Elementary School in Crystal is Mold
Casualty
Star Tribune, July 19, 2002
Mold problems, the bane of school air quality in the Twin Cities over the past decade, is
forcing a Twin Cities elementary school to close this fall. Because of mold that has been nurtured by heavy summer rains, the
Robbinsdale School District has decided to shut down Forest Elementary in Crystal.
Staffers and students will move to Golden Valley's Olson Elementary School for at least the
2002-03 school year. Olson, which is currently empty, has been used in the past to house
students displaced by construction projects. District officials say Forest Elementary is currently safe. Summer school was held at the
site -- the last day being Thursday -- and the school houses a day-care program called
Adventure Club.
Superintendent Stan Mack said parents would be offered day care at a different site if
they're concerned. He said air quality at the school is being monitored monthly.
Mack said the mold problems were discovered as part of the district's normal monitoring
procedures. More intensive monitoring was begun in spring 2001 once the mold was discovered.
The district also attempted stopgap measures to stop the mold's growth. The source of the
problem, Mack said, is a tunnel system under the school's floors. The tunnels house heating
pipes and rest on earth, which is where the moisture that breeds the mold forms.
Reports from Tamarack Environmental Inc., the district's air-quality consulting firm,
indicated that because of the air-quality concerns, the school's students and staff
shouldn't occupy it during the coming school year unless measures are taken to fix the
problems, which could cause or worsen such respiratory ailments as asthma and allergies. But
even temporary measures to clean up the 50-year-old school's mold would cost $500,000 to
$1.5 million.
Such costly and temporary remedies, Mack said, "would be throwing good money after bad, and
not a wise investment when we couldn't guarantee over a long period of time that they would
permanently solve the problem." Remodeling the school as a long-term solution would cost more than $9 million, according to
district estimates. That's even more than it would cost to build a new school. Indeed, Mack
said he wants to hold an election, possibly as early as December, to try to get voter
approval to build a new school on the Forest Elementary site.
Olson Elementary is 4 miles from Forest. In moving, "The only issue of inconvenience is a
little longer bus ride," Mack said. Forest had 452 students last year.
Mack said the planned closing marks the first time that the district has had to shut down a
school because of poor air quality. But other elementary schools have mold problems too,
though less severe. That's a factor in the district's remodeling of all 12 of its elementary
schools, five of which already have been remodeled.
Mack said the first schools renovated were those with the worst air-quality problems. And
Sandburg Middle School, in Golden Valley, was renovated in 2000 to eliminate a worsening
mold problem. Other Twin Cities districts -- Anoka-Hennepin and Mounds View among them -- have had to
close schools with severe mold-related air-quality problems. In the Anoka-Hennepin district,
Andover's Crooked Lake Elementary School was shut down for several months in 1997 and 1998
to get rid of mold at a cost of more than $2 million. In New Brighton, the Mounds View
district's Pike Lake Elementary School was closed for about a month in 1996, then again for
much of the 2000-01 school year to combat mold problems.
Dozens of Minnesota schools each year work to solve air-quality problems. Nationwide
statistics from the U.S. Government Accounting Office showed that, in 1995, more than half
of the nation's schools had air-quality problems, and that mold was the main culprit.
Mack noted that the district administration building is also experiencing some air-quality
problems.
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