BURLINGTON — School officials are sticking with the same message they’ve had for the past year: The district’s former high school is not safe, and Burlington needs a new one.
The doubling down comes after state officials published a memo last week with new recommendations for how to regulate the acceptable level of toxic chemicals in Vermont schools. Those recommendations propose a new threshold to signal that a school building is not safe to learn in, called an “action level,” that is higher than the “screening level” Burlington previously used to influence its policies.
Some parents and taxpayers say the new threshold for contamination makes it unnecessary for Burlington to build a new high school, but school officials maintain that the level of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, found in the old building is high enough to spur construction of a new one.
A VTDigger analysis of data collected in 2020 found that, even with the higher threshold, significant portions of the school would still be contaminated, including at least one room in each of the school’s six major buildings.
Of the 42 rooms officials tested for PCBs at the former Burlington High School, 17 met or exceeded the action level of 100 nanograms of PCBs per cubic meter. The unsafe portion includes all of “Building F,” where many of the school's technical programs are located.
The data included two rooms where PCB levels were 63 and 58 times the level that the recommendations deemed unsafe — the construction trades shop and welding shop, respectively.
Of the rooms tested, 37 of the 42 would have met or exceeded the screening level of 15 nanograms per cubic meter, which Burlington used in its original decision to shutter the school.
In an interview, Superintendent Tom Flanagan said the PCB contamination in the building’s air is still at a concerning level, and a new school is needed to protect students and staff from the cancer-causing chemicals.
“It really does not significantly alter our course or our need, which is a new high school,” Flanagan said of the memo.
In addition to the airborne PCBs that the recommendations focus on, the school would have to clean PCBs that have become embedded in the building, Flanagan said. That process would be so costly, so it’s less expensive to build a new school.
“This is not only about air quality. This is also about building materials,” Flanagan said.
After learning about the PCB contamination last year, Burlington High School transitioned to remote learning and set up shop this year in a renovated department store downtown. Earlier this month, the school board voted to construct a new high school next to the former one on Institute Road with the hope that it will be move-in ready by 2024.
At an unrelated press conference Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Miro Weinberger blasted the state for not informing city officials about the new recommendations ahead of time, calling the memo’s rollout wrong.
“Clearly someone had been working on these changes for months,” Weinberger said, “and there was no engagement with Burlington.”
Weinberger also criticized what he called an overly aggressive impulse by Vermont to regulate environmental contaminants.
“The state promulgates their own standards that are … more than any other state and then the federal government, and we’ve seen the consequences of that now,” Weinberger said. “I think this should be a wake-up call in Montpelier that there needs to be a real evaluation of these policies.”
Federal regulations require PCB levels to be less than 500 nanograms per cubic meter in school buildings.
Mark Levine, state health commissioner, rejected the notion that health officials were not working with Burlington on the PCB issue and said the new recommendations suggest Burlington should stay on its current course.
“I wouldn’t want the thesis to be that what we did all of a sudden should make Burlington change everything they did, and they wasted millions of dollars and caused lots of distress,” Levine said at the governor’s weekly press conference Tuesday, “because that’s actually not an accurate reflection of the process.”
