Education Beat Takes an Ill Turn

Reporters covering an education beat often have their telephones ring off the hook with calls from parents upset or concerned about a particular issue.

Sometimes these calls provide useful story tips, but more often they are routine, with parents simply venting their frustration over anything from budget cuts to the transfer of a popular principal.

Last November, however, barely a week after being assigned to cover the Capistrano Unified School District, I began receiving calls from the parents of some fifth-grade students at Truman Benedict Elementary School that were anything but run-of-the-mill.

Their children had just been moved from a brand-new portable classroom to the school’s library after teacher Kristen Schultz reported that since the beginning of the school year, 80% of her students had complained of nausea, chest pains, headaches, dizziness and breathing difficulties.

Schultz, who told officials at the San Clemente school that she also felt sick, said there was a strong odor inside her portable classroom and an adjoining one. She feared the classroom itself may have been causing the illnesses and refused to continue teaching inside the room. Students in the second classroom were also relocated as a precaution.

The possibility that something inside the portable classroom might be making students sick certainly is newsworthy.

But after visiting the school and filling several notebooks with extensive background information and dramatic quotes from Schultz, other teachers at the school, parents and district officials, there was still no concrete evidence linking the smell inside the classrooms to the illnesses.

The principal said many students throughout the school were suffering from the flu and, in addition, a district official speculated that the symptoms among Schultz’s students could be attributed to “the power of suggestion,” especially since there had not been a similar outbreak in the adjoining room.

Schultz, who was still relatively new to the district, was reluctant to be interviewed. But she agreed to talk, she said, because she was genuinely scared and concerned and didn’t want to return to the portable classroom until she could be assured that it was safe.

The story sat in limbo inside my computer, half-written, for more than three weeks and I didn’t know if it would ever see the light of day. I could sense the anxiety on the part of Schultz and the parents, but writing the story at that time could have led to unnecessary mass hysteria.

What if there was no link?

During that time, the district ordered the Orange County Health Care Agency to test the classrooms for formaldehyde, trichloroethane and benzene, but nothing unusual was found.

In addition, Schultz and a student in the adjoining classroom had extensive blood tests done which revealed a higher than average level of trichloroethane and benzene in the blood of the teacher and the 11-year-old student.

There was the link.

On Dec. 11, the story ran in our newspaper and the reaction was instant. The school was besieged with local print and broadcast reporters; worry and speculation among parents was rampant.

The district conducted further tests, which also came up negative. The consensus was that if there were toxics in the rooms, they had since dissipated. School officials concluded and that the brand-new classrooms probably hadn’t been aired out properly and that poor ventilation was most likely at the root of many of the symptoms, which struck the more susceptible children.

The children at Truman Benedict never returned to the classrooms. The buildings have since been declared safe and are now being used as a reading lab and for music classes.

In the end, I think the series of stories helped to raise awareness and, thankfully, there was no lasting health impact on any of the children, all of whom remain healthy.

But two months after the December story had run, it felt like deja vu when I was flooded with calls from parents of students at Carl Hankey Elementary School in Mission Viejo.

Most had either read or heard about the situation at Truman Benedict--which is in the same school district--and became worried after two third-graders inside a brand-new portable classroom at Hankey suffered seizures. They wondered if there might be a link between the seizures and the new portables.

At a special meeting, more than a dozen of the 50 parents there said their child had recently experienced headaches and nausea. A subsequent survey among more than 200 parents revealed a 20%-higher-than-average incidence of illness among students in four new portables at the school.

But the students were never removed from the classrooms and extensive tests revealed no toxics. A link between the seizures and the new classrooms was also never found.

The school district, which uses more than 500 portable classrooms at its 29 schools to help house more than 28,000 students, later said that the problems and parental reaction situations at the two schools had forced them to take a hard look at the installation procedures used for new portable classrooms--particularly at the airing-out process required before children begin using the rooms.