…but if they can’t pay, Vermont has to pick up the tab and testing could pause 

By Holly Sullivan

After high levels of the toxins known as PCBs permanently shut down Burlington High School, Vermont mandated all schools built or renovated before 1980 to conduct indoor air quality tests. The Agency of Education, and schools themselves, were on the hook to pay for it. 

H.873, a bill passed by the House and now in the Senate, would shift both responsibilities to PCB manufacturers first.

The bill says companies that distribute PCBs must pay for the testing and removal of the chemicals in Vermont’s schools. But the bill has a caveat that’s triggered debate in the capitol: If a company doesn’t have enough money to pay, the state will pick up the slack through the education fund. And if money set aside for testing and removal dips below $4 million, testing will pause entirely.

“Why test when you don’t have the money to do the cleanup and the removal?” legislative counsel Michael O’Grady told Senate education leaders April 2, summarizing the rationale behind the bill. “Don’t put the school in the place where they’re in a corner, and the state has no money to give them.”

But halting testing could endanger people who go into schools daily, especially kids, pregnant women and those with immune disorders, according to Paul Burns, executive director of Vermont Public Interest Group.

“It doesn’t seem to me that the challenge of insufficient funding justifies moving away from a process of identifying the threats that may be there,” he told the Senate education committee April 4. 

“Unless you found a reason that makes us less concerned about that,” he later said, “then I want to encourage you to do whatever you can to find the way to allow this program — not whether this program moves forward, but how it moves forward.”

The bill is “entertaining the possibility that, (only for lack of funds), we will intentionally allow the continued exposure of kids in schools to PCBs,” said Burns, the father of a 12-year-old student. 

Sen. Martine Larocque Gulick, D-Chittenden-Central, told Burns she believes in the severity of PCBs but scrapping the bill would be illogical. 

“One thing I have learned from being on the health and welfare committee is that we are being poisoned in almost every way you can imagine, from the clothing we have on, to the feminine hygiene products we use, to the makeup we put on, to the things that we eat — we all have PCBs in our body,” she told Burns. “So I struggle with — I don’t want to say the hypocrisy — but it sometimes seems disingenuous that we’re focusing solely on schools.”

Disproportionate fear leads parents to make “ill-informed decisions,” Gulick said. 

She said an elementary school gym recently tested a couple of parts per billion over the safe threshold of PCBs for preschool kids. When parents of older, not-at-risk students got hold of this information, they hurt their children’s health in another way, Gulick said. 

“Suddenly, they didn’t want their kids going to gym class. So their kids weren’t able to exercise. They were sitting in the main office with the administrative assistant,” Gulick said. “For me, that’s just wrong on so many levels.”

An alternative PCB testing plan aiming to complete statewide testing with current budgets in mind was presented to senators by Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources.

As of Jan. 1, 96 out of 324 schools had been tested for PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. Sixty-one schools had no PCBs, while 35 had PCBs above a school action level. Of those 35, 13 schools showed PCBs above the level requiring schools to close off the contaminated spaces.

“Leaving half the schools untested, particularly given the fact that we’re seeing a third of them come in with levels that exceed our health department standards, is untenable and frankly inequitable,” Moore said. “And (we) want to find a way to finish the work we’ve started.”

Last summer, Vermont sued Monsanto, a company the state alleges is responsible for at least 99% of the state’s PCBs. The Burlington School District is also suing the company, arguing it should pay for its school building’s reconstruction.

The state’s case alleges Monsanto was aware of PCBs’ detrimental effects on human health — such as increased risk for cancer, cardiovascular and liver diseases and diabetes — but hid those harms from the public and continued selling their products anyway. 

“We’re working really hard with our goal in mind to try to get as much money as we can to hold Monsanto accountable and for remediation to be done so that our natural resources and our schools can be healthy again,” Attorney General Charity Clark told senators April 9. 

Money won in that lawsuit could be used to shore up funds for testing and cleanup.

Though state funding is tight and the lawsuit is still active, the attorney general urged senators to find ways to continue PCB testing. The negative impacts of PCBs on human health and school equity trumps any financial concern, she said. 

“Unfortunately, just because we don’t have as much money to test as we wish we did doesn’t mean there aren’t toxic PCBs in schools,” Clarktold senators. 

The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.