For the Sake of the Children

How did Patrick manage to endure this month after month? It would drive Dana nuts.

But the reporter perked up when the superintendent switched gears to the mold issue at the school. At the mere mention of the word mold, the kid leaned over his pad, his pen poised.

His eagerness made Dana choose her words with extra care. “I want to thank you for allowing me the chance to speak to you,” she said, reading off her first index card. She glanced up and saw Patrick staring at her. Her heart skipped a beat. Was this some sort of test?

“Thank you for giving up your evening,” Patrick told her. The comment, and the unexpected kindness in his voice, was enough to settle some of her nerves. “I understand you have some concerns about how we’ve abated the mold we discovered during repairs of the lunchroom.”

“Yes. I know you did the best that you could with the funds available at the time—” Dana was gratified by the way the Patrick’s clenched fist relaxed at her words “—but I’m afraid that the intensive testing you’re asking me to do is not serving its purpose. Without a baseline measure, checking the peak-flow meter readings of asthmatic children is not…well, it’s meaningless.”

Gabriella Jones sat forward intently. “So how do we ensure that these kids are okay and that any residual levels of mold are not affecting them?”

“Um, you can’t. Not really. Unless we can discern trends over the entire testing population, daily tests aren’t any better than weekly tests.” Dana elaborated on the amount of instruction time the children were missing, and she was pleased to note heads nodding in agreement.

Patrick, though, looked grim. He tapped a pencil on the notepad in front of him. “So what are you suggesting?”

“Well, the real solution, the ultimate solution, would be to take the mold out of the equation altogether. I don’t believe that a do-it-yourself project would be effective enough to eradicate all the mold. Plus, you’ve got lunchroom workers and faculty who are similarly exposed. Granted, the faculty and staff are like the kids, minimally exposed because they’re in the lunchroom for brief periods of time. But the lunchroom workers spend their working days in there. This could be…” She glanced at the string-bean reporter, who was madly scribbling all this down. “They have reason to go to OSHA.”

At the mention of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the point on the pencil in Patrick’s hand snapped. His jaw worked, and she could tell that he was holding back what he wanted to say.

“We’ve informed the lunchroom workers and the janitorial staff, and we’ve had no Workers’ Comp complaints,” Patrick replied evenly.

“Yet,” Dana muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said yet. You haven’t had complaints yet. Why not beg or borrow the money to put in mobile units? If this can be done for the troops in Iraq, surely someone can make a school-cafeteria-size mobile unit. Later on, you can sell it.”

Her suggestion was met with silence interrupted only by the thrum of the air-conditioning unit. The board members exchanged glances but waited for Patrick to lead the discussion.

“I agree that we should be looking out for the students’ welfare.” Patrick’s comment was apparently the signal for the other board members to relax. They settled into their chairs, only to spring back to alert with his next words. “Let’s face it. Our elementary school is over fifty years old. We cannot keep patching the old girl together with staples and bailing wire.”