It’s a typical Monday and you’re sitting in class, struggling to pay attention to the lecture at hand, when the sound of a leaf blower crushes the remains of your concentration. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers should not be used on school grounds. They harm air quality and disrupt classes.

Gunn uses both electric and gasoline-powered leaf blowers on a daily basis. Electric leaf blowers are technically permitted on school grounds, but use of gasoline-powered ones has been banned in residential areas since July 1, 2005. This law should be extended to all parts of Palo Alto, including schools. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers pollute the environment with toxic emissions. On average, a single gasoline-powered leaf blower emits as much pollution in a year as 80 cars do.

Leaf blowers are not only hazardous to the environment, they also generate unnecessarily high noise levels. While normally acceptable ambient noise levels in residential areas are at no more than 60 decibels, leaf blowers generate about 70 to 75 decibels, which results in reduced accuracy of work and increased levels of irritation.

Gasoline-powered leaf blowers may do a great job of getting leaves out of our way, but in doing so, they also stir up mold, allergens and dust particles into the air, worsening allergies and increasing the prevalence of asthma attacks. Sure, having a few loose leaves around may be an inconvenience, but so is dirt, and we’re not about to rip out all of the grass and replace it with asphalt.

Although one way of fixing the problem at hand is to simply let the leaves be, another solution would be to replace the gasoline-powered leaf blowers with virtually noiseless leaf sweepers, which swoop up leaves into a handy collection bag.