Illness-Plagued School Spruced Up

Several hundred parents and youngsters received a sneak preview Thursday of the spruced-up Midland Elementary School campus, where dozens of students and some teachers reported mysterious illnesses last spring.

The Poway school, oldest in the Poway Unified School District, has a new coat of paint, an expanded parking lot, new classroom carpets and a new principal, Abby Silliker, who replaces Fred Van Houten at the trouble-plagued campus.

But the main topic of conversation still centered on last spring’s mysterious respiratory sicknesses, which parents blamed on high levels of fungus and bacteria in some of the rooms.

Midland PTA members who formed a task force last spring to point out potential sources of the outbreak of rashes and other allergic reactions were out in force Thursday, passing out handbills expressing their continued concerns over conditions at the school.

Main among them was the district’s refusal to release a report by an environmental testing firm hired to determine what was causing the mysterious maladies.

Two district administrators, Walter Swanson and Romeo Camozzi, said the report, prepared by Med-Tox Associates Inc., will be made public Monday--the first day of school in the Poway district.