Toxic City: Sick Schools, a recent Inquirer and Daily News series, prompted Bob Brady, Brendan Boyle and Dwight Evans, Philadelphia’s congressmen, to write a letter to Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi. The three urged the House Speaker and House Minority Leader to use federal money to repair deteriorating city schools. The series looked at 19 elementary schools throughout the city.
Young children in Philadelphia are exposed to serious environmental threats in about half of the city’s public schools. Mold spores, lead and asbestos fibers are only a few of the 9,000 environmental problems recorded by the newspapers. While school district officials found fault with some of the collection practices used, they did admit that there was not enough money in their budget to repair the schools.
While Philadelphia property owners cannot legally rent housing with damaged lead paint to tenants with small children, no such law exists to protect Philly’s children from learning in classrooms with damaged lead paint. The school district does not bother to test for lead contamination on surfaces; the report found classroom and hallway floors with contamination levels far higher than the federal hazard level at some schools.
At one school, Lewis C. Cassidy Academics Plus in Overbrook, conditions were so bad that students wrote their state representative for help. The toxic conditions at Cassidy included rats in the lunchroom and cockroaches in milk cartons, in addition to other asthma triggers. A former teacher called the school a horror story. Asthma is a problem for more than one quarter of Philly’s school children, which is almost twice the national average.
Teachers have been complaining about these conditions for years. Many parents agree with Dwight Evans, who said, “It is entirely unacceptable for our students to be expected to succeed in classrooms that are crumbling right before their very eyes.”
