put students and school staff at risk from spills, fires and other accidental exposures — incidents that may result in lost school days and require millions of dollars to mitigate.

The Schools Chemical Cleanout Campaign (SC3) gives K-12 schools the guidance and tools they need to responsibly manage chemicals, thus reducing the risks and hazards posed by mismanagement. The goals of SC3 are to bring together administrators, teachers, maintenance staff...

 

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Safety in the Undergraduate Classroom

A CHED/CHAS symposium on “Safety in the Undergraduate Classroom” is scheduled for the national American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim in March 2011.    

The symposium description is:  “In 2008 the ACS Committee on Professional Training published the revised Guidelines for Bachelor’s Degree Programs which affirm that undergraduate chemistry programs must include safety education ‘as an integral part of the chemistry curriculum’ and that ‘throughout their studies students must experience safety procedures and processes.’  This symposium will include presentations of how different colleges and universities design and implement safety instruction in chemistry courses, both in individual courses and in curriculum-wide programs.  By sharing successful programs, we can all improve what we do on our home campuses and better educate our students for their future careers as safe scientists.”

Abstracts submission opened on August 23 and will close on November 1.  Abstracts may be submitted at: http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_SUPERARTICLE&node_id=432&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=4a6243b7-7507-41ab-a43d-ab47cee2ab78

Previous similar symposia at the ACS meeting in San Francisco (March 2010) and the BCCE (August 2010) offered many useful ideas about academic safety programs to attendees.

Interim queries may be directed to me.

Thanks. 

Dave

David C. Finster
Professor of Chemistry
University Chemical Hygiene Officer
Department of Chemistry
Wittenberg University
dfinster@wittenberg.edu