Meet Premier Youth Ambassador for Radon Reduction (PYA):
Aarya Gowda
The SAISD school district of San Antonio manages over 44,000 students. San Antonio is one of the most divided cities — SAISD sits in an alcove neighboring the downtown, one of eighteen districts in the city.
The difference between these districts is painstakingly obvious. SAISD is forced to manage while being economically disadvantaged, leading to high schools not furnished with adequate supplies and teachers. On contrast, the bordering Alamo Heights district, a region created solely by white flight, has schools that benefit from the plentiful influx of money its residents are able to provide Therefore, they face far less complications than SAISD.
Seeing the disparities that occurred from street to street in my own town was what gave me a passion for health equity. When I learned of the detrimental effects of Radon — and the high chance of contracting cancer attatched to it — my mind immediately went to the kids in my school district.
Out of the forty-four thousand kids in my district, how many of them could be exposed to this deadly toxin? The answer is an unfortunate 1 in 5, posing a serious, but unrecognized health risk. 8,800 of those students could breathe in radon everyday without realizing, with a smaller percent of them contracting a life long ailment from this disease.
Yet testing and mitigating the effects of radon is not as easy for SAISD as it may be for other districts. While the average income of San Antonio sits at 60,000, SAISD sits at 45,500, making it among the poorest districts in the city. The budget other districts might have isn’t provided here, and whatever excess money lies may be concentrated to other matters.
However, no human should be forced to live with a lifelong disease due to the conditions they were born in. Access to a healthy lifestyle shouldn’t be a luck of the draw, a roll of the dice, a probability we can’t control. Which is why with Citizens for Radioactive Radon Reduction (CR3), I hope to work to test and mitigate radon levels in underdeveloped districts, helping more students to be saved from this ravaging toxin. Likewise, I hope to study the link between lung-cancer patients and elevated radon levels in my area, studying if radon levels could be what worsened the already dire effects of cancer. Last but not least, I hope to compare radon-levels between the SAISD district and ones like Alamo Heights, looking for any drastic difference in radon exposure. I hope these findings can be used to convince.
I am so glad to be a part of the mission of CR3, and I hope to be a part of it for many years to come!
However, no human should be forced to live with a lifelong disease due to the conditions they were born in. Access to a healthy lifestyle shouldn’t be a luck of the draw, a roll of the dice, a probability we can’t control. Which is why with CR3, I hope to work to test and mitigate radon levels in underdeveloped districts, helping more students to be saved from this ravaging toxin. Likewise, I hope to study the link between lung-cancer patients and elevated radon levels in my area, studying if radon levels could be what worsened the already dire effects of cancer. Last but not least, I hope to compare radon-levels between the SAISD district and ones like Alamo Heights, looking for any drastic difference in radon exposure. I hope these findings can be used to convince.
I am so glad to be a part of the mission of CR3, and I hope to be a part of it for many years to come!
Aarya Gowda
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