The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has historically not recognized chemical disposal in secondary schools as a priority. Considering that laboratory waste as a whole represents less than 0.1% of all hazardous waste, and secondary schools generate less than 1% of that volume, this makes perfect sense from a regulatory perspective. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that many secondary schools and their local school districts struggle with chemical management. Chemical disposal is not a financial priority, and as a result unused and unneeded chemicals are frequently kept at schools. Often, that storage place is not well planned, chemicals are not secured, and accidents may occur. In addition, the expertise needed to effectively manage chemicals may not be available within the school system. The scope of this problem is extensive—EPA estimates there are at least 33,000 middle and high schools across the country with unnecessary or mismanaged chemicals, potentially affecting 21 million students nationwide. While there are certainly schools that manage chemicals properly, many schools have aging infrastructures, competing priorities, and a lack of resources available to direct towards chemical management.

Chemical safety is a discipline that cuts across all other chemical disciplines and also impacts other laboratory sciences. It is an essential part of chemistry and continues to evolve with the science it supports. This paper provides a short background about ACS’s growing involvement with chemical safety education that stems from support from ACS leadership of passionate efforts of volunteers collaborating across many ACS organizations to develop chemical safety resources. ACS provides many chemical safety resources and programs to assist with nearly every aspect of chemical education in support of integration of safety in chemistry curricula, research, and outreach activities. This paper includes a listing of many chemical safety resources available from the ACS at little or no cost. The table of resources identifies the documents (some are printed), their electronic location on the ACS website, their intended audience, the ACS organization that developed the resource, an annotated description of the resource, and the year the current version was published. A glimpse of ongoing chemical safety products under development by ACS and its volunteers is also provided.

In 1987, the American Chemical Society (ACS) started a program called National Chemistry Day. Celebrated every other year, National Chemistry Day had the goal of reaching the public, particularly elementary and secondary school children, with positive messages about chemistry. In time, National Chemistry Day became National Chemistry Week (NCW), which is now a weeklong annual celebration with 98% of ACS local sections participating, countless hours of community service, and more than 6400 volunteers and 138,000 participants.

To optimize the technical, economic, and social benefits of the chemical enterprise, the practice of chemistry must consider and address best safety practices from concept through research, development, manufacture, use, and disposal of its products. Only such a holistic approach will control individual and public risks associated with resulting technologies to acceptable levels. For this reason, in 2016, the ACS Board of Directors adopted safety as one of the Society's core values. This action established the expectation that the Society and its members will be leaders in this area, particularly in regard to laboratory safety concerns. Living this commitment requires a thoughtful and proactive strategy for the ACS to pursue with its stakeholders. Such a strategy will support a more sustainable chemical enterprise for the benefit of Earth and its people. In order to connect a number of already existing diverse safety engagements and develop a comprehensive strategy, the ACS has sponsored a series of "safety summits". These summits have been bringing together a number of ACS stakeholders along with outside experts and have provided opportunities for the Society-wide conversations about laboratory safety that have led to a number of collaborative safety projects. This report describes the outcome of the latest of these summits, focused on safety communication, held in February, 2020.

This report presents information about the High School Program for the Fall 2010 ACS National Meeting in Boston.