School PCB Testing Program Will Continue After 'Pause' Bill Fizzles in Senate

A bill that would have triggered a pause of Vermont’s costly, time-intensive and disruptive program to test for and remove toxic PCB chemicals from older school buildings has died in the legislature.

The news dismayed House Education Committee chair Peter Conlon (D-Cornwall), who pushed for a pause, as well as some school administrators dealing with the fallout from elevated PCB levels in their schools. The state is paying for the work, which is continuing at a time when increased cost pressures on schools are causing property taxes to spike across the state.

The Vermont House passed the bill, and it also cleared the Senate Education Committee. But Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central) chose not to bring it up for a vote before the legislature adjourned in the early hours last Saturday. He told Seven Days that sunsetting the program without a complete accounting of the number of schools affected by the chemicals could hurt an ongoing lawsuit against PCB manufacturer Monsanto.

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, who filed the lawsuit last year, testified about the testing program before the Senate Education Committee last month. She said she believed the program should continue to protect the health of students and staff and to ensure equality among school districts.

When asked whether pausing the program would threaten the lawsuit, Clark demurred.

“I wouldn’t want to sit here on the record and let Monsanto know what our litigation strategy is,” Clark said. “I think it would have an impact on our case, but I’m not at liberty to go into a lot of the details, unfortunately.”

Baruth also said the Agency of Natural Resources is changing how it oversees the testing program, making it unnecessary to pass legislation to pause it. In recent months, the agency has committed to slowing down testing and prioritizing mitigation and remediation in more frequently used school spaces.

But administrators contending with the slow, burdensome process of PCB testing and remediation in their schools see things from a different vantage point.

Principal Chris Young has been dealing with contamination from the chemicals in numerous rooms at North Country Union High School in Newport for the past year. Testing, combined with a series of burdensome remediation efforts, has cost $1.2 million so far — and the work isn’t even close to finished. The school is almost 60 years old, with building systems at the end of, or well beyond, their useful lives, Young noted. This makes the idea of spending millions on PCB remediation especially confounding to him.

Such situations prompted Conlon to try to rein in the PCB testing program, a first-in-the-nation initiative the legislature mandated in 2021. That year, lawmakers allocated $4.5 million to test schools that were built before 1980. In 2022, the legislature set aside another $29.5 million to pay for PCB remediation, earmarking $16 million of that money for the Burlington School District, which was forced to close its high school in 2020 after finding high levels of PCBs on campus.

In 2023, Conlon proposed legislation that would pause the testing program indefinitely. The House passed the bill, but it stalled in the Senate amid opposition from the Agency of Education and Department of Health. This year, Conlon tried again with a slightly different tack. The bill, H.873, would have paused the school testing program when the pot of money for PCB remediation dipped below $4 million. The measure would have also repealed a requirement that all 324 schools in Vermont built or renovated before 1980 be tested for PCBs by July 1, 2027.

The House passed the new version of the bill this year, and it almost made it to the finish line. Last Thursday, the penultimate day of the legislative session, the Senate Education Committee approved it unanimously. But it ultimately fizzled in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Conlon thinks that’s unfortunate. The state’s lawsuit against Monsanto will likely take a long time to wind its way through the court system, he said. He doesn’t believe Vermont taxpayers should be on the hook for paying for the PCB testing program in the interim.

Conlon also doesn’t think it makes sense to move forward with the program without knowing what it will end up costing the state.

Of the 153 schools that have been tested, 54 have airborne PCB levels that require further action under state guidelines. But the state Department of Environmental Conservation has only approved three “corrective action plans,” which are needed for remediation work to begin.

Another 171 schools still need to be tested.

Meanwhile, money for the program is dwindling. Of the original $4.5 million for air testing, only $183,000 remains. Several months ago, the state moved another $3.5 million into the testing fund to continue the work. The state has distributed $11 million to schools for mitigation and remediation and earmarked another $6.3 million for distribution. North Country Supervisory Union superintendent Elaine Collins said it is “disappointing and worrisome” that the testing pause legislation wasn’t passed.

Her district includes North Country Union High School, which is using a cramped conference room this year as a classroom for its culinary program. Students missed two days of school in December and January to allow teachers to prep their rooms for a PCB-related project. And administrators had to spend days creating a spreadsheet with student schedules for the Department of Health to prove that no one was spending more than a certain number of hours per day in a specific classroom.

The situation is similarly taxing at Twin Valley Elementary School in Wilmington, where high levels of PCBs were discovered in the gym and library in March 2023. Since then, more than $2 million has been spent on additional testing and remediation, according to principal Rebecca Fillion.

A project completed this winter that removed PCB-laden fireproofing spray yielded mixed results. The library’s airborne PCB levels decreased enough that the school was able to reopen the room to students, with a celebration marking the occasion, earlier this month. But the gym’s PCB levels remain elevated. For the remainder of the year, that space is off-limits to students. They’ll continue to eat lunch in their classrooms so that the cafeteria can be used as a makeshift gym.

The school has also seen a decline this year in preschool enrollment, which Fillion attributes to families’ concern about PCBs. The many hours she’s spent dealing with the testing program have also left less time for other important leadership work she’s expected to do as principal.

During the pandemic, administrators and teachers learned how important it was for students to be in their school buildings, Fillion said. She worries about how the PCB-related restrictions are affecting them.

At a time when the state is hard-pressed to fund education and has many aging school buildings, Fillion said she’s worried about the amount of money being spent on PCB remediation.

That’s a concern for Rep. Conlon, too.

In a year when property taxes to fund education are soaring and cost containment has become a rallying cry, Conlon doesn’t think it makes sense to soldier on with an initiative that is likely to cost the state countless millions.

“If we don’t know we have enough money,” Conlon said, “why do we keep testing?”