Database available by clicking here.

In Monday morning's USA Today, there's information on an extensive investigation concerning the quality of air near schools across the country. The investigation used data collected by USA Today and the Environmental Protection Agency from 2005, which is the most recent data available. USA Today used an EPA model to track the path of industrial pollution and mapped the locations of well over 100,000 schools across the country to determine the levels of toxic chemicals outside.

The paper has ranked schools by percentile, and listed polluters most responsible for toxics outside each school. The special project looks at issues such as why children are vulnerable to toxic chemicals and, using the government's own data and modeling software, points to schools which appear to be in toxic hot spots. The series took eight months to produce and will run through the month. 

An interactive database of nearly 128,000 schools featured online is available by clicking here. It shows how emissions of toxic chemicals may affect the air at schools across the country. It also shows how schools rank in their exposure to cancer-causing and other toxic chemicals. The database is modeled on information reported to the government by 20,000 industrial plants. The series also offers information on how Americans can learn more about the air outside their schools and do something about it.

In Part I of the "The Smokestack Effect," which appears today in the newspaper and online, USA TODAY compares what the model shows to what the State of Ohio found after it monitored the air outside Meredith Hitchens Elementary School in Addyston, a Cincinnati suburb. In 2005, Hitchens was closed after the Ohio EPA found levels of carcinogens 50 times higher than what the state considers acceptable. The chemicals were emitted from a plastics plant across the street from the school. USA TODAY found that the air outside 435 schools nationwide may be even worse than the air was outside Hitchens when it closed. Those schools, identified by the government's own data and model, extended from East Coast to West, in 170 cities across 34 states.

USA TODAY also worked with the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health to take "snapshots" of the air at almost 95 schools in 30 states. The series will continue on Tuesday with a look at what USA TODAY discovered and what experts say needs to be done to help parents and school districts know for certain what's in the air outside schools.

Parents shouldn't be alarmed, but they should be concerned. At places that rank high in the modeling, they should start asking questions about what might be outside their schools, experts say.

The EPA has never done what USA TODAY did, which is use its best gauge of industrial pollution to look at what sort of toxic chemicals might be outside our nation's schools. The modeling isn't definitive. It simply directs you where to look more closely.

Not every school can have a detailed air monitoring system outside, so government models like the one USA TODAY used should give authorities insights into where they need to look more closely.

The purpose of USA TODAY's efforts was to identify schools where further investigation is warranted -- places where regulators might want to look more closely at what kids are breathing outside their schools. Experts USA TODAY interviewed said stunningly little is known about interactions among and between chemicals. What is known is that kids are particularly vulnerable to toxic chemicals. They breathe more air in proportion to their weight than adults do, and because their bodies are still developing, they process toxic chemicals differently. What they're exposed to as kids might not manifest itself until years, even decades later.

The nation's foremost air pollution law, the Clean Air Act, mandates extensive government monitoring for only a handful of chemicals, most notably those responsible for smog. That leaves about 180 other chemicals the act defines as hazardous - air pollutants "that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects" - for which no widespread monitoring is required or done. A report three years ago by the EPA's inspector general highlighted the shortcomings of the agency's monitoring. It concluded that "many high risk areas" for toxic chemicals do not have monitors that could spot the dangers to public health.

The model likely reflects only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the pollution at most of these locations. For instance, it doesn't account for other sources of toxic pollution - such as exhaust from cars and chemicals from hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses, all of which the EPA exempts from emissions reporting their emissions. One EPA assessment says that such unreported sources accounted for as much as 85% of toxic chemicals in the nation's air in 2002.