Report Lists L.A. Schools That Pose Toxic Risks

At least 10 Los Angeles Unified schools have environmental risks that require ongoing monitoring or special equipment, district officials disclosed Friday.

And, in releasing the newly compiled list, a spokesman said it is highly unlikely that parents and teachers have been routinely told about the potential hazards.

The district is still reviewing files to determine the full extent of environmentally troubled sites throughout the sprawling urban school system. An unknown number of schools could be added to the list.

“We’re going through a period of profound reexamination, which compels us to immediately assemble this list,” said spokesman Erik Nasarenko.

The environmental probes placed in and around the schools have registered no levels of contaminants high enough to have caused “worry or evacuation” over the years, Nasarenko said. No gases have ever been detected at six sites.

But he acknowledged that a search of district files shows there has been no “ongoing mechanism by which parents and faculty members were informed” that the sensors and equipment were even being used. “That is something we will correct immediately,” he said.

Asked why no list existed before, Nasarenko blamed overlapping responsibilities within the vast bureaucracy and the “sheer number” of school buildings.

But the fact that the district hasn’t kept parents and teachers updated on the environmental concerns is a “pretty sad statement . . . in this age of the right to know,” said Carlos Porras, Southern California director for Communities for a Better Environment, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Porras said he believes the list only “scratches the surfaces” of potential contamination problems at schools built over the years near refineries, landfills and other questionable sites.

School officials “ don’t even know what the extent of the problem is,” Porras said.

The list represents an evolving controversy for Los Angeles Unified over contamination at its schools. It began last year with revelations that district staff allowed a soil vapor monitoring system to lie idle several times at Jefferson New Middle School, which is across the street from the site of a former chrome-plating plant.

The disclosure of the list Friday also comes just days after a team of scientists issued a sobering report about environmental problems at the half-finished Belmont Learning Complex near downtown. The team warned of potentially explosive concentrations of methane gas at the 39-acre site, and prescribed a series of costly mitigation measures that have some wondering whether the district would be justified in walking away from the $200-million project.

The safety team asked the district staff in mid-May to start gathering information on other schools where environmental concerns have required the use of probes, sensors or mitigation measures. Such measures have been overseen either by district staff or regulatory agencies such as the Water Resources Control Board, the city Fire Department or the Air Quality Management District.

The new list, which is the result of this request, includes Jefferson and Gratts Elementary, where, The Times recently reported, district officials removed 12,000 pounds of gasoline from the soil without telling the parents about the problem. Five of the campuses on the list have probes for methane.

One is Hancock Park Elementary School on South Fairfax Avenue, where Nasarenko said fans would automatically switch on underneath the buildings if concentrations of naturally occurring methane got too high.

Another is Francis Polytechnic High School, which is close to an active city landfill in Sun Valley. Principal Carolyn Burch said the city-installed methane probes at the north end of campus lead to a special switchboard in the main office that is supposed to go off if concentrations of the gas get too high.

But Burch said the only alarms have been false ones, and that there has never been a methane problem in the six years she has directed the school. Except for occasional discussions about the probes at parent meetings and regular staff updates, Burch said she hasn’t felt the need to send routine notification to all parents about the situation.

“When you have no news to report, there’s no sense in spending a lot of time talking about something that doesn’t exist,” she said.

Angelo Bellomo, an environmental consultant on the district’s safety team, said schools near landfills are of a particular concern, even if their methane sensors have never triggered alarms.

Such probes, he said, are designed only to alert regulatory agencies to potentially explosive concentrations of the gas and don’t take into account other potentially toxic materials that may be wafting up from the dumps on lower concentrations of methane.

Bellomo said the safety team will probably require expanded testing and monitoring at these and the other campuses, in part because of advances in detection and remediation.

Bellomo advised the district 10 years ago on how to stop tars and oil from oozing up from a makeshift landfill and through playground asphalt at Park Avenue Elementary.

The solution at the time was to dig trenches 50 feet apart to capture the tars and oil, and then cover the area with a special liner before repaving the playground, he said.

“Am I worried that in taking those steps we might have done something wrong or we didn’t go far enough? Yeah, I am,” he said.

He said it is “a problem” that district staff hasn’t kept parents advised about probes and mitigation measures.

“As a parent, I don’t think I would want to leave this to a regulatory agency,” Bellomo said. “I would want to be provided updates, I would want to know the nature of the monitoring system and I would want to receive regular reports.”

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Schools Monitoring Environmental Hazards

The following Los Angeles County schools have active environmental monitoring, detection or mitigation systems.

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District