Teachers Say Foul Emissions Hurt Students : Environment: L.A. Unified School District is looking for a way to rid Wilmington Junior High campus of odors and dust from nearby industries.

Roxanne Lawrence loves teaching. So do Deborah Benson and Lonnie Schiro. So it might seem odd that the three instructors would talk about closing down their school.

But for too long, they say, the 100 teachers and 1,900 students of Wilmington Junior High School have had to contend with the almost daily onslaught of foul odors and dust from an oil refinery, a fertilizer farm and a huge sewage plant all a few blocks from campus.

And after years of watching students and teachers complain about nausea and headaches, bloody noses and even bronchitis, Lawrence and Benson and Schiro say they’ve seen enough. Something drastic, they say, must be done about Wilmington Junior High.

“It’s child endangerment,” said Schiro, who substitutes at the school.

“The bottom line,” added Lawrence, a full-time ceramics teacher, “is that I think they should close down the school.”

Although that prospect seems unlikely, the complaints of the teachers and a growing number of parents in Wilmington is drawing more and more attention to the school. It has been enough, in fact, so that the Los Angeles Unified School District is studying how to rid the campus of the odors.

The options may be few, given the district’s budget problems and the difficulty of linking any health problems to a specific source in an area as heavily industrial as Wilmington. To date, health officials have never deemed the emissions to be hazardous to the school’s population.

Nevertheless, district officials said this week that they have begun evaluating new, state-mandated pollution emission reports prepared by local industrial and sanitation facilities to determine how and whether something can be done to curb the air assault on the school.

“It’s crazy,” said Tony Ricasa, an assistant to Harbor-area school board member Warren Furutani. “We can’t have kids coming into this kind of environment.”

Although Ricasa’s statement suggests some urgency, the school district has spent almost two years reviewing the air quality problems at Wilmington Junior High. And, officials acknowledge, the review has been characterized by glacial progress in determining whether health hazards exist at the school.

For years, teachers and parents say, the school has been overwhelmed by the foul smells generated by Fletcher Oil & Refinery Co., Kellogg Supply Inc., and the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant operated by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. All three facilities--clustered along Lomita Boulevard in Carson, on its southwest border with Wilmington--have been cited over the years by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Since 1989, Fletcher has paid $46,200 in fines for nine citations, the sanitation district, $11,500 for three violations, and Kellogg, $1,000 for one citation, according to AQMD spokeswoman Paula Levy.

But, although citations have been issued for air quality violations, studies by the AQMD and other agencies have long held that the emissions, while nauseating, are not hazardous. The most recent AQMD testing at the school was last fall, Levy said. Levels of cancer-causing benzene and carbon tetrachloride, among other substances, were only at or slightly above the levels found throughout the South Coast Air Basin, she added.

For many, including county Health Department officials, those studies suggest that the odors are a nuisance, but not much more.

“Is there a chronic health risk because of ambient pollutants? . . . The answer is no, there really isn’t,” said Dr. Paul Papanek, chief of toxics and epidemiology for the county Health Department.

Officials of the companies or agencies under fire are emphatic about the safety of their operations.

“Any time one is near any type of industry or business, you are going to have some times of odors. If you live in Gilroy, you are going to smell onions,” said Walter Neil, Fletcher’s community relations manager. However, Neil insists, the company’s studies and those of other agencies convince him that Fletcher’s operation is “not posing any danger” to Wilmington Junior High or the surrounding community.

Phil Friess, supervising engineer at the sanitation plant, also said that facility’s operations “pose no appreciable risk” to the area.

Noting that studies have shown one in four Americans--or 250,000 in 1 million--will contract some form of cancer in their lifetime, Friess said a recent study of the sanitation facility found that its operation increased the risk of cancer for nearby residents by only six in 1 million. That compares with an added cancer risk of 1,000 to 10,000 in 1 million just from living in the region, Friess said.

School officials are now reviewing that agency’s data, along with reports from other facilities, including Fletcher. But some Wilmington Junior High teachers, such as Lawrence, and parents such as Carlos Molina, are already convinced that there is an unacceptable level of pollution.

And just as teachers and parents at two schools in Carson and Torrance have protested emissions from nearby refineries, Lawrence, Molina and others in Wilmington are using the junior high as a focal point in demanding that local industry greatly curb pollution.

“The issue in a nutshell is to make this school a healthy place where people can come to work and come to be educated. And it is not that place because we have loads and loads of pollution,” said Lawrence, who has spent the last two of her 23 years as a teacher at Wilmington Junior High.

Molina, who has just formed a group called Parents Against Pollution, said: “If it was the case that there is no danger . . . then why are we getting sick?”

In the past several years, both said, they have seen or heard of numerous cases of students and teachers taking ill when the winds blow fumes from the refinery or the sanitation plant or the composting facility east toward the campus. “We’ve had a lot of people very ill. Bloody noses. Bronchitis. Throat infections. Nausea,” Lawrence said.

Moreover, the problems resulting from the odors and dust, she and other teachers said, affect not only the health but the performance of students.

“You hear the kids say, ‘This school is dirty. It smells. And they are really angry inside . . . and when you are angry, it keeps you from learning,” said Lawrence, who noted that Wilmington Junior High recently had among the lowest test scores in its region of the Los Angeles school district.

Drawing a connection between the foul air and the test scores is difficult at best and “reckless” at worst, said school Principal David Sowers, who noted that a variety of factors, including each school’s curriculum, play a part in student performance.

However, Sowers said the effects of local industry on the students and teachers at the school are undeniable. “I don’t know if it is injurious to health or not, but I have people who say, ‘It makes me ill or sick to my stomach,’ ” said Sowers, who says he has felt no ill effects since coming to the school last September.

And even if students seem resigned to the problem, their frustration is obvious, according to teachers such as Benson, a home economics instructor at the school for 13 years.

“We had a real bad day in May when the kids were doing a sewing project about the whales,” Benson recalled. “And one kid said, ‘I don’t care about a whale or a fish.

“He said, ‘I have to live here. Who cares about me?’ ”