Pupils sent back to toxic school; parents of students at a high school near Ground Zero claim they were duped into returning their children to a building contaminated with lead and asbestos pollution

Insight on the News, Sept 23, 2002 by Sheila R. Cherry

Frayed nerves and angst are common on the first day of class. But as students in New York City prepared to return for the first school year after 9/11 it was parents who were fretting. Nowhere was that more evident than in Lower Manhattan, hard by the World Trade Center (WTC), where there are three elementary schools, a middle school, three high schools and 17,000 community-college students.

Custodial workers from schools as far away as southern New Jersey who helped clean up the rubble of the WTC twin towers--using some area schools as bases of operation for shelter and food--already are experiencing serious respiratory illnesses. But the returning children were assured that everything about their schools is just fine.

One worried New Jersey mother notes that school areas are being tested for particles of lead and asbestos, but says she worries about unknown particles in the concrete dust that mushroomed out of the collapsing skyscrapers. A spokeswoman for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine confirms that federal funds have been earmarked for medical screening of cleanup workers, who could take as long as 20 years to show symptoms of asbestos-related illness.

Jacqueline Moline, an occupational and environment specialist who is one of the doctors leading the WTC medical corps, says 500 patients with WTC-related illness have come for help. She says federal funds are being used to screen the roughly 8,500 workers and volunteers who were exposed shortly after 9/11. Most symptoms are respiratory.

But what about kids who were put back in area schools, some as soon as Oct. 9, 2001? The screening study does not extend to community residents. So parents who live with their families in Lower Manhattan must fight to get government help for the exposed kids.

Even at the prestigious math-, science- and technology-oriented Stuyvesant High School, which sits four blocks from Ground Zero, there is angst--and denial. Stuyvesant was used as a command and staging area for emergency workers traipsing through the toxic dust and ash of the WTC to their heroic tasks. Whether it now is safe is a matter of community concern. Unwittingly, parents such as Jenna Orkin allege, schoolchildren are being used to put a brave face on the safety of the city's business district. The youngsters simply were ordered to be back in the classrooms on Oct. 9, 2001, by the New York City Board of Education (BOE), which assured parents that Stuyvesant had been given a thorough cleaning and asbestos abatement. [New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently renamed the board as the Department of Education.]

Though Stuyvesant is a public school, it is so competitive that it accepts only 800 of 20,000 applications per year, so it is not so surprising that there was only light resistance to the school's directive to return for classes again on Sept. 5 at 8:45 a.m. Even so, a growing number of "Stuyparents" are demanding to know if their Ivy-League-bound children have been used as canaries in a coal mine--being endangered either to prove a political point or to protect a greater financial interest.

In an Aug. 8 letter to Bloomberg, a small group calling itself the Stuyvesant Parents Association complained about the timing: "Prior to the return of Stuyvesant to its building" they said, "the Board of Education, on Oct. 5th [2001], represented in writing to parents that the Stuyvesant building had been thoroughly cleaned and that an asbestos abatement had been performed. Parents were reassured that the building would be completely safe for our return on Oct. 9th. In particular, parents were assured that the ventilation systems in the building had been cleaned."

But that was not true, say the angry moms and dads. They pointed out the hard-to-miss waste-transfer barge for disposed debris located immediately adjacent to the north side of the school. "Months later, we learned that the central HVAC [heating, ventilation and airconditioning] ducts had not been cleaned," the group declares.

Then parents complained of being stonewalled. "As our negotiations with the [BOE] to clean the building became increasingly frustrating, the Parents' Association retained a lawyer, Stuyvesant graduate Richard Ben-Veniste, to represent us." Only then, they stated, did the BOE offer fully to test the ventilation systems for contaminants, including lead, dioxin and asbestos. Still, the parents charged, the BOE did not release the results for six weeks, and then only after threat of legal action.

An environmental-health consultant hired by the Stuyvesant Parent Association (SPA) came back to the shut-out parents with a chilling report. The trained consultant questioned the decision to test the vertical sides of the ducts, for instance, when lead particles would be too heavy to stick to the walls.

Remarkably, the consultant reported, the plan originally had been to test only the air-outlet grillwork--not the actual duct surfaces (neither vertical nor horizontal). The BOE continued its resistance, according to parents and sources close to the discussions, even though the Federal Emergency Management Agency notified all parties that it was willing to pay for the cleanup to make sure the kids were safe.