PCB testing, transparency
The Worcester School Committee, which for five years has been actively mitigating the potential for exposure in its schools to polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, finds itself between a rock and a hard place over its resisting the teachers union’s efforts to test schools for PCB exposure. There's an easy solution: The committee should take the lead in testing.
Things came to a head at the committee’s meeting Thursday night when a crowd of teachers, parents and students, including former Mayor Raymond V. Mariano, challenged the committee to drop its appeal of a state labor relations department ruling in favor of the Education Association of Worcester, the union, to test for hazardous materials at Doherty and Burncoat high schools. It’s been part of a six-year effort by the EAW to get permission for a formal test.
Perhaps an irony here is that it was the EAW’s initial overture, apparently over a Harvard University student working on a thesis who did some testing on behalf of the union, that sparked discussion and remediation efforts by the Worcester Public Schools that have seen them spend or commit nearly $54 million over the past five years. The schools have replaced problematic ballasts in all fluorescent light fixtures, replaced windows and caulking at a number of schools, and sealed caulking and windows at the rest of the schools. The work is continuing. The EPA says the presence of PCBs alone is not necessarily cause for immediate alarm and has issued a set of best practices, which the Worcester Public Schools has already adopted in minimizing any exposure. These best practices do not include testing - the EPA does not recommend blanket testing at schools.
“I’ve been told that Worcester is on the cutting edge of this issue and way ahead of the other school districts in the state, if not the country,” Mayor Joseph M. Petty said in an interview Friday. He said steps were undertaken even before his becoming mayor (and chairman of the school committee), and he proposed an information session for the Burncoat community in several weeks.
But when it comes to children, schools, a chemical banned by Congress 40 years ago and a potential for cancer and other ailments, there's a potent motivation for action. Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts just released a report that will add fuel to these fires. He's calling for mandatory testing for PCBs in schools, parental notification of test results, and federal funding to pay for testing and remediation. The schools in question were built during the PCB era between 1950 and 1979 when the entire country went on a building spree to accommodate the baby boom generation. It’s not just school buildings that are affected, but many major industrial and institutional buildings that went up in this period as well.
PCBs are a class of organic compounds made from various combinations of carbon, hydrogen and chlorine. The very stability that made them attractive for use also means they don’t break down in the environment. So even with a decades-old ban, we’ve all been exposed to some degree through the air, water and in our food, such as in fish and animal fats. PCBs were widely used in window caulking, paints and building materials; as a cooling oil in transformers and capacitors; as hydraulic fluids; and in appliances such as television sets and refrigerators. How animal studies of harmful effects translate to humans has been debated.
On Thursday night, the school committee’s resistance to testing was called “disgraceful” by Mr. Mariano, who pointed out the potential stakes when he said he knew of 15 people who worked at Burncoat, including his wife, a teacher, who have been afflicted with cancer. Certainly horrifying, especially if there is related causality. But correlation does not necessarily translate to causality. We’ve seen this in apparent clusters that ultimately are unrelated.
The question comes down to whether kids and staff are being exposed to dangerous levels of PCBs in the air. It's hard to argue against checking. But it should be the school committee and school department that take the lead in the testing rather than its employees. If the remediation efforts so far have been successful, we’ll know. And if further steps need to be taken, the test results will frame the discussion. So let's get the data and go from there.