[S]OUTH BURLINGTON — School officials will begin conducting noise pollution tests soon at a South Burlington elementary school that sits about a half mile from Burlington International Airport runways.
For years, teachers, students and staff at Chamberlin School — with 250 students from kindergarten through 5th grade — have endured jet noise from the nearby airport, said South Burlington Superintendent David Young.
“Our teachers often have to just pause for a few minutes, because it’s just difficult to talk over,” Young said. “This is particularly when the F-16s, or prior to that when the F-4s were flying over. It was kind of known as the ‘Chamberlin pause.’”
Young said he has been asking for years to use money from a Federal Aviation Administration grant program that allows for noise insulation for buildings that are affected by high noise levels.
A 2015 noise contour map identified the Chamberlin School as the only public school that is within the noise contours, estimating jet noise as loud as 65 decibels or higher reaches the school.
However, the process to acquire the money has been moving too slow, Young said, and with new, louder F-35s slated to arrive at the Burlington Airport in 2019, he said he isn’t waiting around for noise conditions to deteriorate.
“I don’t want to wait,” Young said. “We think we can do better.”
The district is spending $15,000 to hire a sound testing firm to evaluate the impact of jet noise on the school. Testing will start in early April, Young said, after which necessary sound installation would be installed over the summer.
How involved the FAA will be in the South Burlington District’s plan is still up in the air, said Nic Longo, director of planning and development at the airport. Longo said he and other airport officials have been talking often with Young, and share his concern about high noise levels at the school.
Longo said he is working on a federal grant application to do similar noise testing but will not be able to use the school district’s findings because of restrictions on what sort of data the government will accept as valid.
“I’m going to try to as much as I can, but right now I’m unaware of anywhere I can use that,” Longo said.
Longo will be sending in a grant application to do their noise testing for about $65,000 to the FAA in a matter of weeks, he said.
“We’re still unsure if it will actually be funded,” Longo said.
The tests would likely be carried out from speakers and testing would only be targeted at rooms in Chamberlin that would be insulated, Longo said. Large, non-academic spaces in the school like the gymnasium or the cafeteria would not be insulated under a future FAA grant, but classrooms, offices and the library would be.
The FAA was reluctant to start work on sound insulation before buying out homes that sit closer to the airport, Longo said. About 200 homes that are within the noise contours have already been bought and demolished over the years.
But through pressure from Young and others, Longo believes the aviation officials are now more willing to look at their grant applications and pleas to insulate Chamberlin. Longo will know if the grant has been accepted by the end of the federal fiscal year, which ends in September.
After years of noise from the F-16, conditions will likely worsen when F-35 fighter jets begin to arrive at the airport next fall. The Air Force says the F-35 would be perceived by the ear as nearly four times louder than the F-16 at 1,000 feet in the air.
Voters in Burlington said no to the F-35 during Town Meeting Day earlier this month, approving a ballot measure that advises the City Council to request the cancellation of a plan to base the fighter jets in the city next year.
The vote marked the latest chapter in a years-long debate over the decision by the Air Force in 2013 to deploy 18 of the jets to the Vermont Air National Guard base.
Airport neighbors and other opponents have argued that the newly developed warplane is too noisy and too risky to station in Vermont’s most densely populated area, while politicians and economic leaders have maintained that the project brings financial benefits to the region.
