Latest news with #BlairHighSchool
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Nearly half of Pasadena Unified schools have contaminated soil, district finds
Eleven of the 23 Pasadena Unified School District schools, where students have been back on campus since January, have contaminated soil following the Eaton fire, the district found. Over 40% of the schools had lead at levels exceeding the state's health-based limits for residential soil, and over 20% had arsenic levels beyond what L.A. County considers acceptable, according to the results released Wednesday. The district found lead at over three times the state's allowable limit of 80 milligrams per kilogram of soil next to Blair High School's tennis courts and over double the limit at four elementary schools. Lead, when inhaled through dust or ingested from dirt-covered hands, can cause permanent brain and nerve damage in children, resulting in slowed development and behavioral issues. Arsenic, a known carcinogen, was found at a concentration of 92 mg/kg at San Rafael Elementary School. The county has used 12 mg/kg as a reference level, based on an estimate of the highest naturally occurring arsenic levels in all of Southern California. The naturally occurring background level of arsenic in Altadena and Pasadena ranges from 4 to 10 mg/kg, according to a 2019 study by the U.S. Geological Survey. There is no safe exposure level for arsenic or lead. 'I'm worried about her safety,' said Nicole Maccalla of her daughter, a sixth-grader at Octavia E. Butler Magnet, which is located less than a mile from the Eaton fire burn area. 'I would really like to have assurances that she's physically safe while she's at school.' Instead, what she got was a map of the school posted by the district showing lead levels 40% and 70% above the allowable limit in soil samples taken next to the school entrance and near the outdoor lunch tables, respectively. 'If, literally, you've got to walk by lead to walk up the steps to school, then how many kids are walking through that with their shoes and then walking into the classroom?' Maccalla said. 'It's not like these are inaccessible areas that are gated off.' Maccalla made the hard decision to let her daughter return to school in January despite early fears — worrying that the trauma of moving schools directly after the fire would be too much. Along with other concerned parents, Maccalla has been pushing for both soil and indoor testing for months at school board meetings. It was only after the L.A. County Department of Public Health announced in April that it had found 80% of properties had lead levels exceeding the state's standards in some areas downwind that the district hired the environmental firm Verdantas to conduct testing at schools. 'The school board has been very resistant to any request for testing from parents," she said. "The superintendent kept saying it's safe.' The parents' response: 'Prove it." Read more: Researchers call on Newsom to pay for post-fire soil testing in Los Angeles County The district released test results for 33 properties it owns — some with district schools and children's centers, others with charter and private schools, some rented to nonprofits — that were all largely unscathed by the fires. On the 22 properties with public schools, students have been back in the classroom since late January. The full results with maps for each school can be seen on the school district's website. The district stated on its website there was 'no indication that students or staff were exposed to hazardous levels of fire-related substances in the soil,' noting that any contamination found was highly localized. (For example, while seven samples at Blair High School identified elevated lead levels, 21 samples did not.) Health agencies also advised the district that soil covered with grass or cement was unlikely to pose a health risk. In response to the results, the district stated it would restrict access to contaminated areas, complete follow-up sampling and work on remediation over the summer. No classroom instruction would be affected. 'We want to be abundantly clear: Safety is not negotiable,' Pasadena Unified School District Supt. Elizabeth Blanco said in a press release. 'That's why we're moving forward with both urgency and care.' For Maccalla, it's too little too late. 'I would like to know what their plan is for monitoring the health of the children, given you've got kids that have already been playing outside in that soil for four months straight,' she said. 'So what's their health crisis mitigation plan?' The test results also found high levels of chromium — which, in some chemical configurations, is a carcinogen — on one campus. Another had high levels of a class of contaminants called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which can cause headaches, coughing, skin irritation and, over long periods of exposure, can come with an increased risk of cancer. Three of the five properties with the district's children's centers also had elevated levels of heavy metals — two with lead, one with arsenic. Read more: The L.A. wildfires left lead and other toxic material in the soil of burn zones. Here are their health risks When Maccalla — who has spent much of her time after the fire volunteering with the community advocacy group Eaton Fire Residents United — first saw the map of her daughter's school, she began to formulate a plan to rally volunteers to cover the contaminated areas with mulch and compost before school buses arrive again Monday morning. (That is an expert-approved remediation technique for fire-stricken soil.) 'If the district is not going to do it, the state's not going to do it, our county's not going to do it, our city's not going to do it,' she said, 'well, the citizens will. We absolutely will.' This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
16-05-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Nearly half of Pasadena Unified schools have contaminated soil, district finds
Eleven of the 23 Pasadena Unified School District schools, where students have been back on campus since January, have contaminated soil following the Eaton fire, the district found. Over 40% of the schools had lead at levels exceeding the state's health-based limits for residential soil, and over 20% had arsenic levels beyond what L.A. County considers acceptable, according to the results released Wednesday. The district found lead at over three times the state's allowable limit of 80 milligrams per kilogram of soil next to Blair High School's tennis courts and over double the limit at four elementary schools. Lead, when inhaled through dust or ingested from dirt-covered hands, can cause permanent brain and nerve damage in children, resulting in slowed development and behavioral issues. Arsenic, a known carcinogen, was found at a concentration of 92 milligrams per kilogram of soil at San Rafael Elementary School. The county has used 12 mg/kg as a reference level, based on an estimate of the highest naturally occurring arsenic levels in all of Southern California. The naturally occurring background level of arsenic in Altadena and Pasadena ranges from 4 to 10 mg/kg, according to a 2019 study by the U.S. Geological Survey. There is no safe exposure level for arsenic or lead. 'I'm worried about her safety,' said Nicole Maccalla of her daughter, a sixth-grader at Octavia E. Butler Magnet, which is located less than a mile from the Eaton fire burn area. 'I would really like to have assurances that she's physically safe while she's at school.' Instead, what she got was a map of the school posted by the district showing lead levels 40% and 70% above the allowable limit in soil samples taken next to the school entrance and near the outdoor lunch tables, respectively. 'If, literally, you've got to walk by lead to walk up the steps to school, then how many kids are walking through that with their shoes and then walking into the classroom?' Maccalla said. 'It's not like these are inaccessible areas that are gated off.' Maccalla made the hard decision to let her daughter return to school in January despite early fears — worrying that the trauma of moving schools directly after the fire would be too much. Along with other concerned parents, Maccalla has been pushing for both soil and indoor testing for months at school board meetings. It was only after the L.A. County Department of Public Health announced in April that it had found 80% of properties had lead levels exceeding the state's standards in some areas downwind that the district hired the environmental firm Verdantas to conduct testing at schools. 'The school board has been very resistant to any request for testing from parents,' she said. 'The superintendent kept saying it's safe.' The parents' response: 'Prove it.' The district released test results for 33 properties it owns — some with district schools and children's centers, others with charter and private schools, some rented to nonprofits — that were all largely unscathed by the fires. On the 22 properties with public schools, students have been back in the classroom since late January. The full results with maps for each school can be seen on the school district's website. The district stated on its website there was 'no indication that students or staff were exposed to hazardous levels of fire-related substances in the soil,' noting that any contamination found was highly localized. (For example, while seven samples at Blair High School identified elevated lead levels, 21 samples did not.) Health agencies also advised the district that soil covered with grass or cement was unlikely to pose a health risk. In response to the results, the district stated it would restrict access to contaminated areas, complete follow-up sampling and work on remediation over the summer. No classroom instruction will be affected. 'We want to be abundantly clear: Safety is not negotiable,' Pasadena Unified School District Supt. Elizabeth Blanco said in a press release. 'That's why we're moving forward with both urgency and care.' For Maccalla, it's too little too late. 'I would like to know what their plan is for monitoring the health of the children, given you've got kids that have already been playing outside in that soil for four months straight,' she said. 'So what's their health crisis mitigation plan?' The test results also found high levels of chromium — which, in some chemical configurations, is a carcinogen — on one campus. Another had high levels of a class of contaminants called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which can cause headaches, coughing, skin irritation and, over long periods of exposure, can come with an increased risk of cancer. Three of the five properties with the district's children centers also had elevated levels of heavy metals — two with lead, one with arsenic. When Maccalla — who has spent much of her time after the fire volunteering with the community advocacy group Eaton Fire Residents United — first saw the map of her daughter's school, she began to formulate a plan to rally volunteers to cover the contaminated areas with mulch and compost before school buses arrive again Monday morning. (That is an expert-approved remediation technique for fire-stricken soil.) 'If the district is not going to do it, the state's not going to do it, our county's not going to do it, our city's not going to do it,' she said, 'well, the citizens will. We absolutely will.'
New York Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Esteemed Biographer Puts Her Own Life in the Spotlight
'All biography is autobiography,' Ralph Waldo Emerson said, but most biographers are marginal by definition: parasites or scavengers, 'the shadow in the garden,' to quote a godfather of the genre, James Atlas, in turn quoting his thorniest subject, Saul Bellow. When they step out of the margins it's often because something has gone wrong. In 2017 the highly esteemed biographer Megan Marshall, who won big prizes for her books about long-dead Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters, tried interlacing strings of her own life story with that of her former poetry teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, and was thanked with mixed reviews. Now Marshall is making another halting run at memoir, with a modest collection of essays on topics including her paternal grandfather, who worked for the Red Cross in France after the First World War and photographed the burial of young American soldiers; a run of left-handedness on her mother's side of the family; and a trip the author took to Kyoto during typhoon season. This is not a typhoon-like book that will knock you over with its coherence, but irregular winds blowing this way and that, some hotter than others. The most compelling essay, 'Free for a While,' is about Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old killed in a shootout that made front-page headlines in 1970. He had taken courtroom hostages in an attempt to force the release of his older brother George Jackson, the author of the best-selling Black Power manifesto 'Soledad Brother,' from prison. Jonathan happened to be Marshall's classmate at Blair High School in Pasadena, Calif., which canceled her planned salutatorian's speech devoted to him (she managed to barge up and speak anyway). To read her account of the boy she knew as 'Jon' getting laughs playing Pyramus from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in their A.P. English class — 'Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die' — two weeks before his death, and to discover the devastating origin of the essay's title, is to yearn for an entire new suite of intellectual property — book, play, movie — devoted to this family. Another standout piece is 'These Useless Things,' wherein Marshall puzzles over why she has kept a wood-handled ice pick, salvaged from her late father's studio apartment and placed on her kitchen windowsill. It recalls her to the vanilla ice cream her parents made for summer celebrations, accompanied by her father's physics lessons, and the fading of the community ice trade as described in John Updike's Rabbit novels. But there's something else, too: 'Perhaps the implement's concealed danger, the spike blunted with a wine cork, spoke to me of my father as well.' After a promising start at college, he came to be troubled by mental illness, and drinking would sometimes cost him jobs. Marshall and her two siblings had a life of latchkeys and clipped coupons; she writes evocatively of her mother's aborted art career, and how she sometimes traded in pan drippings collected in a coffee can at the back of the stove for a penny a pound at the butcher. Small wonder, the right-handed daughter grasps later in the left-handed essay, that 'when I began to write, I found myself attracted to almosts, to might-have-beens, to compromise — so often woman's story.' Marshall is moved to consider the 'material turn' in the history profession away from documents like diaries and letters, like the many she sifted through when writing about the Transcendentalists, and toward objects. This, the theory goes, helps to resurrect the narratives of people who were illiterate or not considered important enough for archives. (It's what archaeologists have long done.) Approached by a reader, she pays $300 — a bargain, factoring in inflation — for an early-19th-century Honduran mahogany 'writing box' with a secret drawer, almost certainly shared by Elizabeth and Mary Peabody, and marvels at the dimensionality it gives to the words she has already set down about the sisters. (Will future scholars likely fetishize our own glowing 'writing boxes,' these laptop computers with their busted 'S' keys and crumbs in the crevices? Hard to say.) Like decorating a house, Marshall suggests with this book, the act of crafting a biography is never really finished, and certain odds and ends can be hard to clean up. There's an old-fashioned jump scare when she peers into the coffin of Una Hawthorne, the oldest child of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who inspired the character of Pearl in 'The Scarlet Letter.' Her hair was supposed to be white from heartbreak, but, Marshall reports, instead is 'deep rusty red.' She spends some time retracing steps in her attempt to find out why. 'That was the lesson of looking inside the coffin,' she writes. 'There are a few things we can know for sure: a patch of cloth, a fragment of bone, a red braid. And then there are the questions we can't answer.'
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Yahoo
Former Oklahoma teacher accused of rape
JACKSON COUNTY, Okla. (KFDX/KJTL) — An investigation into possible misconduct between a teacher and a student at Blair High School in Oklahoma leads to charges of rape and destroying evidence against a former teacher. Brittany Lee Gray, 30, of Blair, Oklahoma, was booked into the Jackson County Jail on January 24, 2025, on charges of rape and destroying evidence. As of the publication of this story, she is no longer listed on the jail roster. LOCAL CRIME: Man accused of attacking woman with possible saw blade According to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations, Gray is a former counselor and teacher at Blair High School, located in Blair, Jackson County, Oklahoma. OSBI officials said the Blair Police Department requested they investigate the possible misconduct and probable cause was developed by OSBI special agents before a search warrant was executed at Gray's residence. According to OSBI officials, it was determined, based on the evidence obtained through their investigation, that inappropriate communication and physical contact between Gray and the student occurred multiple times. 'The OSBI would like to thank the Blair Police Department, District 3 District Attorney's Office Task Force, Jackson County Sheriff's Office, and the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit Task Force for their assistance with this investigation,' OSBI officials said in a Facebook post. 'We also appreciate Blair Public Schools for their cooperation. According to court records, Gray has been forbidden from contacting the alleged victim in this case. A hearing is set for March 27, Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
