BURLINGTON — It is unlikely that students will return to the Burlington High School campus by January, school officials said Tuesday night, given continued uncertainties brought by the discovery of toxic chemicals on the property.
At a special school board meeting with state officials and the Vermont health commissioner, Superintendent Tom Flanagan announced the district is “moving really aggressively” in its search for a temporary space for the school. It is possible, he said, that students will not be able to return to the current property for more than two years, if health experts do not judge the campus safe for return before full renovations are complete.
Parents stressed the urgency of securing a new building. “We need to find a place where these kids can be in person,” said a BHS parent who called into Tuesday’s meeting. “We need to think on our feet. We need to move forward. My kid is losing time educationally. She’s losing mentally, emotionally, physically.”
Yet even as it looks ahead, the district is reckoning with the revelation that PCBs, cancer-causing toxins, had reached dangerous levels throughout its high school and technical center, which emerged during testing in preparation for renovations at the high school. The schools were forced to go fully online on Sept. 9, when Flanagan announced that the levels of airborne PCBs discovered were high above state health standards.
The man-made chemicals, which were leaching out of building materials at the high school, can cause cancer and other health complications through long-term exposure. Though classified as carcinogens by the EPA, and now banned from manufacturing, there are few state or federal requirements for testing and removing PCBs. As a result, the chemicals linger in the masonry and lighting fixtures of many old public buildings.
At the board meeting, parents and staff raised concerns about the district’s handling of the findings, and called for testing in other Burlington schools. All of the district’s schools, Flanagan confirmed, were built before PCBs were banned from manufacturing — meaning they could also be at risk. So far, though, he has not committed to further testing in other schools.
The district delayed 13 months in reporting the discovery of PCBs to the state, VTDigger reported last week — and did not directly inform parents and staff until the fall.
A new timeline of the discovery of PCBs at the high school, which the district shared in advance of the town hall, confirmed those findings. It also shows that the district was first advised by consultants to conduct air quality testing in April 2020. They began those tests in the first week of September.
Rachel Hooper, a parent of a son who attended Burlington Technical Center — where the highest PCB levels were found — called the meeting an “eleventh-hour attempt at transparency.” Over the last year that the district had known about the PCBs, “no one seemed to be particularly worried about warning the rest of us.”
Alison Segar, another BHS parent, noted that although the district had discussed the toxins in board meetings, Burlington families who are not comfortable in the English language were kept in the dark. “Those meetings have not been accessible to those who don’t speak English as their first language,” she said.
The district has admitted that their failure to report the findings immediately was a “mistake,” but Flanagan maintained Thursday that they had discussed the PCBs “publicly, in many different settings.”
Even if the district had involved the state earlier, school officials would have encountered the same problem: toxic chemicals that have long been present in the building, and are slow and costly to remove. Had the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation known of the PCBs last summer, Trish Coppolino, program manager at the Waste Management and Prevention Division at DEC, said, “probably not a lot” would have changed, fundamentally.
But, she said, “it may have pushed you to do some of the indoor air sampling a little bit sooner” — perhaps allowing the district to get a head start on its search for a new building.
Now, the district is racing to find a space that can fit a thousand students, and 60 classrooms. “We are really working around the clock to get into a new building,” Flanagan said. “That’s sort of our preference right now,” he said, as opposed to a 2021 return to campus. The empty building downtown that was once a Macy’s is being considered as a location, he said, as are other vacant buildings around Burlington.
The odds are slim that the high school and technical center campus will be deemed safe by January — which is the deadline Flanagan has set to return to in-person learning. Consultants on the project, he said, warned that three months was the absolute shortest time frame to complete the testing and remediation necessary for the PCBs, and the work would “likely [take] significantly longer.”
That is because the district still does not know the full extent of the contamination at BHS and BTC. It is possible that the actual levels of PCBs in the air are higher in some buildings than reported, health officials said Tuesday, because the initial measurements were conducted under ideal conditions.
“Because of Covid, the [school] ventilation systems were working at their peak efficiency,” Mark Levine, Vermont state health commissioner, said at the meeting. “And yet, these levels were demonstrated.”
Though September testing showed that airborne PCBs in multiple buildings on campus were at higher levels than the strict Vermont health standards, most levels were below looser federal health guidelines. But in the winter, that could change.
The district’s task, now, is to measure PCB levels during the colder months, when windows are shut and the buildings are heated. That will help inform whether students can expect to be back on campus for their second semester.
Flanagan and school board members called on the state for support. “We are talking about little bits of money here and there to solve a massive problem,” he said. Removing the chemicals from Burlington High could cost millions; testing at Burlington’s other schools could drag the district into a similar predicament.
Yet without testing, the risks to staff and students who spend their days in old buildings remain unknown.
Levine said that the state recognizes this. “The fact that this is a problem in Burlington is not lost on state officials,” he said.
“It’s not something we’re going to create policy on tonight in this meeting,” he said — but still, “there are going to be ongoing, significant deliberations regarding this.”
Burlington, Levine said, was a “test case” for a larger problem: Schools and other public buildings across Vermont could be at risk of PCB contamination. The case of BHS proved that contamination could be significant.
For now, BHS and BTC are moving ahead with online education. BTC classes are already being moved to alternative locations. The high school has started hosting some classes outside. Last week, students attended a physical education class outdoors and practiced archery.
The canceled reopening “pushed us back,” Flanagan said. “It took the wind out of us.” But he said the district wants a real return in the spring: “That is still our goal.”
