Massachusetts Personal Injury Library
How Safe are Our Children in America's Schools? Part 2
The health of America’s students is being affected by environmental conditions and dangerous air quality outside the schools. Using the government’s most up-to-date model for tracking toxic chemicals, USA TODAY spent eight months examining the impact of industrial pollution on the air outside schools across the nation. The model is a computer simulation that predicts the path of toxic chemicals released by thousands of companies. USA TODAY used it to identify schools in toxic hot spots – a task the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had never undertaken. For information about the air quality in your state, go to the USA Today website and get access to the entire report.
One of the hot spots USA Today looked at was in a Cincinnati suburb along the Ohio River. School district officials at Meredith Hitchens Elementary School pulled all students three years ago, because air samples outside the building showed high levels of chemicals coming from the plastics plant across the street. The levels were so dangerous that the Ohio EPA concluded the risk of getting cancer there was 50 times higher than what the state considers acceptable. The air outside 435 other schools – from Maine to California – appears to be even worse, and the threats to the health of students at those locations may be even greater.
The USA Today report completed a ranking of 127,800 public, private and parochial schools based on the concentrations and health hazards of chemicals likely to be in the air outside. The model’s most recent version used emissions reports filed by 20,000 industrial sites in 2005. USA said, “In some school districts, emissions from the smokestacks of refineries or chemical plants threatened students of every age, preschool through prom. Outside those schools, reports from polluters themselves often indicated a dozen different chemicals in the air. All are considered toxic by the government, though few have been tested for their specific effects on children.”
The model showed levels of industrial chemicals declined at three-quarters of U.S. schools since 1998, a trend that mirrors improved air quality across the nation. However, outside one-quarter of schools, the model showed students were exposed to higher levels of industrial pollution in 2005 than they were 10 years ago. The likely exposures weren’t simply the product of living in a part of town where pollution is heavy. In thousands of cases, the air appeared to be better in the neighborhoods where children lived than at the schools they attended, USA TODAY found. At about 16,500 schools, the air outside the schools was at least twice as toxic as the air at a typical location in the school district. At 3,000 of those schools, air outside the buildings was at least 10 times as toxic.
Unfortunately, regulatory responses to these dangerous conditions have not been addressed. Some children’s health experts have tried to push the EPA to make better use of its own tools. What the agency hasn’t done is use its models, as USA TODAY did, to look for potential problems around schools – then follow up by testing for toxic chemicals. Some EPA officials quoted in the report said they didn’t feel it was their place to initiate these kinds of studies.
Parents can get involved by contacting their legislators and the EPA state and federal offices and advocating for testing the air around their children’s schools. Without advocacy, the EPA is currently not doing the necessary testing for this kind of information.
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