Philly schools are ramping up asbestos work but are three years away from meeting federal requirements

Though teams are working nearly around the clock to examine the Philadelphia School District’s vast stock of aging buildings for asbestos, the school system is still falling short of its goals for inspecting and publicly reporting out data, officials said Tuesday.

To date, 277 of the district’s 293 asbestos-containing facilities — not just schools, but also garages, pools, farms, and other structures — have undergone the inspections required once every three years by the federal Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA). (Once asbestos is noted, schools need additional examinations every six months.)

Victoria Flemming, the district’s new interim executive director for the Office of Environmental Management and Services, said Tuesday that the 16 buildings that have yet to receive their three-year checks will have inspections completed by August. Officials declined to name the 16 that have not yet been scrutinized for this inspection cycle.

“We still know that we do not have the staffing and resources that we need to address all of these issues,” said Flemming, adding that the district hopes within three years to be on track to consistently inspect the 50 schools a month it must to meet federal requirements.

Each three-year inspection is a lengthy process — taking several days at least, with two inspectors working usually in the hours after students and staff occupy a school building. The district last year agreed to spend $24 million over three years on a contract with Tetra Tech, an environmental firm, to better meet the environmental demands of its old schools.

» READ MORE: Philly teachers and parents from schools closed by asbestos petition the district for better information

Final reports for each of the district’s buildings will be made available to the public, but some might not be ready until the end of the year.

“We understand this is frustrating for school communities eager for the news of the inspection,” Flemming said, but the sheer volume of data that needs to be synthesized, encompassing years of inspections and much of it now only available in paper form, makes for a laborious process.

The district is on track to inspect 49 schools this month; in April, its number was 30. Officials are “working hard to keep up the pace of our inspections given the availability of inspectors,” district spokesperson Marissa Orbanek said. “Additionally, the district is working to hire additional management planners to manage the data that these inspections are generating.”

Flemming, who assumed her new job recently after two years spent working on district asbestos issues as a contractor, underscored the fact that more asbestos discoveries will be forthcoming.

“As we improve this process, as we do additional inspections, we will identify additional material. But this is a step in the right direction,” Flemming said at a news conference held to shed light on the district’s ramped-up environmental efforts.

Officials in 2017 said it would take about $5 billion to fix all the environmental problems in Philadelphia schools, a number that has surely risen. Asked what sum of money would ensure the district would be able to keep up with its federally mandated asbestos inspection requirements, Flemming said she wasn’t sure.

“I don’t think that there’s a quick, easy answer to that question,” she said.

Six district schools have closed this year because of damaged asbestos. Of those schools, Frankford High, Mitchell Elementary, and Universal Vare Charter School are still closed. While Mitchell students have been relocated to McMichael Elementary, and Frankford special-education students are taking classes at Olney High, the bulk of Frankford’s students and all of Universal Vare’s students have been forced to shift to virtual learning for the rest of the school year.

The district has said it will work on identifying “swing spaces” that can function as alternative sites if damaged asbestos forces future closures. But those decisions can be tricky, too — when Building 21, a West Oak Lane high school, closed, officials unilaterally ordered staff and students relocate to Strawberry Mansion High, a move that the Building 21 community rejected wholesale.

Soon after Building 21 was closed, Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. disclosed that plaster at the school that had been labeled as safe for years in fact contained asbestos. Watlington acknowledged that discovery calls into question the accuracy of asbestos records district-wide.

Flemming said the district is currently running a “plaster assessment program” to identify gaps in accurate record-keeping like those discovered at Building 21 and at Mitchell, in Southwest Philadelphia.

Sixty schools have had complete audits of their plaster sample numbers; samples have been collected at 150 more. That means there are “at least 50″ schools that still must have their plaster status assessed, Flemming said.

Which schools remain to be checked is unclear.

How errors were made in the past is also not clear, but there are multiple possibilities. An AHERA report could contain 3,000 lines of data, so there is lots of room for error. Also, while the EPA requires a certain number of samples be collected per square footage to check for asbestos, the district has now moved to collecting more samples than required to be certain it’s capturing all instances of the toxin.

“What we have actively done is go back through our archive to confirm that we have the correct number of samples based on the protocol that we’re using today,” Flemming said. That’s one reason for the pace of data being produced.

Parents and staff have generally called for more transparency and information in the asbestos process.

Last week, a group of parents and teachers from some of the schools affected by asbestos this year brought their demands to Chief Operating Officer Oz Hill at district headquarters.

“We needed a better, more comprehensive plan about how asbestos was going to be remediated,” said Ta’Mora Jackson, whose daughter attends C.W. Henry Elementary in Mount Airy, which was closed for two weeks because of damaged asbestos.

The district is coping with years of neglect and underfunding, and now trying to do better, Flemming said, but it has much to overcome.

The average district building is 73 years old, constructed long before anyone knew of asbestos’ dangers. Just four district schools — including Northeast Philadelphia Community Propel Academy, which opened in 2021 — have no asbestos-containing materials.

The goal, though, is not to eradicate asbestos in district buildings; if it is intact, asbestos is not dangerous. But once it’s disturbed, it can release tiny toxic fibers.

For those who worry about what years of possible asbestos exposure might mean long-term, officials encouraged parents and staff to talk to their own doctors.

“The expectation cannot be that each and every school will be asbestos free,” Flemming said. “But that doesn’t preclude the school district from striving for providing that 21st century learning environment.”