By Ellen Barry

Portland, Maine — Freckled Ashley Olmstead was ready to plunge into her sixth year at Jack Elementary, but the second-to-last week of summer found her on tiptoe, peering through the windows, looking for the toxic mold everyone is talking about.  Inside, the building looked as peaceful as it always has at the end of summer:  chairs were stacked on top of desks, and staplers and poster paints lay exactly where they were in mid-August, when a medical consultant declared the site too risky even for teachers to duck in and pick up their textbooks.

The magic word behind Jack Elementary School’s sudden closing is Stachybotrys chartarum, the slimy green-black mold that has suddenly become a public health emergency after growing quietly in the dark for thousands of years.  Although scientists say there are no proven links between Stachybotrys and serious illness, the last year has brought a wave of national reports on ill effects that range from flu symptoms to pulmonary hemorrhage — accompanied by a wave of multi-million-dollar lawsuits.

The reexamination of mold is playing out in dramatic fashion at Portland’s largest elementary school.  For years, Superintendent Mary Jo O’Connor had heard complaints about the air quality in Jack Elementary, but on Aug. 15, when an environmental testing service first found traces of Stachybotrys in the air, she made up her mind instantly.  The next day, the school was shut down.  “I just don’t want to fool with it anymore,” said O’Connor, who has rented a downtown space for the school.  “Some decisions you make you kind of waffle on, but in this case I felt it was clear what I had to do.”

In the murky world of mold as a health risk, though, O’Connor’s quick decision is anything but simple.  While air quality specialists hailed the superintendent’s caution, others are angry that they were exposed to the risk for so long.  Teachers at the school have spent the last two weeks in turmoil about what harm they may have suffered during their careers at Jack Elementary, said Kathleen Casasa, president of the Portland Education Association, which represents most of Jack’s teachers.

Over 20 years, teachers at Jack have complained of “any number” of health effects that may be associated with the mold, including cancerous tumors, miscarriages, nausea, neurological effects like confusion, and the amputation of a leg because of skin problems, and they are aggressively researching possible links to mold, Casasa said.  She added she would “not rule out” a lawsuit against the school district.  Although “there is some relief on the staff’s part that they haven’t been making it up,” Casasa said, “the anxiety is just higher than that.”

Susan Upham, the physician who recommended that Jack Elementary be closed, said “only rarely” do people report serious infections.  Initially, she had recommended that teachers be allowed to collect their belongings, but then one teacher who went in had such a severe allergic reaction that Upham changed her mind and barred them from entering.  “I’ve seen this happen in other situations where stachy is present,” she said.  “It’s a worrisome environment.  I mean, weird things happen.  I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Meanwhile, teachers in other Portland schools are asking that their own facilities be tested for mold, Casasa said.  O’Connor said she had no plans to initiate that expensive process, and would test facilities only in response to complaints from faculty and students, as she did in the case of Jack Elementary.  “This is apt to set off a rash of complaints,” she said, adding, “You can’t shut down the whole school system.”

The questions buzzing around Munjoy Hill are being asked all over, as an old pest is reassessed as a new hazard.  Some experts say even if the threat of Stachybotrys has been overblown by media reports and lawsuits, this year’s focus has brought much-needed attention to the unglamorous topic of indoor air quality.  In Maine, school closings because of air quality have traditionally occurred every other year, said Norman Anderson, research coordinator of the American Lung Association of Maine.  But under the scrutiny that has accompanied the Stachybotrys scare, three have closed in the last 15 months.

“We’ve been dealing with complaints and trying to address complaints for years about indoor environments,” Anderson said.  “The good news from that standpoint is that it’s beginning to be taken seriously.” Unless school districts have delayed basic repairs to the point where mold reached a crisis level, school closings shouldn’t be necessary, said Mary Beth Smutts, regional air toxicologist for the Environmental Protection Agency.  Smutts recommended that rather than testing universally for Stachybotrys, schools should focus on preventive measures, such as stopping the leaks that create a breeding ground for the paper-loving mold.  Besides, she said, Stachybotrys is pervasive enough that it probably exists in a vast number of schools.

“If you test for stuff, you’re going to find it,” she said.  “It’s too bad it takes that drama to get a school to do maintenance.” The drama is heightened because even scientists “are just beginning to appreciate the health hazards associated with mold,” Anderson said.  The most common reaction is hayfever-like symptoms, but lawsuits against insurance companies have painted a much more dramatic picture, with families contending that Stachybotrys made their houses so dangerous that they simply had to walk out, abandoning their possessions.  A Texas woman, Melinda Ballard, was recently awarded $32 million for mold damage to her 22-room mansion.  A student in Chicago this spring filed a class action lawsuit against his school district, and last week three teachers in Ohio sued their school district for $2 million apiece.

Public awareness has risen, meanwhile, sometimes to the point of panic.  Even the man who found the Stachybotrys spores in Jack Elementary School — an environmental tester who dubs himself “the Mold Man of Maine” — says the public response to mold reports in the media is sometimes overly dramatic.  “They watched the ’48 Hours’ show, ‘This Mold House,’ and you wouldn’t believe the amount of calls we got the next day.  We call them ‘nut calls.’  They call up and say, ‘My house is killing me,”‘ said Bruce Hackett, whose company, Environmental Safety and Hygiene Associates, was involved in all of Maine’s recent school closings.

All those uncertainties are being played out at Jack Elementary School, which opened in 1942 and sits on a promontory above a city waste treatment plant that occasionally emits odors.  It’s also on Munjoy Hill, the poorest section of Portland, where parents have no parent-teacher organization and “tend not to rock the boat,” said Richard Larochelle, who last year decided to pull his second-grader from Jack Elementary because of concerns about air quality.  O’Connor said the school district had been responding to air quality complaints at Jack for upward of 12 years, in large part as a result of the sewage treatment plant.  But repeated air quality tests had only come up with benign mildews and molds until August 15, she said.

Several parents interviewed on Munjoy Hill said they were satisfied with O’Connor’s swift decision to shut the school.  But Melissa Darling, who is friends with a school staff member, said she blamed administrators for delaying action.  Last winter, Darling said, she was warned that her 10-year-old’s asthma might have its root in the school’s walls.

“They weren’t quite sure, but they knew something was making people sick,” said Darling.  “My son was a healthy kid before he started going to Jack and now he’s got asthma problems.”  What’s more, she is beginning to think that she might be suffering from after-effects of attending Jack 20 years ago.  She and her two girlfriends from elementary school, who are in their 30s, all have health complaints: her friends have both had cancer, and Darling complains of chronic abdominal pain.

Since O’Connor announced the closing of the school, Darling said, she has only become more frustrated.

“They just waited so damn long,” she said.

This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe on 9/2/2001. © Copyright 2001, Globe Newspaper Company.