As parents mounted pressure on the school district to test soil samples at Malibu High School, the district announced this week that preliminary results of airborne samples and surface swipes showed levels of contaminants in the air at MHS to be “well below” federal public health guidelines for schools, according to Supt. Sandra Lyon and district consultant Mark Katchen.
A district press release on Monday announced plans to expand the airborne and swipe tests to next-door Juan Cabrillo Elementary School.
But tempers flared at a meeting last Thursday at Juan Cabrillo, where many demanded soil samples be tested at MHS. Elevated levels of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were found in soil of the quad of the middle school campus in 2011. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifies PCBs as probable human carcinogens and reproductive toxins. They have been found in building materials used up until the 1970s. The contaminants were outlawed in 1979.
“We need to get the soil tested,” Juan Cabrillo parent Eli Craig said.
Concerns over PCBs flared in early October, when a number of MHS teachers expressed fear in a letter to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District that the diagnosis of three teachers with thyroid cancer and health problems among other teachers could be related to contaminants on campus.
On Thursday, Katchen told the group there were no immediate plans to test soil at Malibu High because it was too early in the evaluation process.
“Testing the air, it’s just the first step of trying to evaluate the environment,” Katchen told the group.
But several parents found the answer unsatisfying.
“I’m about to pull my son out of school…because all I’m hearing is ‘hurry up and wait, wait, wait,” one mother said.
Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who helped found the agency in 1971, said he has been closely following the health scare at Malibu High from EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In a telephone interview on Monday, he said he also believed the district should go further and test soil samples.
“Doing air samples and swipe samples for PCBs are good, but the documentation of hazardous materials in the area is much more extensive,” Kaufman said. “The pathway is not just inhalation by direct contact in the classroom, but it’s also inhaling through contact outside in the soil.”
Lighting ballasts installed between the 1970s and 1990s have also been known to contain PCBs, Lyon said, so the district is reinspecting all MHS rooms and will eventually do the same at Juan Cabrillo.
Lyon said the school district is currently reinspecting lighting ballasts through each campus, though any containing PCBs were replaced.
“Although we knew our district had replaced ballasts in our schools, we did a complete reinspection of all ballasts at MHS and confirmed that all ballasts at Malibu High School had been identified and replaced,” she said in Monday’s statement.
CO2 levels high, radon levels normal
The district also announced that levels of radon at both Malibu High and Juan Cabrillo Elementary were found to be normal, but “some classrooms” did show signs of elevated carbon dioxide levels. The district did not specify which classrooms showed higher levels.
“We are taking immediate action, the first of which is to instruct our health and safety team to begin this week to identify an air balance technician who can work with us to determine what we need to do to address this issue,” Lyon said in a statement issued Monday.
On Thursday, Katchen said the district chose to test for radon because tests were inexpensive and it has been known to cause cancer.
“Malibu has been shown to have moderate to below-level radon levels,” Katchen said.
Radon has been known to cause lung cancer but not thyroid cancer, according to the EPA.
Lyon said the district plans on updating its website as an environmental task force meets Thursday and more test results come in this week, including airborne and surface tests from Juan Cabrillo.