Attack of the school-killer

Poisonous mold has already forced the closing of three Maine schools. Are more to follow?

By Lance Tapley

Experts say a poisonous mold may be contaminating the air in a number of Maine schools. Few schools have been tested for it. Of those that have, three — in Lincolnville, Farmingdale, and now Portland — have been forced to close permanently within the last 15 months.

The sudden, high-profile closing on August 15 of the 342-pupil, 70-teacher William B. Jack Elementary School in Portland highlights an ethical dilemma faced by some school boards, school superintendents, and state officials.

It turns out that some of them may have been jeopardizing the health of schoolchildren and teachers for decades. In order to save money, officials created an environment that allowed mold to run rampant — by not fixing leaky roofs, by turning off air-circulation systems to save on heating bills, and especially by not building new schools to replace the old ones that were becoming moldier and moldier.

They have the excuse that, until recently, they did not know how badly they were poisoning the air. But now they know about the toxic mold Stachybotrys chartarum, which has thrown three school systems into an expensive turmoil — and some others may soon join them.

The school closings so far could be just “the tip of the iceberg,” says Mary Jo O’Connor, Portland’s school superintendent, who made the decision to close 58-year-old Jack Elementary on

Eastern Promenade, attended by children in kindergarten through fifth grade in the Munjoy Hill area. “Perhaps this is the decade of the mold.”

(Perhaps it is. These closings illustrate a growing national awareness of the range of health hazards caused by mold. On the cover of the August 12 New York Times Magazine, a woman in a respirator and space suit stands above the headline lurking, choking, toxic mold. Lisa Belkin’s story describes how residents afflicted with rashes, memory loss, and bloody coughs have had to flee homes rife with Stachybotrys and other toxic molds, resulting in a flood of litigation and insurance-industry panic.)

In addition to the three Stachybotrys-related closings, a school in Calais shut permanently several years ago because of a combination of air-pollution problems. In recent years, schools in Machias, Lewiston, and the Dover-Foxcroft area have had to close temporarily to address air pollution, according to state officials.

So the big question is: what will school officials throughout the state do now?

HARMFUL: STACHYBOTRYS CHARTARUM: aggravates asthma, causes allergic reactions, and may induce lung bleeding and memory loss.

Will they test? A thorough inspection by an environmental consultant costs thousands of dollars, and Stachybotrys (pronounced “Stack-ee-bot-tras”) is by no mean the only possible air contaminant that tests could reveal.

If they test, what will officials do about polluted schools? In Portland, O’Connor closed the school because she concluded that no scientific evidence indicated any safe exposure level for Stachybotrys.

She was right. The health effects of this mold are the subject of debate. There is a medical dispute over whether it causes such severe ailments as lung bleeding and memory loss. However, there is no question it aggravates asthma, and recently Maine discovered that its residents suffer from the highest incidence of asthma in the country. Stachybotrys and other molds also can cause allergic symptoms such as nasal stuffiness, eye irritation, skin rashes, and wheezing, and 20 percent of the population have allergies. Individuals with weakened immune systems may be more susceptible to infections in mold-ridden environments. Mold substances in the air have been associated with headaches. And indoor air pollution lowers work productivity.

Shouldn’t the association of Stachybotrys with asthma, allergies, and other complaints, as well as its possible connection to graver diseases, offer sufficient cause for school systems to test, and to close schools where it is found contaminating the air? Not everyone thinks decisions will be made on these grounds.

Norman Anderson, a toxicologist at the Augusta office of the American Lung Association of Maine, is one. In 15 Maine schools, he has helped set up “Lung Healthy” teams of staff members to investigate air-pollution problems. Jack Elementary School had such a team. Some superintendents, Anderson suggests, may see the decision to close Jack “as a reason not to participate” in the Lung Healthy program: “The teams may unleash some concerns. When you get into these teams, the concerns have a forum.”

He adds: “If the light is shined on other schools, would we find Stachybotrys in other places? It’s not an uncommon mold. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in many schools. It may have been there for years.”

On the other hand, he muses, “can you end up doing unnecessary testing?” The decision faced by Portland superintendent O’Connor, he says, is “a harbinger of what may be down the road for a lot of schools. It’s an extremely touchy issue.”

Others close to the school indoor-air-quality issue agree.

“People get excited about all this,” says Richard Lewia, physical-plant director of Kennebunk’s six schools for the past 18 years. He is a member of the board of the Maine Indoor Air Quality Council and has taken courses at the Harvard School of Public Health on indoor air pollution. He, too, gets excited about the issue: “I would suspect it’s in every old building,” he says of Stachybotrys. “It’s a big problem.”

Besides getting excited, he gets disgusted. “We’ve been sticking our heads in the sand for almost 60 years by deferring maintenance in the schools to save money,” Lewia says. Deferred maintenance means leaky roofs, windows, and walls; wet insulation, drywall, and ceiling tiles; unclean and damp carpets — all lush conditions for the growth of mold, of which Stachybotrys is only one of many types, albeit one of the most dangerous.

Cities, towns, and the state government also have deferred the building of new schools. Lewia observes: “Every school has a useful life, but we’ve just had to live in them” well past that life’s end. “Plus, some schools were designed wrong” — i.e., for saving money on heating bills rather than for healthy air. And some school administrators, he claims, shut off ventilating-heating machinery at night and even during the day in order to reduce heating bills.

Lewia gets particularly agitated when he considers the needs of the youngest children. Typically, he notes, “when the new high school gets built, the old high school becomes the middle school. Then when the new middle school is built, [the old middle school] becomes an elementary school. A child’s lungs don’t really develop until they’re seven or eight years old, yet we’re giving them the worst old buildings. We’ve got to think again about building that beautiful high school first. The little kids can’t take it.”

But, he admits, “20 years ago no one thought of indoor air quality.”

State Representative Elizabeth Watson, a Democrat from Farmingdale, also doubts that officials will make decisions with only the health of children and teachers in mind. A member of the legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, she had her interest in the air-pollution issue stimulated by the Stachybotrys-caused shutdown of the Farmingdale elementary school in June 2000. Even before that, she had helped the school struggle with radon pollution.

“Schools just don’t want to go there,” she says, of whether school boards will decide to have their schools’ air thoroughly tested. If they were to find Stachybotrys, “they probably would have to close down the school. They’ve had a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.”

School officials may have heard complaints about air quality from teachers and other staff, she says, but dealing with those complaints has been a “tradeoff” with not spending more tax money. In deferring maintenance on the schools, they have acted like homeowners who wonder “how long can we get away with the bucket in the hall.”

The possible debate to come — pitting better children’s health against higher taxes or other uses of tax revenues — could be acrimonious. Will more empty schools litter the Maine landscape as the legislature debates whether to fund healthier air for the state’s students, or to pay for Governor Angus King’s proposed individual laptop computers for middle-school students? Are town and city taxpayers willing to raise property taxes for repairs or new construction for what they may see as a benefit for an asthmatic minority? What if angry parents start suing school districts and officials for negligence? Suits over mold in buildings have become a legal industry in places such as California and Texas.

CLOSED: Portland superintendent of schools decided to shut the Jack Elementary due to dangerous mold.

Flying blind through a cloud of spores

Besides mold, air-quality threats in the schools include radioactive radon from granite bedrock, asbestos in construction materials, school laboratory chemicals, kitchen and lawn pesticides, cleaning solvents, infectious diseases, and dust. But Stachybotrys has become the school-killer.

Is this school-killer a recent, evil, contagious fungus from outer space? No, but in some ways the situation is even worse than that horror-movie scenario. This evil, contagious fungus lurks in inner space — under the floorboards, behind the wall panels, in the ceiling tiles — and it probably invaded many schools long ago. Children and teachers in some schools may have been breathing Stachybotrys chartarum toxins for years.

Air-borne mold spores — and they are everywhere — are too small to see, but when the mold finds a location wet enough in which to grow, it creates the slimy, often musty, greenish-black colonies we’ve all seen — and smelled. Some of these molds produce toxic substances, called “mycotoxins,” in an attempt to kill any organisms that might compete for nutrients. When inhaled or touched, these mycotoxins are what usually make people sick, although exposure to a mold’s spores alone may produce allergic reactions. Though less common than such widespread molds as Cladosporium, Aspergillus, and Penicillium, Stachybotrys is considerably more toxic.

The school air-pollution problem is greatly aggravated when indoor air is not well ventilated, such as in tightly sealed buildings. High humidity also stimulates mold. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that, generally speaking, indoor air pollution is two to five times — and sometimes up to 100 times — greater than outdoor levels. And most people spend 90 percent of their time indoors.

Norman Anderson says the federal General Accounting Office estimates that 30 percent — or 210 of Maine’s approximately 700 public schools — have inferior air quality. These are generally the state’s older schools, but can include schools built in the 1960s and ’70s, especially if they have not been properly maintained.

The skyrocketing rate of asthma, Anderson says, drives the growing national consciousness of the school indoor-air problem. In Maine, 8.9 percent of the general population suffers from asthma, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There is a lot of anxiety” on the issue, says Anderson.

But Maine schools have been flying blind — or flying with blinders — through the indoor-air-pollution cloud.

One day after receiving the report on the discovery of toxic mold at Jack Elementary, O’Connor decided to close the school, declaring: “I am not willing to put kids or staff into a school that isn’t a completely safe environment.” But she admits she has no idea if Stachybotrys has infected the rest of Portland’s schools.

In her judgment, Jack was so old that it was beyond rehabilitation. She was also suspicious of odors from the nearby city sewage-treatment plant that waft toward Jack. And there had been complaints at Jack from the staff of headaches, eye irritation, and breathing problems. The school’s principal, Myrtle Collins, has a respiratory condition and was sensitive to the air-quality issue. This was a major reason Jack was thoroughly tested.

On the day of the closing, O’Connor’s own facilities manager, Hank Dresch, had a different attitude toward Stachybotrys. He told this reporter that with mold, “a lot of the problem is perception. Articles in the papers blow things out of proportion.” He was specifically referring to the New York Times Magazine article, which he termed “yellow journalism.” The significance of the problem, he says, “is going to vary depending on who you speak with.”

His attitude — so different from O’Connor’s — illustrates the difficulty schools face when dealing with this problem. Because there are no safety standards for Stachybotrys, or even agreement on its health threats, people may react to its discovery either by saying the issue is overblown or by demanding the school be shut down. Middle ground may be hard to find.

The Maine Indoor Air Quality Council, a nonprofit research group, notes in a recent report to the legislature that “there is no mechanism for ensuring that a minimal level of environmental quality is achieved and maintained in all school buildings.” The group suggests the establishment of performance standards for schools on air-quality issues, the hiring of more personnel devoted to the issue on the state level, a “preventive approach,” and a “focus on the ventilation system” in schools.

Currently, state help to the schools is minimal. There are only two people in the Bureau of General Services to help schools “perform assessment, interpretation and mitigation services pertaining to indoor air-quality concerns,” according to a publication detailing the Bureau’s “protocol” for responding to a school district’s needs. The document notes that “the Bureau has very limited, available technical staff and a lack of financial assistance to offer public schools.” The agency essentially acts as a go-between with school superintendents and private environmental consultants.

Moreover, building a replacement school is a long, difficult process in Maine. School administrators stress the need for the state government to “free up monies to address this problem,” as O’Connor puts it.

Nora Murray, superintendent of the MSAD 16 Hallowell-Farmingdale school system, is upset that, when her 193-pupil, 1940s-era Hall-Dale Elementary School in Farmingdale was closed permanently last year because Stachybotrys was discovered in the air, a new school for her system was “not put at the head of the line” to receive construction funds by the state Department of Education. The state pays 72 percent of the cost of a school. The typical small elementary school these days costs $5 million.

The Department of Education did not consider the closing an emergency. “They don’t consider it like a tornado or the school burning down,” she notes. In the last round of prioritization by state officials of school-construction needs, a new elementary school for the Hall-Dale district was 28th on the list. Twenty-two schools were funded.

The state did come through, however, with money from its Revolving Renovation Fund for Murray’s district to set up modular classrooms to house the displaced students, a solution that may be in the offing for Jack’s students. Murray says that even finding this temporary solution “took a tremendous amount of time.” She does not envy Mary Jo O’Connor’s plight in Portland: “With the start of school, it’s tough.”

For their part, state officials say that while they understand local frustration, they are doing what they can. In fact, they are proud of the increased funds they have provided in recent years for the construction of new schools and the rehabilitation of old ones.

State Board of Education member Jim Rier, of Machias, is the board’s point man on school construction. Prior to 2000, he says, the state would fund only four or five new schools a year. Funding 22 schools for a two-year period is a vast improvement, he feels.

He also points to the 1998 establishment of the Education Department’s Revolving Renovation Fund, a combination of no-interest loans and grants that has received $70 million through voter-approved bond issues. Another $15 million will be voted on this November. The fund represents a change in the way the state looks at school-facility needs, he says: “We’re not just looking at growth but at the condition of buildings” — including air-quality issues.

Over 500 applications from schools seeking assistance from this fund are pending before the state. This summer, disbursements from the fund are already financing a good deal of construction activity at schools, including a significant amount of roof repair, which may be crucial for limiting mold growth. The amount of money a school can receive for health and safety purposes is capped at $1 million.

Rier and state education officials are among those struggling with how to react to the infamous Stachybotrys mold and its fungal cousins. “We continue to learn about how to measure and understand air-quality problems,” he says. “We can’t get the scientific and health community to agree. It’s easy to overreact.”

He doesn’t think the Education Department should jump a replacement school to the head of the new-school-funding line just because Stachybotrys is found. “Then we’d have everybody digging for Stachybotrys,” he suspects. But he also says: “I expect there’ll be other schools we’ll find with Stachybotrys.”

The Portland school system recently applied for state assistance for a facility to replace Jack Elementary. Typically, however, the time between an application and when students move into a new school is five years.

CONCERNED: Norman Anderson, toxicologist with the American Lung Association of Maine, fears Stachybotrys will be found in more schools.

Where’s the leadership?

So far the discussion in Maine about indoor air quality has largely taken place among officials, along with input from quasi-official, professional public-interest groups such as the American Lung Association of Maine and the Maine Indoor Air Quality Council. But what about the parents of schoolchildren?

They have not always been invited in. At the Jack Elementary School, parents were not included on the Lung Healthy team. Why not? “That’s a good question,” responds Superintendent O’Connor, adding that she had not heard of complaints from Jack parents on air-quality issues.

The Lung Healthy teams in other school systems generally do not include parents. The lung association’s printed material on setting up such teams does not recommend including parents, even though the EPA, which gave $15,000 to the Lung Healthy project this year, wants parental involvement in the school-air-pollution issue.

Ruth Tarkinson, Jack Elementary’s assistant principal, bemoans the lack of a parent-teacher group at the school. And there’s no parent who takes a lead in dealing with the school? “That’s correct,” she replies. The “economically challenged” make-up of the parents, as she puts it, may account partially for their disconnection from the school. They may be too busy just scraping by. Tarkinson says that up to 95 percent of Jack’s students receive free or discounted school lunches.

In other communities, however, parents have been involved with indoor-air-pollution issues. In Kennebunk, Richard Lewia, the school system’s activist physical-plant director, has invited parents to sit in on the four Lung Healthy teams he has established. “I went right after the people who had more complaints,” he says. “They support you when they understand the problems.”

Another group relatively silent on the issue has been the politicians. In the recent legislative session, despite the Maine Indoor Air Quality Council’s report urging action, lawmakers failed to provide for special aid or set air-quality standards. Instead, legislators are still studying the issue.

“I just don’t think it’s been a priority” for the King administration, says Representative Watson, who helped draft the council’s report. Governor King “has been very public in saying there will always be unhealthy schools,” she claims, adding a bit sarcastically that the school air-pollution issue is not as “cutting-edge” as King’s controversial plan to put laptop computers into the hands of students, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

The governor’s office replies to Watson in a statement that says in part: “In the past few years a very large amount of work has been done on school renovation issues. Air quality and other public-health concerns rate very high on the priority list when it comes to selecting schools that will receive state funding for their renovation projects.”

“People will look for leadership” on this issue in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, Watson feels. “It’s going to be ratcheted up. We just have to have the political will.” However, she has not heard any of the gubernatorial candidates address the issue, although it is still very early in the campaign.

 

Meanwhile, she says, many school officials “are just hoping that bad things don’t happen.”

But they may already have happened. Slimy Stachybotrys may have invaded their schools.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.