Estabrook Elementary students may be shifted until PCBs cleanup is completed

Published by The Boston Globe

Parents at Joseph Estabrook Elementary School in Lexington were told Tuesday night that they may have to send their children to one of seven other school buildings or even a private space if tests show a toxic chemical found at the school has not been brought below acceptable levels.

At a School Committee meeting tonight, Superintendent Dr. Paul Ash said administrators have established four options to redistribute Estabrook students if levels of polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCBs, remain above Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.


The options include moving all 455 Estabrook students and the school's staff to the Lexington High School field house, sending them to other schools by grade level, sharing one other elementary school in double sessions or finding an as-yet-to determined private space.

Estabrook closed last Thursday and yesterday to allow crews and consultants to continue a second phase of PCB removal after taking out contaminated window caulking did not lower the chemical levels. School administrators and parents will not know whether the clean up efforts over Labor Day weekend brought PCB levels below federal guidelines until a new set of test results come back Thursday or Friday, said Ash.

Tonight, Jessie Steigerwald, a school committee member, said she is concerned about costs associated with each option for distributing the students.

Ash said he did not know how much each option would cost and conceded that there are some problems with all of them. "There are a lot of awful things that could happen when trying to cram 455 kids into over-capacity buildings,'' Ash said tonight.

Parents at tonight's meeting, however, said they appreciated the school administration and staff's efforts to devise a contingency plan to use in case the PCB tests come back at unacceptable levels. "I appreciate that Plan B has been put forward . . . .Just knowing we're speaking about it,'' said Harold Payson, a father of two Estabrook kindergartners.

The EPA is also conducting a site-specific risk assessment to determine more accurate guidelines for Estabrook's situation, Ash said.

After the results are available, the superintendent will meet with a committee of parents, experts and consultants to decide how to respond.

Students will not enter the potentially dangerous building this week. Instead, they will attend educational field trips today and Friday, and school is closed Thursday for Rosh Hashanah.

Tests last spring found that the school had potentially unsafe levels of the chemicals in the building’s caulking, and plans to remove them began Aug. 24, said Gerard Cody, the town’s health director.

The removal was to be completed before the first day of classes on Aug. 31, but the Lexington Health Division measured even higher levels of PCBs in some of the building’s rooms.

PCBs are believed to harm the immune and reproductive systems. Studies have linked them to cancer, according to the EPA.