Students learning in tents. Libraries and gyms offline. Vermont鈥檚 first-in-the-nation law requiring schools to test for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, has caused innumerable disruptions.
Now, school officials in Hartford say that PCB contamination could require the district to rebuild over half its high school.
And while lawmakers promised to pay for all testing and remediation when they enacted their mandate, the state has already burned through nearly all available funding 鈥� with less than half of Vermont鈥檚 schools having undergone testing.
While school officials in Hartford are publicly contemplating and planning for worst-case scenarios, the path forward in the district remains unclear. While funding is one problem, agreeing with the state about the required course of action is another.
Patricia Coppolino, a senior environmental program manager at the Agency of Natural Resources, said the state hadn鈥檛 yet endorsed a remediation plan for the district.
鈥淚t鈥檚 important to carefully weigh each option to make sure it will be the best fit for Hartford,鈥� she wrote in an email.
According to Hartford superintendent Caty Sutton, the state has suggested less aggressive approaches to dealing with the problem than the district would like. But local school officials, Sutton said, are hesitant to accept solutions that leave contaminated materials in place.
鈥淲e've been told that we could use a strategy such as encapsulation or increased ventilation,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut the issue with that, again, is that's not removing the source material.鈥�
State lawmakers enacted the mandate for schools to test indoor air for PCBs, a class of probable human carcinogens, in 2021. Because Congress banned PCBs in 1979, the requirement applies to all schools in Vermont built or renovated before 1980.
Vermont is the first and only state in the country with such a universal school testing mandate in place, and the science of PCB remediation continues to evolve. , but local officials have complained bitterly about the disruptions that a trial-and-error approach to mitigation has had on their schools.
At Twin Valley Elementary School in Wilmington, for example, the school installed noisy and energy-intensive carbon air filtration units on the advice of the state. Follow-up testing showed concentrations of PCBs subsequently went up 鈥� not down.
Hartford is reluctant to embrace the state鈥檚 suggestions, Sutton said, because the district has already piloted some of those strategies and they didn鈥檛 work.
The majority of schools that have undergone testing in Vermont haven鈥檛 discovered high levels of the contaminants in the air. But when the toxic, man-made chemicals have been found, the resulting disruptions have been dramatic.
At North Country Union High School, the school year started in tents. Students at the Newport school have since moved back inside, but after spending over $7 million, remediation is still not done.
North Country wasn鈥檛 the only school to temporarily educate students in tents 鈥� that happened at Bellows Falls Union High in Westminster last year. That district recently completed an HVAC project that helped mitigate the problem, but it used leftover pandemic-relief aid to fund the effort and a Trump clawback could now leave them with .
Despite multiple attempts by lawmakers in the Vermont House to halt the program, the Senate has declined to act, and the mandate remains on the books. The state is suing Monsanto, which manufactured PCBs, in an attempt to recover testing and cleanup costs, and Attorney General Charity Clark has told lawmakers that formally ending the program could hurt the state鈥檚 case.
But while the law technically remains in place, Vermont has in practice already paused its program as funding dwindles.
鈥淧CB testing is currently on hold while we work to address some schools with elevated concentrations in indoor air,鈥� Coppolino said last week. 鈥淲e are supporting schools that wish to conduct testing or work with their own funds and will try to reimburse them when we have received additional funds.鈥�
The Hartford district is one such district that went ahead with voluntary testing. The state had sought to halt testing new schools before it was done with all of the schools in Hartford, but local officials insisted that testing also occur at the White River School, an elementary school.
鈥淲e didn't think it was responsible to not test the last remaining school in the district,鈥� Sutton said. Test results at the elementary school did not reveal elevated levels of PCBs, but the district is still awaiting reimbursement.
Statewide 鈥� and including $16 million that was sent to Burlington 鈥� Vermont has already invested $37.5 million into PCB testing and remediation. Just a little over $3 million is left. That鈥檚 despite the fact that the state has tested fewer than half of all the schools that it is required to test by 2027. So far, 148 schools have undergone testing. Another 180 are on the list, according to Coppolino.
The PCB program is this month. But most of that is expected to be spent on schools with a backlog of remediation bills 鈥� and public education officials worry it still might not cover cleanup costs in schools that already know they have a PCB problem.
With state funding uncertain, Vermont schools have sought relief in court. The state鈥檚 lawsuit against Monsanto, which is now owned by the German multinational Bayer, is not the only Vermont-based litigation seeking financial compensation from the company. A coalition of school districts, including Hartford, is also suing, and the Burlington School District has filed its own standalone suit.
The company is facing a flurry of PCB-related litigation and a spate of multi-million dollar settlements, including , and , have raised hopes that court action could bear fruit in Vermont. But skeptics say it could take years 鈥� and that local schools might get pennies on the dollar, if they get anything at all.
For her part, Sutton says she remains hopeful litigation will allow her district to one day recoup expenses.
鈥淲e just need to put one foot in front of the other,鈥� she said.
