Creston Elementary School in Southeast Portland, photographed on Feb. 2, 2024.
Julie Sabatier / OPB
Families of Creston Elementary School students received a letter Thursday evening that began: “You may have noticed smells in the wing near the cafeteria.”
Portland Public Schools on Thursday received concerning air quality test results affecting the K-5 school in Southeast Portland. Creston enrolled about 260 students as of last school year and houses a special program for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, as part of Columbia Regional Inclusive Services, or CRIS.
According to the letter sent to families on Thursday, the school “may have an unsafe level of fungal spores,” specifically ascospores, aspergillus/penicillium and basidiospores.
While none of those are toxic, the letter states, they do have the potential to cause adverse health effects, especially to people with allergies. The issues are particularly concentrated in parts of the school that serve students who are deaf and hard of hearing.
Mark Posey, with PPS facilities and operations, and Kenzy Sorensen, with the district’s environmental health and safety team, said in the letter: “We know this will concern families, and we will do our best to address any concerns you have.”
The root cause is a leaky steam pipe near the cafeteria, according to the air quality report submitted to the district.
The district needs to repair the pipe, then assess and repair the damage to the attic above these rooms, Posey and Sorensen wrote. Once that is complete, they said, the school will be able to clean and reoccupy the rooms.
According to the district, the same rooms were tested as recently as December without concern. Posey and Sorenson told families they were pleased to learn that one of the impacted classrooms has not been in use since December anyway, and another has not been used for the last two weeks. These rooms, they said, are adjacent to the cafeteria, and windows have remained open there when it has been occupied.
They said the school will not use any of the affected classrooms until they are deemed safe.
However, a response letter from a group of concerned Creston and CRIS staff members, addressed to PPS leadership, paints another picture.
More than two dozen members of the school community — including grade-level teachers, a librarian, a school psychologist, a health assistant, a reading specialist, two custodians, at least five CRIS educators and the school’s parent-teacher association (PTA) president — say staff from the affected wing have been sharing concerns for months.
However, “they were told they needed to open their windows and wait for it to dry out,” the response letter states.
That letter also alleges that when the rooms were tested in December, they were tested “with windows wide open and all air purifiers turned up to max level, conditions under which it would be impossible to teach.”
Because of this, they argue the non-concerning results from late last year came from “extremely favorable and fabricated conditions.”
“Please understand that the affected areas are learning environments for the most vulnerable students we at Creston serve: reading intervention and our Deaf and Hard of Hearing program, which is at the heart of our Creston school community,” the group wrote.
The group letter also claims that work orders were put in last July to address the problem when it was first noticed, and that these classrooms have been used more recently than the district told families.
Will Howell with PPS district communications said the district doesn’t routinely test all of the district’s 80-plus schools like this, but they do conduct tests when complaints are made, then follow up as needed.
In the response, staff said they reached out to the district multiple times as early as December to share that their health and the health of their students were being compromised. They claim it was met “with no corrective action coming from PPS.”
The district’s report says testing was done on Dec. 13 and again on Jan. 22. The district was not able to confirm to OPB in time for publication if earlier testing was done but acknowledged a smell was noticed in the fall.
Those involved in Friday’s response letter also took issue with the fact that CRIS staff did not receive the news from the district Thursday night when families did. PPS confirmed it failed to notify CRIS staff due to an internal technical problem, which incorrectly listed staff as working at a different school site. Howell said this has since been remedied. He sent an apology to the employees on Friday.
Though district officials said Thursday that they would have updates and a timeline for repairs for families and staff early next week, the responding educators and PTA president said they want tests completed and updates sent to families by Sunday evening so parents can decide if they feel safe sending their kids to school Monday.