BURLINGTON — Teachers and families are questioning why they didn’t hear sooner about the cancer-causing chemicals at Burlington High School.
So are state officials.
In July 2019, the Burlington school district made a discovery that, more than a year later, would shut down Burlington High School: There were PCBs — cancer-causing chemicals — in the building, and they had leached into the soil.
In the months after the discovery, consultants working on renovation plans for the high school found evidence of the toxins throughout the property.
However, the district waited until August 2020 to report the findings to the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation and the state Department of Health, two state officials told VTDigger — a significant delay and, in the case of the soil, a likely violation of state law, which says any release of contaminants in the environment must be reported “immediately” to the Department of Environmental Conservation. Failure to do so can result in major financial penalties.
This month, the district tested air quality across the school campus, which includes a wing for the separate Burlington Technical Center, in search of airborne PCBs. When the results showed stunningly high levels — in one room, more than 400 times the Vermont state health standard of 15 nanograms of PCBs per cubic meter — Superintendent Tom Flanagan announced that the two schools would close for the fall.
“We just did not expect levels like that to come back,” Flanagan told VTDigger. “That’s why it was so abrupt for the community.”
Now, parents and teachers are questioning why air quality was not tested until a week before students were scheduled to start classes, and why they weren’t informed last year about the PCBs.
Though the Burlington school board and consultants have been publicly discussing the contaminants since at least October 2019, the district did little to publicize the potential dangers before this fall.
“If it was known, it wasn’t made known to me, so I could let my members know,” said Dwight Brown, a tech specialist at Burlington High and the chair of AFSCME Local 1343, the union that represents many of the school’s staff.
Two other district employees also told VTDigger that they had not been informed of the contamination before the fall.
The problem is not confined to Burlington High. PCBs and other carcinogens threaten students and educators nationwide. The bungled September reopening at Burlington High is a case study in how PCBs have stubbornly remained untouched in schools across the country — and, teachers say, are part of a pattern of neglected air quality in public schools.
‘Most schools are trying to ignore it’
PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, are a group of artificial chemicals once common in fluorescent lighting and some building materials. Prolonged exposure can cause cancer, nerve damage, and other health complications in children and adults — and, as a consequence, the chemicals have been banned from manufacturing since 1979.
Yet, PCBs continue to plague old buildings. A 2019 Associated Press investigation showed that millions of lighting fixtures in U.S. schools built before 1979 contain PCBs. Many more, like Burlington High, have PCBs in their caulking, the sealant that fills cracks and seams in building walls.
Unlike with toxins such as asbestos or lead, relatively few state or federal laws govern the reporting or removal of PCBs. “Most schools are trying to ignore it,” said Judith Enck, a visiting professor at Bennington College and a former EPA regulator who worked on PCBs. Why? The costs of abatement are high, she said. “There is a real hesitancy to require schools to spend money on this, because it’s an expensive fix.” As a result, schools have resisted sampling, and regulations have remained sparse.
Indeed, had the PCBs in Burlington High been contained inside the building walls, the district would not have been required to report the toxins to the state. Soil sampling in 2019 showed PCBs had slowly leaked into nearby soil — which was also found to be contaminated by PAHs, another carcinogen that’s likely residue from nearby manufacturing plants. That soil contamination constitutes a release of hazardous materials into the environment, which according to state law must be reported, Patricia Coppolino, the environmental program manager at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, told VTDigger.
“As soon as there’s a known release, then it needs to be reported,” she said.
Her department didn’t learn about the contaminants at Burlington High School until last month, she said. Sarah Vose, a toxicologist with the Vermont Department of Health, said her agency learned of the PCBs on Aug. 18.
PCBs in soil not reported for 13 months
Routine soil and building sampling began at Burlington High in March 2019 as part of the design work on the city’s $70 million high school “re-envisioning” plan.
In July 2019, consultants discovered PCBs in soil and in two elevator shafts on the campus, according to documents that VTDigger obtained via a public records request. The documents advised that the findings “should be reported to the Waste Management and Prevention Division” at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, in accordance with the law.
The district did not report those findings, but it did continue sampling for PCBs. According to minutes from a November 2019 oversight meeting, consultants had discovered “actionable” levels of PCBs “well above” standards, and had detected them “throughout the campus.”
In initial conversations with VTDigger, school officials claimed they had first detected PCBs in the soil in July 2020, and reported that finding to the state in August 2020. Marty Spaulding, the district’s director of property services, said only PAHs, a “commonplace” pollutant in the city, had been discovered in early soil testing. (Coppolino wrote to VTDigger that those pollutants, too, were at elevated levels, and should have been reported to the state.)
However, after VTDigger obtained the July 2019 reports of PCBs in the soil, Russ Elek, the district’s communications specialist, said in a statement that “we were told to report the findings.” But the district was unaware that it was required to report the chemicals immediately, Elek said; it planned to do so after developing a more detailed work plan, which is still underway. “We regret the misunderstanding,” he wrote.
“It should be noted that we were transparent and open with our community about these materials, their impact on our project scope and budget, and our desire to have a fully developed plan to address the contaminants,” Elek wrote.
Records of school board meetings — which are open to the public, if poorly attended — show that the contamination had been discussed for nearly a year before the school was shut down.
At most meetings, minutes show, the conversation revolved around the significant costs of cleaning up the contaminants, rather than potential risks for students and staff who were in the building.
Judith Enck, the former EPA regulator, said that, regardless of the particulars of the law, the district had not properly handled the discovery of PCBs on their property.
“They should have done [air quality] testing right away,” she said. “And they should have immediately contacted the state health department, the state environmental agency, and the EPA for help.”
When consultants on the renovation project discovered the chemicals, Flanagan said, they did not advise the district to do air-quality tests. “We were not getting any indication from the consultants to be concerned about that,” the superintendent told VTDigger. It was only when the district brought in a new environmental consulting firm this year that the testing was recommended, and the school was abruptly shuttered.
Exposure over the years
As Burlington teachers and families reckon with the indefinite closure of a school that normally houses nearly a thousand students, questions about the PCBs linger. It is unclear how long the carcinogens were at unsafe levels on the property, nor is it clear what their health impacts may have been.
“We only know what the indoor air levels are based on this recent testing. We don’t know what they would have been a month, a year, 20 years ago,” said Sarah Vose, Vermont state toxicologist. However, she said, given that the PCBs had been in the building for decades, “it’s likely that people that spent time there had some level of exposure to PCBs.”
Teachers and union leaders say the events form part of a greater pattern. Air quality complaints have dogged Burlington High and the district for years. Until now, the complaints centered on ventilation issues and mold. Those grievances date back to the 1990s, and eventually led to a round of air-quality testing at the high school in 2004, after several teachers reported serious heart-related health problems.
But concerns cropped up again four years later, when several teachers at the high school all reported strange rashes that they believed were related to the building. Both the school district and the state health department said at the time they had no hard evidence that there was a connection. Still, some think those complaints were never fully addressed.
“The district is really going to have to buckle down and start paying attention to these buildings,” said Andrew Styles, president of the Burlington Educators’ Association, a union that represents more than 400 preschool, elementary, middle school and high school teachers, specialists, guidance counselors and school psychologists, special education faculty, curriculum coordinators, school nurses and other employees. “There has just been so much deferred maintenance over the years. And there never has really been an adequate response.”
Parent leaders and staff have urged that other schools test for PCBs — in Burlington and around Vermont.
“This is not a Burlington problem,” Clare Wool, chair of the Burlington School Board, told WCAX on Sept. 18. “Our districts are all vulnerable to exactly what Burlington High School is going through.”
Asked if the district plans PCB testing in other schools, Flanagan gave no firm answer.
“Right now, we are focused on figuring out how to support the high school,” he said. “So we’re not there yet.” He noted that only the district’s older buildings — those constructed before 1979 — would be at risk. “We are going to take the safety and health of our staff and communities very seriously, which I think we’ve done in the decisions we’ve made,” he said.
Gov. Phil Scott has hesitated to commit to any state action on the issue. It is “too early to tell” if money will be available for PCB testing in schools, he said at a press conference Sept. 18. “We need to pay attention to this, obviously,” he said — but remediation can be “quite expensive.”
Styles, though, believes testing would answer critical questions for students and teachers. “How many of these buildings have PCBs in them? What other contaminants are there that we’ve not tested for?” he said. “We need to have testing. And those results need to be made public.”
