PCB-CONTAMINATED CAULK FOUND in DOZENS of NYC SCHOOLS

Here is a chart that identifies NYC schools where the DOE found window caulk containing more than 50 parts per million (ppm) PCBs. PCBs are highly toxic compounds that were banned years ago but not yet removed from all sources.

PCBs spontaneously enter the air and can be ingested through breathing. They pose particular health and developmental risks to children. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PCBs at levels greater than 50 ppm “present an unreasonable risk of injury to health” and “must be removed.” The windows at many public schools around NYC nevertheless continue to contain caulk that is contaminated with PCBs, sometimes very severely.

What the chart shows are results of some PCB tests that the DOE conducted before doing routine window renovation work in the period from April 2008 to September 2009. The caulk that was tested was slated to be removed and was in fact removed. However, the DOE only tested windows subject to renovation in each school, and it is highly likely that other windows and doors at these schools contain the same contaminated caulk.

PLEASE JOIN THE NYC COALITION FOR PCB-FREE SCHOOLS! We are parents, school employees, and community members concerned about the risks posed by PCBs in schools. We have formed a coalition to urge the DOE to have all NYC schools tested and cleaned up; we also want to ensure that parents have a meaningful voice in the DOE’s decision-making on this issue. All children deserve a PCB-free learning environment. If you know parents at any of the schools, please let them know, and please forward this information widely.

To join us, or if you have questions, please contact New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), the non-profit civil rights organization we are working with. You can reach Staff Attorney Miranda Massie at mmassie@nylpi.org or Community Organizer Gigi Gazón at ggazon@nylpi.org. They can also both be reached at 212/244-4664.

THANK YOU!

Cupcakes or carcinogens: is DOE really interested in protecting student health?

Last week, the members of the Panel for Educational Policy unanimously rubberstamped hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts in about twenty minutes, including two contracts that will give exclusive right to sell snacks and beverages to two commercial companies, effectively banning student bake sales during the school day, under the guise of protecting their health. Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan rep, was away on business and thus the lone voice of sanity on the PEP was sadly absent. Actually, the ban appears to be an attempt to maximize the revenue stream for these two companies, now able to market their commercial products through email ads to students and their families and test new products on students and staff.

Meanwhile, most NYC public schools still fail to provide the state minimum of hours of physical education, nearly one quarter of the schools in the Bronx have no gyms, and school lunches continue to offer many unhealthy items. An oped in the Daily News pointed out that the ban on student bake sales will seriously hamper their ability to raise money to support sports teams, further detracting from the opportunities to promote physical activity in our schools. You can also join a group on Facebook, organized by NYC students to protest the bake sale ban.

Here is an update from Steve Koss, addressing the DOE’s claim to be motivated by an interest in protecting student health:

When I was PTA President at Manhattan Center for Science and Math high school, we parents learned (from an October 30, 2007 FOX NEWS report) that our school building was sitting directly atop a toxic site, a buried, oozing tank of coal tar left over from the days when our site was home to a coal gassification plant (known as an MGP, or manufactured gas plant). This fact was known by school administration and the DOE who purchased the property in the late 1930s but was never conveyed to current or prospective parents.

At the same time that the School Construction Authority (SCA) was doing major, major renovation to our building, including digging a huge, deep trench on the grounds, we parents were learning that highly carcinogenic coal tars had been leaching under the school yard and FDR Drive and beneath the Harlem River riverbed. We further learned that no substantive indoor air quality testing had been done by the DOE or anyone else in the previous four years, and none for over five years during the winter heating season when windows are closed and the heating system creates negative pressure that draws vapors inward or upward into the building from below that would then be trapped inside and allowed to accumulate.

Our PTA Board immediately sent a letter addressed to Chancellor Klein and others expressing our concerns as well as our call for immediate, updated air quality and soil testing. What response did we receive from the DOE regarding our children's wellness? None -- just silence. No reassurances or expressions of concern, no offers to meet with persons who could address or allay our concerns, no offers of assistance in how to proceed or whom to contact, no offers to fund an independent air quality assessment, nothing. When we arranged, entirely on our own, to have Con Edison representatives (they were responsible for the site under a Voluntary Cleanup Agreement with NY State Department of Environmental Conservation) come to our next PTA meeting just two weeks later, some guy from SCA showed up and dozed through the entire meeting without saying a word. It wasn't until we got NY Lawyers for the Public Interest involved that anyone from DOE would even begin speaking with us -- I'm sure it was the threat of bad publicity or a lawsuit that prompted their response, not a concern over students' health being potentially endangered.

We're not talking about cupcakes here; we're talking about cancer-causing coal tars known to have been leaching from a tank buried inside and under our school basement. So when the DOE claims to be concerned about student wellness, I have to take those concerns with some rather large grains of salt.

I'd be curious to know how many parents and/or teachers have expressed such outrage over the horrendous health effects of cupcakes and brownies in their children's schools that the DOE found itself with no recourse but to take swift and decisive action. Apparently, in the DOE mindset, calories are more dangerous than carcinogens to children's health.

I see this bake sale prohibition policy as nothing more than another way for the DOE to take away parent and student initiative and weaken their ability to raise funds over which they can have some modicum of control. No matter how you slice it, this attempt to remove a classic, long-standing school tradition is another step in kneecapping parent/student influence and involvement, hiding behind the veneer of a supposed concern over student "wellness."

---Steve Koss

No more building schools on toxic sites without environmental review!

The decision from the NY State Supreme Court that there should have been a full environmental review before the School Construction Authority starting building a school complex on a contaminated site in Mott Haven is justly deserved – congrats to Dave Palmer and the people at New York Lawyers for Public Interest who worked so hard on this case. As usual, the city’s attorney has an incredibly unconvincing response:

“Ms. Noteboom said it was more practical to come up with a [environmental] plan after a cleanup had started so that the plan “can take into account the actual conditions at the site after the cleanup is done.”

What? It makes no sense to do the environmental assessment afterwards – rather than before. This is yet another instance in which the city has shown absolutely no regard for the health and safety of our kids.

Moreover, by skirting the necessary environmental review, the School Construction Authority may in the end spend more money and more time to try to remediate a toxic site than they would if they found a less contaminated land elsewhere. See this excellent oped from last year by Dave Palmer which makes this very point, among others.

We have noted previously on this blog the apparent determination of this administration to build public schools on toxic sites without properly addressing the risks to our children – and once these schools are built, their refusal to properly remediate the contamination – here, here and here.

The city claims that contaminated brownfields are the only open land available for schools – but clearly, this is not the case. It may indeed be the only land that nobody else wants—and cannot be cleared for the benefit of private developers, which appears to be the city’s highest priority: to serve the interest of developers at the expense of our children.

In the new five year capital plan, released last week, nearly $1 billion of the meager $3.7 billion to be spent on new school construction is being held in abeyance, for “potential site specific/environmental/code costs.”

I have never seen this line before in a capital plan – and it makes one fearful that the SCA is planning to build as many schools as possible in future on toxic sites.

Nolan and Gioia on toxic schools

See today's oped in the Daily News by Assembly member Cathy Nolan and City Council member Eric Gioia, responding to Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott piece last week --- in which Walcott defended the indefensible -- the opposition of this administration to requiring environmental and community review of toxic sites for leased schools. This is how the Nolan/Gioia oped starts:

“Deputy Mayor Walcott's "Be Our Guest" piece last week is a disingenuous public relations ploy to protect mayoral power and avoid accountability at the expense of the health of New York City's schoolchildren and teachers.”

The bill in the Legislature sponsored by Nolan would provide the most necessary basic rights of disclosure and City Council review for the SCA’s plans to lease buildings on contaminated sites:

“As a check and balance on mayoral control, communities must be given notice of plans to lease toxic sites for schools and the Council must be given the opportunity to vote on the appropriateness of a site.”

The administration’s dishonesty on this issue and their lack of concern about the health of our children matches their dishonesty on class size. For more info on this issue, see our previous posting here, about the contaminated Information Technology HS in Long Island City, and the New York Lawyers for Public Interest website here.

Parents & Scientists: Bloomberg Plans for Toxic Schools Inadequate

In a series of articles in the NY Metro, investigative reporter Patrick Arden has explored Mayor Bloomberg's controversial plans to reclaim toxic sites to build schools. As Arden explains, the plans will not result in a complete clean-up. Instead, complex engineering systems will be required to continuously vent toxic fumes out of contaminated soils and away from children and teachers. One problem is that the Mayor's administration refuses to provide any plan for long term monitoring of these systems. In today's article, Arden quotes two Pace University scientists:

Schlesinger and Cervino noted the ventilation system would have a monitor to ensure it was working. They asked if another monitor could be installed to detect levels of specific chemicals being released from the site.

“Even if the controls are working, we still want a monitor in that school,” Cervino said. “We asked, ‘If it’s not about the money, why wouldn’t you do it?’ They said, ‘Because we’re doing everything within the law.’

The local community board has opposed the construction plans.

In the Bronx, parents and community leaders exasperated with the Administration's refusal to provide a monitoring plan for the Mott Haven schools site have filed a lawsuit. See Metro coverage here and Post here. Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott blasted these concerned parents, calling their actions "unconscionable". Oddly enough, we didn't hear a peep from Walcott when the Daily News reported how School Construction Authority bigwigs had diverted school repair funds into a well-appointed lounge for themselves.

More Toxic Schools on the Way

In January, the Mayor secured City Council approval to build four schools on a brownfield site in Mott Haven. Today, Metro reporter Patrick Arden describes the City's latest plan to reclaim a toxic site for a school, this time in the former Queens County Morgue. Here's what people in the neighborhood had to say:

"The site is contaminated,” said Robert Trabold, president of the community group Hillcrest Citizens for Neighborhood Preservation. “Over the years chemicals were dumped on the soil, and it’s in the groundwater. We said, ‘Well, what will parents think?’”

Mr Trabold asks "What will parents think?" but we know that's never a concern with the Administration that will build twice as many new stadium seats as school seats. Queens has the most overcrowded crowded schools in the City. But that simply means Queens parents will face another of the Mayor's false choices: crowded schools or schools on toxic sites. Here's a link to the full article.

Last November, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff's staff issued strenuous denials when the NY Times reported that reclamation of toxic sites for school construction was a major component of the Mayor's sustainability effort. This school-in-a-morgue news doesn't make those denials any more believable. If Mayor Bloomberg can move heaven and earth for big real estate developments, why is it so hard to build schools?