The Cabot School closed its gymnasium late last month after Vermont officials found elevated levels of airborne Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), a toxic chemical used in building materials for several decades prior to 1979 when production was banned.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the gymnasium is closed for use by all students until we can identify and remediate the specific source of the airborne PCBs,” Mark Tucker, the district’s superintendent, wrote in an Aug. 23 newsletter to community members.
State testing also detected PCBs at Oak Grove School, a Pre-K-6 school in Brattleboro, but not at a level that requires immediate action or evacuation of any space. Those PCBs will eventually need to be remediated as well, state officials say.
The test results are a troubling, if smaller-scale, echo of the predicament at Burlington High School, which was shuttered completely in 2020 after officials detected high PCB levels throughout the building.
After that closure, which forced classes into a retrofitted mall, the state legislature set aside $4.5 million to test Vermont schools for PCBs. Earlier this year, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation launched a major operation to test every school building in the state constructed or renovated prior to 1980.
That schedule prioritized schools deemed more likely to have PCBs. Cabot and Oak Grove were among the first to be tested.
On Thursday, data from those two schools and Cavendish Town Elementary was downloadable from the state’s PCB website. VTDigger asked about that data Thursday afternoon; by Friday morning, it was no longer available.
State officials detected no elevated PCB levels at Cavendish Town Elementary.
The data was posted online by mistake, Patricia Coppolino, a senior environmental program manager at the Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an interview.
The data was supposed to be shared only with school administrators until 10 days after the state could send a formal letter about the results, Coppolino said.
“Holding the data from being public right away allows the school to evaluate what is being shared with them and make decisions about how to address any PCB detections,” she said in an email.
Asked about next steps for Cabot School and Oak Grove, Coppolino said that both schools “need to hire a consultant to conduct additional work to identify the source of PCBs in the school.”
Oak Grove’s principal and superintendent did not immediately respond to calls or emails Friday afternoon.
PCBs are a class of chemicals used in building materials — paint, caulk, insulation and others — during the 20th century. The federal government banned their production in 1979.
The chemicals are classified as “probable human carcinogens” and have been linked to a range of immune, neurological and reproductive health problems, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
In an email, Tucker, the superintendent of the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union, said that state officials gave him a “preliminary, verbal report” about the PCBs in the Cabot School on Aug. 19.
The chemicals were detected in both the gymnasium and the school’s art room, Tucker said, but the levels in the art room were “low enough that it requires no immediate action.”
The presence of the chemicals would have a minimal effect on the school’s operations, he told community members: classrooms, the kitchen and the dining area are safe to use, while P.E. classes were moved outside or elsewhere in the building.
“We hesitate to say, ‘It could have been worse,’ but it could have been worse,” Tucker wrote.
He said that he expects the state will conduct further testing to identify the source of the PCBs in the gym, after which officials can draw up a plan to eliminate them. That could involve replacing caulking or repainting the gym with a specialized type of paint, he said.
Those measures would be much less costly and invasive than in Burlington. This November, Burlington voters will weigh in on a $165 million bond to demolish the city’s old high school, clean up contaminated soil and construct a new one.
This spring, fearing that a repeat of Burlington’s predicament could play out across the state, public school officials asked lawmakers to set aside state money for cleanup and remediation. Lawmakers responded with $22 million earmarked for that very purpose.
But it’s not yet clear exactly how that remediation will take place, according to Tucker.
“We were surprised to learn yesterday that the State doesn’t actually have plans in place for testing and remediation beyond the airborne testing that has been done so far,” he wrote to community members, noting that “there is every reason to believe that many schools in Vermont will face this issue as the airborne testing is still ramping up.”
Coppolino, however, said that “the process has always included plans to work with the school to identify a consultant to conduct mitigation activities.”