Chair Schulman on Bronx asthma investment and center coordination

I'm going to switch gears because I'm going to ask you about childhood asthma in the Bronx.

Mayor Mamdani announced a $20 million investment from the MTA Congestion Pricing Mitigation Program to improve childhood asthma outcomes in the Bronx.

The investment will support two major initiatives, including $8.9 million for the Bronx Asthma Program, including the establishment of a new Bronx Asthma Center.

And $11.1 million to expand the asthma case management program in Bronx schools.

The school-based expansion will provide intensive asthma support services, including in school medication administration, self-management, education for students and families, and the addition of up to 15 schools to the program.

While asthma-related emergency department visits among children ages 5 to 8

5 to 18 declined by 38% citywide and 25% in the Bronx between 2009 and 2024.

Rates in parts of the Bronx remain disproportionately high due to longstanding inequities, environmental burdens, and gaps in access to care.

How will the $8.9 million allocated for the Bronx Asthma Program and Bronx Asthma Center be?

utilized.

Yeah, thank you, Chair, for this question.

You know, look, as an ER doctor, what I've seen in my own emergency department is that too often asthma presentations are not dictated by biology or genetics.

They're dictated by things like structural racism.

They're dictated by, you know, access or no access to health care, dictated by things like being surrounded by mold or pests.

And so, you know, we're extremely grateful for, you know, the opportunity to say that this new $20 million investment will be actualized in a targeted way in some of the very communities that are most impacted by asthma.

So there are two things that we're doing here with this funding.

Number one, we are increasing our footprint when it comes to our targeted asthma case management program in schools.

The reason why we're doing that is because it's incredibly important to meet people where they're at and meet students where they're at.

They're spending hours and hours and hours a day at school, so let's go there.

The second is it allows us to surge resources to our, what we call community-based asthma interventions.

What this allows us to do is to go literally to the source of the problem in people's homes, do the home remediation work that needs to happen, the pest mitigation, address the problem.

The mold, et cetera.

And so this is not funding a new physical space because we already have a physical space in the Bronx at our Tremont Neighborhood Health Action Center.

This is going a step further in sort of saying that we need to further target our resources and meet people where they are.

Okay, so this is an expansion of the Tremont Center, is that what you said?

So it's, so we have our space.

So it's not a new structure, go ahead.

Yeah, we have our space in the Tremont Neighborhood Health Action Center.

And now we have more resources to deploy for what we call community-based interventions.

Okay.

As well as...

In the schools.