Fuming Mom Helps Clear the Air on Idling Bus Problem

Cindy Trahan’s fight began four years ago when her daughter Jessica, a ninth-grader at North Country Union High School, collapsed at school, unable to breathe.

Trahan got to the school in time to ride with her daughter in the ambulance to the hospital.

“One of the guys in the back of the ambulance said, ‘We’re losing her,’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘No, you’re not losing her, you’re not losing my daughter.’ ”

Jessica, who had developed worsening respiratory problems and sensitivity to fumes, survived. She is in her first year at Johnson State College.

Her mother was convinced that Jessica’s problems, which started in her first weeks at North Country, were caused by fumes wafting into the high school building from buses that would idle outside as they dropped off kids each morning and picked them up in the afternoon.

Cindy Trahan now is a member of the North Country Union School Board and nationally recognized as an advocate for clean air inside schools.

“I became the parent from hell,” she said.

And North Country Union High School is known around Vermont and beyond as having a tough policy about school buses and delivery trucks not idling near the building. It recently received an award from the federal Environmental Protection Agency for excellence in its indoor air-quality program.

Now the state’s environmental agency has taken up the cause of healthy air in and around schools. Natural Resources Secretary Scott Johnstone recently issued a newsletter calling on Vermonters to ask their school boards to adopt policies similar to that in Newport.

“Diesel engine fumes contain a dangerous mix of pollutants, including benzene, dioxins, arsenic and more than 30 other compounds,” Johnstone said. The fumes, he added, contribute to ground-level ozone, which aggravates respiratory problems.

Johnstone has been urging parents who drive their children to and from school not to idle their cars outside. “Allowing your car to idle next to the school means children--including your children--are inhaling pollutants coming from your car,” he said in his newsletter.

Ben Davis, environmental health organizer with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said his organization has been working on indoor air-quality issues for years.

Davis said a bill pending before a Vermont House committee calls for inspections of diesel vehicles’ emissions, and requires tuneups when trucks and buses fail the tests. The tests, conducted annually and at random roadside weight and safety inspections, would involve attaching a monitor to the vehicles’ tailpipes.

Davis said he also has been working up a draft municipal ordinance for cities and towns that want to crack down on idling, but Burlington is the only Vermont community he knew of that had adopted such an ordinance to date.

When school officials at North Country first began hearing complaints of poor indoor air quality, they were slow to respond, Trahan said. But her advocacy, coupled with workers’ compensation cases brought against the school by two employees, brought the school around.

The school also hired Mary Scarpa as its new business manager, and she took up the battle against fumes. The school board didn’t adopt a formal policy until March 2001. But Scarpa was aggressive enough on the issue that Principal Robert McKenney, who came to the regional school of 1,100 students three years ago, was able to say, “By the time I got here, it wasn’t a problem any more.”

The diminutive Scarpa, a New Jersey native, is modest about her efforts. But she has a big fan in Trahan.

“For a while, Mary would run out all the time and say, ‘Shut your bus off,’ ” to any of the district’s 13 drivers whose buses were idling outside the school, Trahan said. Because the business manager oversees the bus drivers, Scarpa was the boss.

She also was able to stop the school’s vendors from idling their trucks. She asked fuel dealers to make their deliveries before school in the morning or after classes in late afternoon. And she rented a parking lot two miles from the school where the buses can warm up in the morning before beginning their day’s rounds.

Before steps were taken, including a major renovation to the building in 1998, “we had a severe indoor air quality problem,” Scarpa said. “In the afternoon, when you’d have 12 or 14 buses out front all at the same time, the fumes would come directly into the school. They’d come in when the doors were open and they’d come in through the ventilators” on the school’s roof.

As school got out one recent afternoon, buses pulled up three abreast in previously assigned spots in the driveway, ready to carry students to hometowns reaching from Montgomery to the west to Island Pond in the east.

Three that were dropping off students who had gone on field trips idled briefly--and not all at once--as they let the children out before proceeding to their assigned spaces.

Ray Patneaude of Derby was one of the drivers who pulled up and shut his engine off right away. “It’s no problem for me,” he said of the no-idling policy. “I don’t think anybody’s really had any problem with it. Some of the new drivers forget sometimes, but they’ll get used to it.”