School District Denies Mold, Tears Down School

The San Diego Unified School district has found a very unique way to avoid the drama and litigation that happens when teachers and students start complaining about mold in a school. What’s their solution? Tear down the school and build a new one, which will remove the mold and, at the same time, demolishing the evidence.

After two-thirds of teachers started experiencing symptoms of toxic mold exposure, including coughing, sore throat, sinus infection, multiple respiratory illness, and chronic bronchitis, the situation at Shermen Elementary had reached a breaking point. Teachers were diagnosed with mycotoxicosis poisoning, kids were getting sick, and parents were getting really concerned. A letter writing campaign began to test the school for mold and clean the vents and ducts.

The questioning tests performed by a health department inspection and a contracted industrial hygienist came back negative for mold – as they often do in these stories. The report was criticized by toxicologist Dr. Richard Lipsey, who pointed out that the few tapelift samples that were taken were taken in places chosen by the school district personnel and were not places where mold would be expected to grow.

But this story that is so similar to what is happening in so many schools across the nation took an unexpected turn when the school district decided, seemingly out of nowhere, to tear down the school and build a new one at the end of the school year. According to Tom Mitchell, a representative of the school district, this decision was made because of “economics.” He claims the school needed a makeover and it would cost more to remodel than to rebuild the school.

“The issues we did look at were that these bungalows were pretty old and beat up,” says Mitchell, making sure to emphasize that “health concerns were of no consideration at all.”

So the question is why would the San Diego Unified School District tear down and rebuild a school just to hide mold, if this really is the case? Wouldn’t it be easier to just clean the school?

The issue in these cases is that if the school cleans the mold then they are inadvertently admitting that there is a mold problem. This could be taken as an admission of guilt in any potential lawsuits against the school by teachers suffering from long-term health effects. By remediating the mold, the school district takes a legal risk.

So the school district may have solved both problems by their decision to tear down and rebuild the school for “unrelated reasons.” The mold is gone and now any evidence that there was ever mold is also gone. They can continue to deny it ever existed without repercussions.

Tagged as: health concerns, health effects, mold, mold problem, Mycotoxicosis, respiratory illness, san diego unified school, san diego unified school district, symptoms of toxic mold, symptoms of toxic mold exposure, toxic mold, toxic mold exposure