Santa Clarita Schools Plan ‘Clean Sweep’ of Chemicals

Hazardous chemicals will be removed from science laboratories at high schools in the Santa Clarita Valley in the next few weeks in a “clean sweep” prompted by a wave of new state regulations, school officials said.

Until now, no up-to-date inventory has been kept of hazardous chemicals in the school system.

“I don’t even know what there is, whether all that stuff is just three little bottles or there’s lots of it,” said James Bown, director of support services for the William S. Hart Union High School District, which runs the four high schools in the area.

“Since the teachers are not always experts on what should and shouldn’t be kept, I’m going to have a person who is a chemist from a hazardous waste disposal firm do the survey,” Bown said.

He said the district has contracted with Disposal Control Service Inc. to inspect science storerooms and classrooms, searching for old, unlabeled or hazardous chemicals, which would later be removed.

Methods Arbitrary

The company will also recommend new storage methods and safety equipment for the schools, Bown said.

For years, high school chemistry teachers bought safety equipment and set up storage methods arbitrarily, said Tom Leth, who teaches chemistry and physics at Hart High School in Newhall. “You pretty much did your own thing,” he said.

But several recent pieces of legislation, aimed primarily at businesses but also including nonprofit entities such as schools, now require that detailed lists of hazardous chemicals be provided to employees and to local agencies--the first for personal safety, the second so that fire departments and other emergency services are aware of potential dangers at particular locations.

Removal of Old Chemicals

As of last year, schools also were required by state law to create guidelines for the regular removal and disposal of old or dangerous chemicals.

The state Department of Education and Cal-OSHA, the state agency that monitors employee safety, have been providing assistance to school districts on how to meet the new regulations, said Thomas Sachse, head of the state’s science education unit.

Visits to science laboratories last week at three of the district’s four high schools--Hart, Saugus and Canyon--disclosed that, with a few exceptions, the schools have begun to remove hazardous chemicals and to add safety features.

Jay Headley, chairman of the science department at Saugus High School, showed off the safety features of his spacious science laboratory.

Chemicals are stored on earthquake-resistant shelving in a large storeroom that was free of strong chemical odors. The room is equipped with separate storage cabinets for acids and flammable chemicals, as the state science unit recommends. However, the chemicals on open shelves were stored in alphabetical order rather than by compatible groups, as the state recommends.

At Canyon High, storage also was alphabetical.

Alphabetical storage can place incompatible chemicals together--chemicals that, if combined during an accidental spill, can explode or create potentially lethal vapors.

Hart High was the only one of the three schools that had chemicals arranged in compatible groups--organic chemicals on one shelf, metals on another. Teacher Leth said he used experience gained as an industrial chemist to reorganize the supplies.

Teachers at all three schools said alphabetical storage persists despite the potential danger because it is simpler for new teachers, or those with less expertise in chemistry, to understand.

“It shouldn’t be alphabetical, but you can’t find the damn stuff otherwise,” said Jim Foster, a chemistry teacher at Canyon High.

Other Safety Precautions

All three high schools had eye-wash stations and a supply of protective eye wear, either goggles or wraparound safety glasses, as recommended by state safety officials. Many high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were found to lack such items in inspections earlier this year.

Hart High School budgeted $1,500 for improvements to its laboratories last year, Assistant Principal John Schirmer said. The money will go toward the purchase of fire blankets, respirators and special kits for cleaning up spills of poisonous mercury.

The effect of tight budgets has forced the school to compromise on some improvements. For example, Schirmer said, the school opted to buy inexpensive trays designed to catch chemicals that leak while in storage rather than buy new storage cabinets.

“With the special cabinets, you’re talking about $700 or $800,” Schirmer said.

Another problem that has vexed science teachers at schools in the rapidly growing Santa Clarita Valley is finding enough space to store chemicals properly as the school population continues to swell, several teachers said. “The more students you have, the more chemicals you need and the less space you have,” Leth said.

Storage Room Packed

At Hart High, the storage room was tightly packed with materials for physics and chemistry classes. When the door to the storeroom was opened by Leth, an acrid smell of chemicals emerged. The crowded shelves contained many old bottles, but Leth said most of the dangerous chemicals had been removed.

Leth recalled an incident from his days as an industrial chemist that he said pointed out the need for a carefully updated, consistent storage method.

He once discovered an old container of ether that had not been discarded because it was shelved with bottles of isopropyl alcohol. He was about to open it when he remembered that old ether can produce compounds that can easily explode. The bottle was heaved onto a trash heap and indeed exploded, he said.

He said the best thing about the new cleanup drive is that it will force chemistry teachers, who he said are instinctive hoarders, to weed out unneeded supplies.

“Practically speaking, I never use many of these chemicals,” Leth said. “But they’re expensive. You hate to throw anything away.”