Mobile Schools combat mold growth

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March 24, 2003

Schools combat mold growth

By REBECCA CATALANELLO Staff Reporter

Fourth-grader Tyler Hensarling said his friends at Indian Springs Elementary started calling him "Dog" because of the dry, barking cough he developed while suffering bronchitis this winter.

Tyler's parents blame poor air quality at the Eight Mile community school for their son's wintertime ailment, and they have air test results showing that mold levels there are unusually high.

But school officials have maintained that the mold levels are fine, and they, too, have tests results to back them up.

Central to the disagreement is one fact: There is no standard for how much mold is too much.

"Whatever affects you may not affect me," said Maxime, one of two managers who oversee the school system's Facilities Division. "It's whatever your tolerance level is."

Mold is everywhere, especially in the moist environs of the Gulf Coast, where, as Mobile allergist Dr. Lawrence J. Sindel said, "We are in a sea of mold."

Mold requires food and water to flourish and can grow on cloth, carpets, leather, wood, Sheetrock and insulation.

In schools such as low-lying Grand Bay Middle and Theodore High, extreme mold problems have prompted school officials to react by pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into upgrading facilities, heating and air conditioning systems and more.

For Donny and Hensarling, the relativity involved in determining the dangers of mold has provided little relief.

Though the couple sent four of their children to Indian Springs Elementary in the past, they recently transferred Tyler to nearby J.E. Elementary, a brand new building just down the road.

Their daughter, the only other child still in Indian Springs, has been moved from a classroom in the newer wing, where mold issues have been raised, to another fifth-grade classroom in a different part of the school, where parents have not complained about mold.

"It's a big problem," said Barnett, executive director of Healthy Schools Network Inc., a New York-based advocacy group. "Schools are very densely occupied environments. And, for one reason or another -- and

nobody really completely understands it -- we have a lot more children at risk now than we ever had before."

About half of the nation's schools have suffered problems linked to poor indoor air quality, according to a 1995 federal report, and some of that has been mold-related. With about 20 percent of the American population spending their days inside school buildings, the potential for exposure reactions is high.

The hard part for school systems and parents alike is identifying and agreeing when mold is enough of a problem to require action.

See it, smell it, feel it:

Just about every Tuesday, head maintenance technician Jewell Malone and several members of her custodial staff head down to a walled-off section of Grand Bay Middle School wearing rubber gloves and masks.

Using spray bottles filled with bleach, they douse the walls of the vacated first-floor classrooms and hope that traces of the black mold disappear. The floor of one classroom has been dug up in one corner, and a red clay hole in the ground s a make-shift drain for a room that persistently floods during rains.

"By tonight, that hole will be full," Grand Bay Principal Louis Petro said on a recent rainy morning, standing over the crude well. "We've done everything anyone would suggest to try to solve this problem."

Once the hole fills with water, the custodial and maintenance staff use a shop vacuum to suck the pool dry.

It's a weekly ritual Malone hopes will end as soon as the building is demolished and a $2 million 30-classroom addition promised by the school board is erected in its place.

This section of the 1923 school -- which includes five classrooms and two bathrooms -- has been shut down for about three years, according to system officials. After years of classes being held in water-soaked rooms, school officials banished teachers and students to some of the school's 19 portable classrooms and erected a wall with a locking door to prevent students from entering.

Inside the closed-down rooms, wallboard has been pulled down to expose any mold growth, and empty bleach bottles are scattered between classrooms. Outside, a concrete ditch surrounds the outer wall of the building, a monument to efforts by school system workers to distance the classroom walls from the moisture-trapping dirt behind them.

It was a poorly planned building, said Sheffield, executive facilities manager for the school system.

After several attempts to correct the problem in the water-damaged first-floor classrooms, the system hired a company to test the air in the second-floor classrooms to ensure students and teachers weren't being affected by the high moisture on the first floor.

Despite the extreme mold invasion on the first floor, the school system never conducted air quality tests, officials said.

"When you see visible mold, you know it's there," said O'Hearn, an environmental supervisor for Engineering, the company that collected the air samples for the school system. "So, there's no need to test."

Even after the students had been removed from the first floor of the building, the state Department of Public Health suggested minor corrective actions at the school, where officials found mold was not visible and not found in alarming rates.

"It is recommended that the Grand Bay Middle School be thoroughly cleaned and possibly disinfected. ... Further protection can be afforded by applying paint over the cleaned areas. Possibly running dehumidifiers to offset the current propensity for watedampness to accumulate," State Toxicologist Neil Sass wrote in a letter dated April 29, 2002.

Barnett and Engineering senior engineer Trippie Dumas both said the bleach-and-paint approach alone isn't effective at stopping mold growth.

"That's like applying a pesticide to a pest infestation," Barnett said. "It might stop it in its tracks for a day or two, but the reality is, unless you remediate the underlying conditions -- unless you address the ventilation, the moisture that are present in the building that are allowing the mold to grow and eat the wall, eat the wallboard, eat the books, eat the furniture, eat the carpet and make people very ill -- you can never really get rid of it."

Barnett said there is one good test for school systems to apply when deciding whether mold is or isn't an issue.

"If you can see it, if you smell it, if you have health complaints, sick people who say they're sick only when they're in the building, you deal with it up front," she said. "You deal with it right away."

People complain :

At Theodore High School about two years ago, the complaints from teachers had been rolling in for quite a while.

They were reporting high incidents of illness. They noticed that when they were in the school, they would get sick. When they were home, they would get better.

So, the school system responded one step at a time.

First, workers removed all the carpeting. Carpet is notorious for trapping mold and dirt, and most schools today are built without it.

"The staff said they still had problems," Sheffield said.

Next, the system turned to Theodore's air ventilation system, replacing some bad, 20-year-old controls and balancing air intake with air dispersal.

When teachers still complained of problems, the system called in the air quality testers as well as the state and local health departments, Sheffield said. The August 2001 results showed that the indoor air in some classrooms had mold counts almost as high as the count outdoors.

The system facilities team replaced the school's air ducts, and in the current 2003 budget, the school board set aside enough money to redesign the school's entire air handling unit, a project that could cost up to $500,000.

Complaints about the building went on for about two years before officials finally agreed to set aside money for the ventilation overhaul.

"People grossly overreact to what they think is bad air," Sheffield said of the trial-and-error approach to addressing air quality complaints.

Sindel, the local allergist, said that while real cases of mold poisoning do occur, it is hard to pull together hard-and-fast evidence linking one person's respiratory problems directly to the conditions in a building.

"We all have different tolerances for this stuff," Sindel said. "When people walk into these things with their minds made up, they often don't find out where the real problem lies."

According to Sheffield, however, the complaints at Theodore were key to identifying a true problem.

Barnett said school systems, parents and other officials too often ignore the complaints and lean on air quality test results to tell them whether there is or isn't a health hazard in the building.

In fact, the New York-based Healthy Schools Network discourages expensive testing, partly because the results can vary so much from day to day, classroom to classroom.

In the tests conducted by Engineering, for example, third-party laboratories charged between $50 and $100 per air sample to examine the mold cultures, according to Dumas. At Indian Springs, took eight air samples. At Grand Bay, it took five.

"The reality is that a lot of money spent on testing is probably misspent," Barnett said. "If you can see it, if you can smell it, then clean it up, period. It's probably easier to clean it up, remediate it and stop the leak that is causing it. It's the cheapest, fastest thing to do."

Indian Springs affair :

The Hensarlings and the school system haven't reached an agreement on the quality of the air at Indian Springs.

When the Mobile Register asked to tour the building with Sheffield and Donny Hensarling, Sheffield refused to participate if Hensarling showed up, saying he felt the school system had gone to great lengths to address Hensarling's concerns.

So, on a tour without Hensarling that was guided by Sheffield and Mobile County school system mechanical supervisor Huey Belaire, Sheffield lifted his index finger to the ceiling of one of the classrooms in question and ran it across the tile.

"You can run your hands up here, and you may find dust, but dust is not to be confused with mold," Sheffield said, a layer of dust crumbling onto his tie. "It's not bad air."

According to the air quality test conducted by the school system, the mold levels in some of the classrooms were not that far removed from those found on the second floor of Grand Bay Middle, where the levels have been considered safe by the school system.

"We can't put a bubble on the earth," Sheffield said. "We feel we have a good, clean building."

Donny and Hensarling vehemently disagree. Now that Tyler is in his new school, his health has improved noticeably, they say.

Engineering, the company that performed the air tests for the school system, notes in its results that fungi produce health effects through inflammation, allergy or infection, and symptoms might include respiratory problems such as wheezing, nasal and sinus infections, eye irritation, dry hacking cough, nose and throat irritation and skin rashes or irritation.

Hensarling, whose concern about her son's health prompted her to research mold for a class assignment at the University of South Alabama, said she doesn't believe her fears are exaggerated.

"He's definitely hypersensitive to something in that classroom," she said. "I'm not just making it up."