Wednesday, May 21, 1997
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

Portable Classrooms and Air Quality

It was cause for celebration last summer when the state initiated class-size reduction for the primary grades. Who, we asked ourselves, needed private school when we've got a ratio of 20 to 1?

There was just one little snag: a space crunch. School facilities were already stretched thin by federal and state mandates, aging buildings and the demands of new technology. A 1996 state-by-state profile of school conditions by the U.S. General Accounting Office had shown California to be at the bottom of the heap: 87 percent of our schools reported at least one unsatisfactory environmental factor; 71 percent reported inadequate building features.

So, when the order to reduce class size came from Sacramento, school superintendents looked around for more classroom space and came up with a solution: portable units. Today, there's a portable sitting outside virtually every school throughout the state. These modular buildings are typically airtight. Their carpets and carpet glues can often give off high levels of volatile organic compounds. Their pressed woods release formaldehyde, which explains why Ellie Goldberg, a national expert on educational rights for children with chronic illnesses, calls them “boxes of formaldehyde.”

“Whatever can be said about indoor air quality in a regular classroom can be said ten-fold about portables,” says Irene Ruth Wilkenfeld, an environmental health consultant who contributed a chapter to “The Healthy School Handbook,” published by the National Education Association. “They have high levels of formaldehyde, they have poor ventilation, they’re a nightmare.”

“One of the big problems with portables is the fact that they’re all carpeted,” says Jed Waldman, chairman of the California Interagency Working Group on Indoor Air Quality at the state Department of Health Services.

“With the way schools are maintained and the amount of rain we get in California, we shouldn’t use carpeting in schools at all. You turn carpets into mold factories. And most molds, under various conditions, will produce toxins.”

In January, Waldman’s group sent an advisory letter to school superintendents warning them about the possibility of health problems in portable units. The class-size reduction program “has prompted the projected use of thousands of (portable) classrooms,” the letter read. “Past experience has shown that, when proper design and care are not applied, indoor environmental quality problems can become endemic.”

And that, apparently, is what had happened by the time Debbie Bakker, mother of a second-grade boy at Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in the Cupertino Union School District, volunteered in her son’s portable classroom last fall. “I was there about five minutes when I started to feel odd,” Bakker recalls. “I became visually disoriented, I felt a tingling in my fingers, and I started to have muscle tremors. The room started spinning, and I couldn’t listen to what anybody was saying. By the time I got out of there, I had full muscle tremors from head to toe. My heart was racing; I could hardly breathe.”

Bakker’s doctor eventually diagnosed a severe allergic reaction caused by overexposure to toxic materials. She now describes herself as chemically sensitive and carries a special injection kit in the event of an anaphylacticshock.

At first, the school district found no problems with the portable. But the district began taking the complaint seriously after a second incident in which a teacher and parent were overcome by noxious fumes in the regular school building, which was being remodeled. Parents began meeting to research the problem, collecting information about the health of children and teachers at McAuliffe. Eventually, they asked the district to educate its teachers about ventilation in the portables and requested a “flush-out”—a process for eliminating chemical odors in which a building is aerated for long periods of time.

“When the parent became ill, we began to ventilate the (portable) and during Thanksgiving we aired out all the (portables) through the whole vacation period,” says Jerd Ferraiuolo, Cupertino’s director of facility modernization.

Ferraiuolo says he checked the children’s absence and illness reports at the school for the first month of the current school year, comparing the records of students housed in the portables with those in the regular building. He found no difference in the number of one-day absences, though he did report minor differences in the rates of two-day and three-day absences.

“The portables are gone now,” says Ferraiuolo. “But that incident was the beginning of special attention to environmental problems in the school.”

Copyright 1995 San Jose Mercury News