[CPEO-BIF] Letter calls for more testing for New York City Schools

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

More Testing for Schools


Gail Robinson
Gotham Gazette (NY)
August 31, 2011

In the wake of the closing of a Bronx schools contaminated with a  
toxic chemical, two advocacy groups and eight members of the City  
Council have written to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott demanding  
immediate testing of city school on leased property and a public  
disclosure of he results.

Earlier this summer, the Department of Education shut Bronx New  
School, which had operated in a leased former industrial site in  
Bedford Park. Walcott has admitted the department knew of the  
contamination since January but did not tell parents until eight  
months later. The school had apparently never been tested before -  
although students attended classes there for two decades.

While other cases may not be quite that egregious, as Melissa Checker  
reported in Gotham Gazette last month, Bronx New School, also known  
as PS51X, is hardly an isolated case. The city now leases more than  
90 properties - many of them former industrial sites - for schools,  
and the regulations regarding leased properties, as opposed to those  
for sites the city owns, are lax, to say the last. Schools on leased  
sites, Checker wrote, do not have to undergo environmental review  
under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, and the city does  
not have to keep the public - including parents, staff and students -  
informed about its plans for building or monitoring those schools or  
remediating any hazards at the site.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.gothamgazette.com/blogs/wonkster/2011/08/31/more-testing- 
forschools/

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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