As we end our third school year with teachers and students sitting in toxic PCB classrooms, it is important for parents understand that the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District still does not have a plan to fully remediate the school or to put a metal barrier around all windows and doors as a temporary measure.
We asked for portables for everyone. Superintendent Sandra Lyon answered, “If we move kids into portables, classrooms will be empty and how will that look when it’s our position that classrooms are safe?”
The classrooms are not safe to occupy. They are riddled with PCBs — the same cancer-causing PCBs that caused Monsanto to lose a $46 million lawsuit due to three cases of non-Hopkins. These three people didn’t work or attend schools with high levels of PCBs like those in Malibu, but they won because they were exposed to PCBs in everyday life and it made them sick.
Malibu kids and teachers have a much larger PCB burden.
The SMMUSD’s head-in-the-sand attitude is pure ignorance. It is a horrible educational lesson for our children — ignore a problem for as long as you can and then deny it exists.
Even the district’s plan to modernize buildings over the next four years will not solve the PCB issue, because they still refuse source testing to ensure proper removal with clear-margins around all windows and doors, simply because they refuse to admit there are illegal PCBs at the schools.
Come August 2016, kids will go back to the same toxic classrooms.
Jennifer Blue deNicola