This story by Liz Sauchelli was first published in the Valley News on May 26.
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Planning to demolish up to 60% of Hartford High School and Hartford Area Career and Technical Center is on hold while the school district further investigates the presence of toxic building materials and develops a strategy for how the contamination might be removed.
The decision comes after school and state Department of Conservation officials met earlier this month to discuss next steps.
“The plan we have to date has not changed a whole lot,” Hartford facilities director Jonathan Garthwaite said during a School Board meeting last Wednesday. “The timeline has changed a little.”
There are no plans to relocate students to other areas of the school for the 2025-26 school year. “We’re not going to move athletic programs out of the gym in September,” he told the board.
Previously, school officials had said that they’d like to remove polychlorinated biphenyls — chemicals more commonly referred to as PCBs that were added to construction materials from the 1930s until they were banned by the federal government in 1979 — “as quickly as possible.”
Exposure to high levels of PCBs can cause cancer, as well as affect the body’s immune, reproductive, neurological and endocrine systems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The state requires school districts to work with an environmental consultant in developing an “Evaluation of Corrective Action Alternatives,” known as an ECAA.
The document spells out and ranks options for dealing with PCB contamination. The options will likely include doing nothing, mitigation, which involves removing some PCBs and encapsulating others, or demolishing structures with PCB contamination, according to the state.
An important component of the action alternatives plan is “the degree of community acceptance for the remedy and overall costs of the work,” Kassandra Kimmey, a Department of Environmental Conservation project manager who is overseeing Hartford’s PCB response at the state level, wrote in an email to the Valley News.
After the action alternatives plan is completed, the school district is encouraged to hold a public meeting to discuss its findings before moving onto creating a “Corrective Action Plan,” Kimmey said. That plan includes the method selected to deal with PCB contamination and its cost.
“Until a cleanup option has been chosen and a (Corrective Action Plan) is written and approved, remediation work may not begin,” Kimmey wrote in a letter to Hartford Superintendent Caty Sutton.
The ECAA requirement cannot be met in time for the district to begin remediation work this summer, Garthwaite said in a recording of last Wednesday’s School Board meeting.
“At the same time, we’re not committing to a financial obligation that we cannot meet until we understand the entirety of that financial obligation and what our funding options are,” he said later in the meeting.
In 2021, Vermont lawmakers passed Act 74, which requires educational facilities built prior to 1980 to be tested for PCB air quality contamination. Under the law, if PCB levels are found to be above state-approved levels, school districts are required to address it even if state funding is not available.
In the upcoming fiscal year state budget, which begins July 1, $9.5 million has been allocated in the Environmental Contingency Fund for PCB “testing and remediation in schools.” Gov. Phil Scott signed the budget bill last Thursday.
State officials have previously said that the money will be split between six schools deemed priorities by the state, a list which includes Hartford, and that the funding will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
“I can’t guarantee that we will have enough funding to conduct all the work outlined in the (Contamination Action Plan) and we may need to prioritize certain portions of your school or conduct a phased cleanup,” Kimmey wrote in her letter to Sutton, the Hartford superintendent, before the state budget passed.
The meeting with the state doesn’t change Hartford’s plans, Garthwaite said. The school board “has created a mandate that we deal with this problem completely … and at the end of this process we do not have toxins in the walls,” he said in a phone interview.
Garthwaite acknowledged the state “could possibly come to a conclusion that is less expensive or less permanent that would be acceptable to meet their mandate in good faith, but would not be acceptable to the district.”
When asked why Hartford is taking a more aggressive approach than the state has mandated, Garthwaite pointed to a PCB informational page posted on the school district’s website: “Previous experience has proven that, while addressing air quality is critical to mitigating immediate health hazards, it does not address in any meaningful way the long-term risk associated with unabated contamination,” according to a statement.
It called PCBs “inherently unstable,” meaning that air contamination levels can increase and decrease based on heat, humidity and how buildings are used, and require that air quality be monitored regularly.
“Unaddressed material contamination represents significant financial and operation liability that will increase over time,” the website said.
The board authorized district officials to test materials — including paint, caulk and adhesives — that are in areas of the school that tested negative for PCB air quality contamination, Garthwaite said. The district is seeking proposals for testing.
The additional testing will take place in parts of buildings that were built around the same time as spaces in the technical center and high school that have exceeded PCB safety levels set by the state.
Last August, Hartford officials relocated the technical center’s culinary arts program because PCB contamination exceeded the state’s “immediate action level,” which the state deems as unsafe for students to be in the space.
Other areas of the building, including the gym, cafeteria and auditorium, met the state’s “school action level.” Students are allowed in the space for a limited amount of time and regular air quality testing must be done to check on whether PCB levels have increase.
“… Where we stand right now is the testing program proceeds as planned,” Garthwaite said during last Wednesday’s meeting. “… That’s something the board decided to do in the best interest of the school and the community, to know the total extent of this problem or to rule it out once and for all.”
Since planned testing exceeds requirements under Act 74, the state will not reimburse Hartford taxpayers for it, said Patricia Coppolino, senior environmental program manager with the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.
Where PCB concentrations in indoor air are low, Coppolino said, “I think it’s going to be very difficult to find the PCBs in those spaces.”
It costs $12,000 to $129,000 to test a school for PCB contamination, according to January 2025 estimates provided by Coppolino. The lower end of that range includes air testing only, while the higher figure includes both air and material sampling.
To date, the Hartford School District has run up a bill of $145,500 for PCB testing. It has not yet asked the state for reimbursement, Jacob Vezina, the district’s finance director, said in an email. He’s waiting to hear back from the contractor regarding how much of the amount billed out falls under the state-approved scope and how much of the additional testing the district conducted was not approved by the state.
Until the school district understands the scope of the PCB contamination, projects planned at the high school as part of a $21 million bond voters passed in 2024 have also been put on pause.
“I’m not going to put a fire alarm system in a building, in a space that might be demolished in the process of abatement,” Garthwaite said. “We’re not going to spend that money and leave it behind.”
