Kyrene de la Sierra Elementary students this week began lessons on the Cerritos/Altadeña campus until at least the end of fall break Oct. 13 after air quality concerns were raised in connection with its roof replacement project.
Kyrene School District’s handling of the roofing project and complaints about the odors it generated sparked vehement criticism by three parents at the Aug. 5 Governing Board meeting, with one parent, Ryan Pfutzenreuter, stating “our children have been exposed daily to toxic industrial chemicals inside their classrooms at La Sierra.
“What’s happening is not normal,” he said. “This is not just an unpleasant smell. It’s dangerous, and we were never warmed. This isn’t just construction smells. These are industrial grade chemicals over the summer and continuing today.”
A new air quality report posted by the district on Aug. 12 suggested children were not exposed to harmful levels of any substance prior to the school’s shutdown on Aug. 2.
Board President Kevin Walsh had said prior to the parents’ appearances that he and his colleagues could not legally respond to them at the meeting and district spokeswoman Erin Helm told the Ahwatukee Foothills News the district would have no comment. The day before the meeting, however, she said the district received no health complaints.
The district posted an Aug. 5 letter from Tremco Construction Products Group that said, “Odors generally experienced during a roofing project are typical of nuisance level and not at levels that warrant a health exposure concern.”
Kyrene officials on Aug. 1 closed the school temporarily after air quality tests showed “elevated levels” of particulates that were subsequently reclassified as “Total Volatile Organic Compounds,” which “specifically refer to gasses emitted from certain solids or liquids.”
In a report posted Aug. 12, a report by Dr. Ryan Kuhn of Dominion Environmental Consultants said, in part: “Compounds (tVOCs) levels identified by the handheld photoionization detector (PID). Consistent with our preliminary readings the laboratory reported the high tVOC levels and reported twenty-one compounds that are considered primary contributors to the tVOCs reported. The compounds were all reported by the laboratory to be in parts per billion (ppb).
“All compounds with published exposure limits were all well below the established exposure limits.”
A day earlier Dominion filed another report with the district that said there was no asbestos in Sierra.
In posting the more detailed air quality report Aug. 12, Suoperintendent Laura Toenjes wrote, “Kyrene is consulting with the appropriate experts and will continue to share their reports and analysis on our website. Thank you for your patience as we navigate this challenging situation one step at a time.
“Roof work has not yet resumed. However, crews will be on the roof tomorrow sealing against forecasted rain. We will continue to keep the Sierra community informed of next steps.”
Helm sent out a notice to news media as well yesterday, stating the district would have no further comment and that nodistrict or board official will be available for interviews because “Kyrene does not comment on pending or potential litigation.” She did not elaborate.
While the district last week stressed “we have been assured the chemicals and materials used in our roof installation are safe,” the three parents who addressed the board Aug. 5 challenged that description and the way the district responded to their concerns.
Toenjes and the district’s facilities and emergency response overseers detailed the project and Kyrene’s response to complaints about the odors it had been generating since late last month.
Meanwhile, the administration last week scrambled to work out a slew of logistics so that Sierra children could resume in-class instruction this week. Those logistics involved everything from transportation and food service to getting additional supplies to the temporary classrooms. For the first three days of last week, students received paper assignments until online instruction began Thursday and Friday.
Sierra K-2 students are attending classes at Cerritos while the upper three grades are at adjacent Altadeña Middle School and the preschool at the Kyrene de la Esperanza campus.
“The district is committed to ensuring students have the same services at their temporary campus that they have at Sierra,” Kyrene said in one of the earliest of its many updates at kyrene.org/sierraroof.
It also stressed, “The health and safety of our students and staff is our highest priority.”
Toenjes said closing the school until mid-October “allows us to expedite the roofing process so that the portions of the project involving asphalt or off-gassing could be completed before bringing staff and students back to campus.”
“If we had brought everyone back to campus while smells may still be strong, it would also likely cause undue anxiety, and we also didn’t want to risk bringing everybody back and then potentially (sending) them away again.”
At the board meeting, Facilities Director Mason Meade said the project to replace what has been Sierra’s original roof since the school opened over 30 years ago was scheduled to begin in late May but was delayed until June 6 by bad weather.
Parent Courtney Maxwell blasted Kyrene’s handling of the Sierra roof project.
(YouTube)
“It was originally scheduled for completion in January, and that’s not uncommon for schools with projects to go as long as six months, depending on the size material cure times and weather,” Meade said.
“The first concern about smell was reported on Meet the Teacher Night (July 21),” Meade said. “But this is also very common during a roofing project.
“While odors can be a nuisance, they are not necessarily indicative of a health hazard on their own,” he said, adding that expressions of concerns and complaints escalated until the district made its decision to close the school on Aug. 1.
Meade also said that during preliminary air quality tests, “we also discovered that a key safety protocol was not in place” and that air intakes were not sealed off.
In announcing the closure, the district also issued a list of precautions that were taken, ranging from sealing air intakes to replacing air filters.
In response to board member Bunny Davis’ questions about why the district had not acted between July 21 and Aug. 1, Toenjes said, “It’s not uncommon that at the beginning of a project that it’s going to smell” and “it’s not uncommon for us to get a report of ‘hey, there’s some smells.’”
“There were no complaints to administration or to the district office in July,” she added. “So nobody here was aware that there was even a complaint of smell.”
She also said, “The standard practice has not been to do air quality testing every time we do a project somewhere,” although she added “we’ve done multiple air quality testing anytime and it’s not always related to a roofing project.”
Board member Triné Nelson said that moving forward, air testing should be “part of our standard operating procedure” with any roofing project and that information should be shared on the district’s website.
Meade also agreed with Nelson that the district’s switch to a trimester schedule shortened the summer break so significantly that roofing projects took longer and said:
“We will evaluate working with our roofing vendor and manufacturer of the product to try to come up with a plan to address our next roofs and see if we can fit those in, if we (can) man them up with the appropriate crews to get them done over the summer.
“However, working through the monsoon season, it’s very difficult because the weather delays us. We had multiple delays this summer due to rain.”
Kyrene issued this list of actions it took after air quality tests raised concerns at Sierra school.
(Kyrene School District)
Among the criticisms from the three speakers was a complaint that the district had a faulty system for handling parental concerns about projects.
“There is no clear way for us as parents, when we see safety concerns on the construction site such as this one, that we can escalate those beyond talking to our principal or talking to members of the staff,” Jennifer Dustin said.
“That timeline does not reflect my experience as a parent. My asthmatic son goes to Kids Club, and one Friday, I walked in the doors… and my eyes teared up from the fumes.
“They were not aromas,” Dustin continued. “It was clearly fumes that my asthmatic son had been breathing in for I don’t know how long, I said to the Kids Club staff, ‘Oh, my God, how can you guys be in here like this?’ They couldn’t smell it. It had been building up while we were there. So that was a verbal complaint, a concern that I addressed with the director of the Kids Club at that location, and it didn’t go anywhere.”
She also said she complained about volatile materials being stored at the school site with “a flashpoint of 109 degrees in a heat wave next to a propane tank in a residential neighborhood.”
“I did not receive a response,” Dustin said. “What I did see is members of Kyrene Safety Department and other people working on the construction site put a white tarp over those materials, literally.
“So this needs to be addressed in a way that … people on the site can be empowered to raise those concerns beyond their immediate vicinity.”
Parent Courtney Maxwell said the information Meade and others disclosed at the meeting was “alarming, disturbing and frankly infuriating.”
She assailed the fact that “fresh air intakes on the roof were actively pulling in contaminated air from roofing work while children were in the building.
“This is not theoretical. This is not hypothetical. This is a real exposure. There has been no medical guidance for families and no transparency,” Maxwell said, adding “mitigation efforts continue without families knowing what their children were exposed to and what symptoms to watch out for – that is not protecting children.”
Pfutzenreuter charged that the chemicals in the products used in the roofing project carry “serious health warnings” that that safety data sheets “say they must not be used in occupied buildings.”
“This is negligent,” he told the board. “And you all know, I emailed every single one of you, I told you what needed to be done, and now it’s going to be a much bigger problem.”