MBUSD mold, asbestos abatement costs $1.2 million
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Education last week allocated $1.2 million for the abatement of asbestos disturbed at Mira Costa High School and mold discovered at schools throughout the district.
The asbestos problem, which is the result of a contractor sanding a floor at the Mira Costa library in mid-August, is closer to complete remediation. School officials were awaiting final approval from the LA County Department of Public Health and expected the library to reopen this week. The cost of that remediation effort was $245,000, although it may not be final. The South Coast Air Quality Management District is expected to levy a fine.
The mold problem has proven to be larger, more costly, and more difficult both to assess and remediate. The school board allocated $950,000 to immediate remediation efforts at its Nov. 7 meeting, after last month authorizing the hiring of an additional maintenance supervisor and two new maintenance workers.
At a workshop dedicated solely to district facility issues, which took place prior to the regularly scheduled board meeting, Assistant Superintendent Dawnalyn Murakawa-Leopard told the board that 214 spaces in the district had been tested for mold thus far, and 33 spaces — including 24 classrooms — have required remediation. The problem appears most endemic at Manhattan Beach Middle School and MCHS, but has also been found in multiple rooms at Grandview, Pacific, Meadows, and Robinson elementary schools as well as a single room at MB Preschool.
“This has really been an unprecedented experience for us,” Murakawa-Leopard said.
District officials say the problem was discovered in August. Some teachers, however, say they’ve been reporting mold or moisture-related problems long before this year. Two teachers at Manhattan Beach Middle School, where the mold problem appears to be the most pervasive, reported problems years ago. Teacher Barbara Umanoff contacted MBMS administrators in 2015, while teacher Liz Laffoon emailed the district at least 11 times since 2011 regarding pools of water and leaks in the roof of her classroom so that they could schedule a roof replacement.
Laffoon, who went public with her concerns via the NextDoor social media site, remarked that it was ironic that the district is now emphasizing a “See something, say something” approach to problems.
“I did say something,” she wrote. “Over and over and over again.”
Murakawa-Leopard has traced at least part of the problem to maintenance staff understaffing. After more than a dozen years of budget cuts, that maintenance staff is only 10 people; according to Murakawa-Leopard, this is 35 short of what a district of MBUSD’s size would normally need to adequately maintain its facilities.
Shawn Chen, the president of the Manhattan Beach Unified Teachers Association, said that between 30 and 35 teachers are currently without classrooms due to the remediation process. At least five teachers and three students, she said, have suffered health problems that appear to be related to mold exposure. Chen laid the blame directly on MBUSD leadership.
“This is an ongoing issue that they are too late to and not proactive enough to fix,” Chen said. “They are trying to whitewash the problem. It seems like the only reason they are fixing it is because it can’t be ignored.”
Chen said the shortage of maintenance workers is the result of mismanagement.
“It’s just a lame excuse. Do your job,” she said. “If you are going to build buildings, work a maintenance schedule into it, which they did not do…They had an increasing number of buildings and a decreasing number of maintenance staff. It’s not rocket science to figure out. They are not maintaining these buildings, and it’s they who are trusted to do so — it’s their job. The public trusts them to do this job.”
The school board last week adopted an indoor air quality management plan intended both to address current problems and to prevent future problems from occurring.
Superintendent Mike Matthews, in an interview, said that the unprecedented nature of the problem has made it more difficult to address. He said that sporadic mold-related issues that had been reported in past years had usually been addressed, but that mold often reappears. Getting rid off the mold is possible as long as you hire professionals that know exactly how to do the mold clean up correctly.
“This experience has not been anything any of us had been through before, so we have learned quite a bit in the process,” Matthews said. “We believe the new indoor air quality plan will prevent this from happening again. So we will be better for it, as difficult and challenging as it has been to go through.”
“If we can successfully address and clear where there is mold, and we can identify in our buildings where there is the potential for mold, that is what it will take to create a safe learning environment for everybody. Mold happens. And when it does happen, you find it, you remediate it, you make sure it’s safe for everybody, and you move forward.”
Matthews also said that upcoming bond measure work includes new roofing at most district schools, which will help prevent the recurrence of mold problems. He also noted bond plans include the replacement of a third of district portable classrooms, which appear to be more susceptible to mold than brick and mortar classrooms. He acknowledged that the $1.2 million hit to the district’s general fund “will require some belt-tightening” but said that it differs from past budget problems in that it does not represent an ongoing expense.
“We hope this is a one-time expense and it’s not going to be ongoing if we successfully address it,” Matthews said. “This is not a long-term funding issue for us.”
Educators at Mira Costa, meanwhile, hope that the asbestos problem will be a thing of the past any day now. One of the biggest problems has been the fact that the library has been under containment, including rooms where the school’s textbooks are stored. Principal Ben Dale did a walking survey this week to see how teachers have coped with a lack of textbooks. He found that 23 of 106 teachers do not use textbooks, and of the remaining 83, 41 rated textbook usage as heavy. Teachers have found various ways to make do without textbooks, including using PDF versions of books and even having students photograph pages of books to take home and study.
“What I hope you see here is the remarkable job teachers do,” Dale wrote in an email sent to MCHS parents. “The good and the bad of teachers in these situations lies in their ability to scrape, scrounge and find a way. This principle applies to teachers everywhere. The good comes from getting it done. The bad is that we come to depend on their grit in times of crisis or diminished resources. May we never take it or them for granted.”