Local parents are fighting to clean up their kids’ schools as they grapple with the statistic that 800 public school buildings across New York City, including five in Morningside Heights and West Harlem, have lighting fixtures with traces of toxic chemicals.
City agencies have developed a plan that would remove all lighting with caulking that tests positive for toxic PCBs. But their 10-year timeline isn’t sitting well with parents.
“In a K-8 school under this plan, my second-grader could risk exposure for nine years,” Julie Golden, co-president of the PTA at P.S. 334 on 77th Street, said at a Community Board 7 meeting last week. “That’s simply unacceptable.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that prolonged exposure to PCBs—elements used in construction until outlawed in 1978—is known to cause acne, rashes, liver damage, and possibly cancer. To determine the risks of the PCB levels, the New York City School Construction Authority established a pilot program to test schools around the city. But because the program was the first of its kind, Holden said that it has been difficult to get started.
“This type of program has never been done before,” Ross Holden, SCA executive vice president, said. “We have a certain amount of funding and the schedule has been established for that.”
But parents at a meeting of CB7’s Youth, Education, and Libraries Committee on Nov. 16 expressed concern over how long it will take to remove the PCBs.
“There’s a lot of parents that would like to get some type of inspection in and aren’t sure if custodians are doing it,” PTA member and P.S. 199 parent Eric Shuffler said. P.S. 199, on 70th Street, is one of three city schools with PCB levels in excess of the acceptable federal amount.
“We’d like to take more control of our destiny and not have to work through this infrastructure,” Shuffler said.
John Gorman, a representative from the EPA, said that SCA workers are moving as fast as the budget allows them. The pilot program currently determines the order in which schools should have PCBs removed based on their initial test results—a tedious but necessary process, he said.
“EPA advocated a two-year plan first, but that’s not what the city is advocating,” he said. “Our biggest concern is with young children and pregnant women, which is why we are dealing with schools first.”
And Gorman noted that it is difficult to remove all traces of PCBs in schools in a short time.
“PCB caulk is everywhere all over the country and it’s not something that can be taken care of overnight,” Gorman said. “We wanted a faster schedule and the city is doing what they can to speed up their schedule.”
Pam Factor-Litvak, an associate professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health who has researched how PCBs affect pregnancies, said that the current risk level is still significant.
“I think they should probably move faster than 10 years,” she said. “The city should be acting prudently to remove the exposure.”
It is reasonable for parents to have concerns about their children, considering the uncertainty of the effects, Factor-Litvak said—but the environmental contaminants don’t directly show how severely the chemicals are affecting children.
“The levels of exposure are not extraordinarily high, so I think that the level of concern should match the level of exposure,” she said. “They’re high, but not extraordinarily high.”
New York State Assembly member Linda Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, was critical of the pilot program and said she hoped that parents would continue to ask for updates about the issue.
“While we don’t want to be alarmists, we don’t want to poo-poo that there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said. “When parents hear that students could be trapped in a school building for 10 years being exposed to PCBs, parents are outraged.”
Golden, the P.S. 334 PTA president, agreed.
“I can be very patient when it’s months before someone is assigned to monitor $200,000 renovations, but I can not be patient when my child is at risk possibly developing cancer.”
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