In Potomac, Portable Classrooms Are a Persistent Headache

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 9, 2006

Soon after she started fifth grade at Bells Mill Elementary School in Potomac, Katie Jenkins began coming home with headaches, puffy eyes and a stuffy nose. Infection followed infection, and last month she underwent surgery to remove inflamed adenoids.

About the same time that other parents came forward, her parents came to believe it was Katie's classroom, Portable No. 6, that was making her sick.

As a precaution, administrators closed two of the eight portable rooms, including Katie's, that sit on the shrinking ballfield behind Bells Mill -- one of the most prized public schools in the Washington suburbs and, not by coincidence, one of the most crowded.

Portable classrooms huddle behind hundreds of public schools in the fast-growing Washington region and thousands more across the nation. They are boxy trailers that mar the landscape, critics say, with noisy ventilation systems and stale air that sometimes seems to make teachers and students sick.

And they are an endless source of complaints.

At Bells Mill, where five other portable rooms are being repaired, parents have hired independent specialists and surveyed every student in the upper grades, compiling a list of 41 students -- out of 115 in portable classrooms -- with symptoms including headaches, chronic sinus infections and colds.

The parents have stormed school board meetings and prompted a bill in the Maryland Senate that would empanel a task force to study environmental health in public classrooms.

The dispute at Bells Mill underscores the difficulty in assessing air quality in these rooms. No federal standard exists for what constitutes bad air, no simple way to link mold to illness. Montgomery school officials say they found no elevated levels of mold or other irritants inside the Bells Mill classrooms, although the parents and their hired experts say otherwise.

"There's something in those portables," said Greer Dellafiora, whose fourth-grade daughter had daily headaches.

Portable classrooms are considered particularly susceptible to air-quality problems. They are not as well ventilated as regular classrooms and are less sturdy, more vulnerable to the elements and prone to damage while being towed from one school to the next.

Proper ventilation depends on noisy systems that teachers sometimes switch off.

Montgomery County is home to 700 of Maryland's 3,000 portables and is considered a national leader in addressing air quality in public schools, said Barnes Johnson, an Environmental Protection Agency official. The school system has two teams to investigate such problems; most systems have none.

Still, few schools have generated as many reports or as much publicity over their portable classrooms as Bells Mill. Then again, few have had quite so many lawyers, doctors, politicians and executives in their parent ranks.

On this issue, the parents have found themselves fighting something else: the community's reputation as overprivileged. "When you talk about Potomac, they kind of roll their eyes and say, 'Don't they have everything already?' " said Sen. Robert J. Garagiola (D-Montgomery), who introduced the bill.

Bells Mill awaits a multimillion-dollar renovation, scheduled to begin in 2008. Three other schools are ahead of it on the school system's priority list.

Within the Montgomery school board chambers, that list is considered sacred. So when Bells Mill parents showed up in force at two consecutive board meetings last month to demand that the school be moved up on the list, their proposition bordered on blasphemy.

Some board members offered reassurance. Valerie Ervin (Silver Spring) spoke for the skeptics. "We know there are other schools out there in similar condition," she said. "Is there some queue-jumping going on?"

That hasn't stopped the Bells Mill parents, who have alerted politicians and local media with each turn of events.

They are convinced that someone -- either the school principal, Jerri Oglesby, or someone at a higher paygrade -- has orchestrated a coverup to hide the full extent of the mold problem. The principal says she has hidden nothing.

"I know that each parent has their child that they worry about," Oglesby said. "But I have 468 children that I worry about. And I also have 68 staff that I worry about."

Parents are not the only ones complaining. Teachers who have spoken up about air quality in their classrooms say they have been harassed, muzzled and threatened with reassignment.

All three fifth-grade teachers found anonymous notes in their boxes last month, advising, "You need to keep your mouth shut." Oglesby called the missives "disgusting" and said her teachers have not been silenced.

Teachers reported respiratory problems in two of the portables at Bells Mill, Buildings 4 and 5, as early as 2003, Oglesby said. Maintenance staff installed dehumidifiers and machines to better circulate the air. Oglesby said she thought the problems were isolated.

This year, the health complaints seemed to multiply. A teacher in Portable 4 brought in a doctor's note that attributed her severe respiratory symptoms to her work environment. A teacher in a new portable, No. 6, developed a stubborn respiratory infection the first week of school. And the malaise seemed to be spreading to students.

A few weeks into the school year, Greer Dellafiora's daughter began to come home from Portable 4 "shaking, big circles under her eyes, crying" from headaches so severe that she could barely move.

"I'd put her on the couch, and by the end of the evening she would be better and do her homework and go to bed. The next day, it would all happen again," Dellafiora said.

They took her for body scans. Doctors reported a buildup of fluid on her brain. The cause was hard to pinpoint.

Parents said they didn't connect their children's symptoms to their classrooms until a PTA meeting in January, when Dellafiora stood up and told the group that her daughter had been sick all year.

"I think we all kind of looked at each other and said, 'Oh my God,' " said Marion Cantor, mother of a fifth-grader who was in a class with other students who complained of health problems.

Although parents and school officials disagree on whether the air in the portables is to blame for the respiratory complaints, a consensus is growing that water has seeped into the buildings. The school system has agreed to have an occupational health doctor interview staff and parents who reported symptoms and prove or refute the link to mold.

The portables at Bells Mill remain among the most visited classrooms in Maryland these days, hosting a parade of school board members, lawmakers and reporters.

"Everyone has said that we have to prove we're different from everybody else," Cantor said. "There must be a lot of really sick children out there, if we are the same as everybody else."

Staff writer Lori Aratani contributed to this report.