Thousands of schools fouled by PCBs, study says

Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are industrial chemicals so toxic that Congress banned them 40 years ago. Research has shown that they can cause a range of health concerns, including cancer and neurological problems such as decreased IQ. And yet, because they were commonly used in building materials for decades, they continue to contaminate classrooms in between 13,000 and 26,000 schools nationwide, according to Harvard researchers.

No one knows exactly how many schools are affected — nor how many children are being exposed to these toxic chemicals — because many schools don’t test for PCBs. Under federal law, they don’t have to.

Now activists are mounting a campaign to change that, lobbying Congress to close what they say is a dangerous loophole that could be harming millions of children. The effort comes in the aftermath of the Flint water crisis, amid new scrutiny of schoolchildren’s exposure to another toxic substance for which schools are not required to test: lead in drinking water fountains.

“Parents have the right to know what their children are being exposed to in school,” said Jennifer deNicola, a parent in Malibu who helped lead a years-long effort to rid that community’s schools of PCBs in window caulk and other materials, eventually filing a lawsuit against the school district. People can be exposed to the chemicals when they touch contaminated substances, eat contaminated food or breathe air contaminated with PCB-laden dust. The caulk in Malibu schools had concentrations of PCBs that in some instances were thousands of times higher than the federal limit.

The legal battle in that tony seaside community — which ended last month, when a federal judge ordered the school district to remove PCBs from its schools by Dec. 31, 2019 — drew national attention to the issue, not least because Cindy Crawford pulled her children out of the school system and became a spokeswoman for the cause.

“This isn’t my normal day job, but it just didn’t make sense to me, and it didn’t seem fair,” Crawford told reporters Wednesday morning. “My children are being homeschooled, but that is not an option for most people.”

Schools also have grappled with the problem elsewhere, including in New York, Massachusetts and Washington. A school in Hartford, Connecticut, was closed indefinitely for cleanup last year after it was found to have airborne PCB levels nearly 2,000 times greater than the federal limit, according to the Hartford Courant.

Now deNicola and Crawford are turning their attention to undetected PCBs in schools nationwide. “We need to make this a political issue bigger than us,” said deNicola, who started the nonprofit America Unites for Kids to address the problem.

They have an ally in Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who on Wednesday released a report on the extent of PCB contamination in the nation’s schools and called on Congress to provide the money that schools need to test for, and respond to, the problem. Markey also called for mandatory PCB testing in schools, for parents to be notified when PCBs are found in their children’s schools.