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Email Letter from Board of Education - February 12, 2002To Executive Board. School Leadership Team Delegates, Members-at-Large and Committee Chairs, Stuyvesant High School Parents' Association |
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Ladies and Gentlemen: I write to advise you of a meeting we had Monday, February 11th in the evening with certain members of the Stuyvesant Parents' Association Executive Committee. We had proposed a meeting between senior officials at the Board of Education and our consultants with the entire Executive Committee. The PA president rejected this proposal and said she would bring a small number of Executive Committee members so "a dialogue could take place." That group turned out to be the President, David Newman, Sheldon Stachel, Mary Umeki, Howard Bader, the PA's environmental consultant, and Mark Izeman, a lawyer from NRDC. At the meeting the PA President renewed her demand that the Board expand the retrofit of the school's HVAC filtration system pursuant to a preliminary plan designed by Cosentino, a firm retained by the PA. Prior to the meeting, Robert Cascone of Burns & Roe spoke with the gentleman from Cosentino who had done this preliminary plan. Mr. Cascone reported that the Cosentino employee, who did not attend the meeting, admitted that he had not had access to the full plans of the school's HVAC system, nor had he been to the school to examine the system. Mr. Cascone estimated that the Cosentino plan would cost four times the $1.5 million prelimary Cosentino estimate and would take two years to implement. In addition, significant structural alterations would have to be built on each floor of the school, taking up classroom or hall space and turning the school into a dusty construction site. Mr. Cascone further reported that the retrofit that has been implemented at Stuyvesant, at a cost in excess of $600,000, is working very effectively, and that based on tests his firm has done the school now meets standards for hospital patient areas. (Similar retrofit strategies were employed at each of the other schools near ground zero.) Mr. Cascone's recommendation was that the additional retrofit was unnecceary, would be very disruptive to the school over a two-year period, and would impinge on the classroom space available in the school. Bernard Orlan, the head of Environmental Health & Safety at the Board of Education, reported that the air ducts had been cleaned pursuant to a protocol agreed upon by the environmental experts for the UFT, the DEP, the EPA and the Parents' Association. (Mr. Bader denies that he agreed to the protocol, although he agrees that he attended the meeting at which the testing of air from the ducts was discussed.) That protocol required that the air intake areas for the ducts be cleaned and then the system run vigorously for 24 hours with the air tested throughout. All of the air tests were negative for toxic substances that might have been caught in the ducts. In fact, all of the air tests (we take over 100 each day) have been negative for toxic substances. Mr. Orlan also reported that the air quality levels in the school were excellent. Air quality outside of the schools was greatly improved after December 15, which may be related to the fires having gone out. He stated that air quality in the school had improved even more since the retrofit. He also noted that air quality tests taken around the City have found that fine particulate levels are higher in many other areas than they are near Stuyvesant. Finally, Dr. Paul Yellin, the head of NYU Downtown Hospital and the past president of the New York chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, urged the parents to focus on issues like smoking and seat belts rather than the relatively minuscule possibility that their children would come to any harm from the air quality in and around the school. He said that while continuing anxiety in the wake of a tragedy such as September 11th is entirely understandable, as is the search for assurances of safety to a moral certainty, that such certainty is simply not possible in this area and the continuing search for it - accompanied by requests for actions not supported by the testing data or any available scientific information - is only increasing the levels of anxiety and upset among the school's students and parents, and undermining the Stuyvesant community's process of healing, learning and moving forward. Yours sincerely, David Klasfeld, Deputy Chancellor for Operations |
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