Asthma is the most chronic childhood illness and the top reason kids are missing school.

A group of college students are looking to pass down knowledge about the disease, which now impacts more than 4 million children, to younger kids.

The initiative aims to help keep kids out of the hospital and in classroom.

Asthma affects one of every 13 school-age children across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

“You are talking about absenteeism, because if a child sick, having trouble breathing, nothing else matters,” American Lung Association Director of Advocacy in New York and Vermont Trevor Summerfield said.

It’s why the American Lung Association is visiting schools across the state and country with its Open Airways Program.

Albany College of Pharmacy students joined the cause Thursday, meeting with elementary school students at Giffen Elementary School in Albany to teach them how to recognize the triggers of asthma and control it.

“As any school nurse knows, we do a lot of teaching, but you don’t have the time to really get into the details,” said Liza Kirchgraber, the school nurse at Giffen. 

Kirchgraber says the details are critical for students living with asthma to understand.

“We use some asthma stuff for examples. We have posters and stories about characters who have asthma,” explained Sophia Diaz, a third-grade student at Giffen living with asthma.

Diaz is happy to learn more about the condition and says she feels safer knowing her peers are better aware, too.

“That way we can know what we should do if we need our medication, or if we need to tell an adult,” she said. 

The information is generally well received, which is music to the ears of those involved with the program.

“They need to be happy and not to be so much stressed about this big thing that have called asthma,” said pharmacy student Dancan Oruko. “They need to be free.”