by Laura Glesby
Why don’t city inspectors crack down on school building conditions the way they often do with residential properties?
West Hills/West Rock Alder Honda Smith asked that question of an array of city department heads on Tuesday night.
The answer she heard back — that departments have to stick to their statutory authority — revealed regulatory gaps in how the city assesses and responds to mold, heat, and infestations.
Smith asked that question at a Board of Alders Education Committee meeting on Tuesday night — a meeting at which dozens of students, teachers, parents, and advocates testified about mold, rodents, broken HVAC systems, and more across New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) buildings.
One month after publicly calling for a citywide inspection of all schools, the Education Committee called in an array of city department heads to answer questions about the role of health, building, and fire inspectors in regulating school facilities.
City Sanitarian Brian Wnek: “There are no mold standards” for inspectors to enforce.
Chief Administrative Officer Justin McCarthy explained that during the last school year, a variety of city officials began to conduct “rolling walkthroughs” of schools across the city.
The officials were initially focused on school security issues, identifying ways that lockdown and other emergency management procedures could be bolstered.
“It was not the intent to go looking for building maintenance issues,” McCarthy said. But the team would alert school officials about potential maintenance concerns they discovered along the way.
Alders sought to clarify the role of city inspectors and facilities staff members in responding to school concerns.
At a residential building, said Smith, “if the city did inspections and found violations, we red tag it, close it and give it 24 hours to fix their violations.”
Under the city’s housing code, landlords have seven to 24 hours to address the most urgent health hazards, such as heating outages or broken smoke detectors.
“How much time,” she asked, “are we going to give the Board of Education to fix their problems?”
McCarthy responded that the city does respond to urgent matters.
For example, “in many cases last year, the fire marshal did in fact order fire watches,” he said — referring to a protocol in which a staff member is required to manually patrol the building, watching for potential fires, due to a malfunctioning alarm system.
Many of the school building issues, McCarthy said, warrant a report and a future re-inspection. “Is this safe? Yes,” he said. “But it might not be what we want.”
City Sanitarian Brian Wnek pointed out that city departments are each constrained in different ways by their statutory authority.
The Health Department, for instance, doesn’t cover residential buildings — “we only cover commercial.” In a school context, the Health Department has oversight over “cafeterias and pools,” but not the rest of the building. Other city inspectors, from fire marshals to building officials, have a very specific set of regulations they are empowered to enforce.
Wnek said that the city and state’s regulatory framework may not account for some of the most severe concerns coming from students and teachers.
For instance, several school community members testified that broken HVACs have at times led to very hot classrooms, with health ramifications for teachers and students.
According to Wnek, OSHA — the Occupational Health and Safety Administration — has a “lower limit” for workplace temperatures, but no “upper limit.” State law appears to be similar.
“There are no mold standards” in city building codes, even for residential properties. “We don’t have applicable testing that falls under the codes that we enforce,” Wnek said. “We work with what we have.”
Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller pointed out that the city owns numerous buildings, including City Hall, that do not see the same kinds of complaints. “So you know how to run buildings!” she said. “What does it look like for our school system to update school buildings properly?”
McCarthy said that a variety of city departments, from the New Haven Free Public Library to the police department to the fire department, each have a “facilities person” in charge of managing and maintaining the physical spaces that those departments occupy and operate for the public.
The school system is now trying to hire a director of facilities, a new position created as part of NHPS’ transition away from a private contractor who previously managed school buildings.
With NHPS, said McCarthy, “We’re talking about a portfolio of 40-plus buildings.”
“I think we have a really great set of people at the Board of Education that work really hard, but I don’t know if we have enough,” McCarthy said.
“What a lot of us have been looking for,” said Miller, is a public dashboard of school building work orders, with live status updates. She pointed out that the Livable City Initiative recently developed a similar dashboard for housing code complaints.
Miller asked McCarthy to zoom out to a bigger picture. “Would you agree with our assessment, from the schools that we’ve been to, that we have schools in the district that are in completely unacceptable condition?” she asked.
“I think it is very fair to say, and I think there is nobody arguing with the fact that there are significant issues with our schools that need to be addressed as soon as feasible,” said McCarthy.
Some alders expressed frustration with the officials’ responses.
“My kids go to these schools,” said Hill Alder Angel Hubbard. “We could not breathe while we were just in Hillhouse,” she added.
“I’m sitting here. I have not heard one clear answer,” Hubbard said. “I guess I’ll have to wait until I hear the Board of Education say the same thing: just a bunch of excuses.”
“Thank you!” called out someone from the crowd.
Chief of School Operations Paul Whyte and Superintendent Madeline Negrón listen as students like Hillhouse Sophomore Sarah Butavia speak out about school building conditions.
Fair Haven Heights Alder Mildred Melendez urged the officials: “Tell me what you need. Is it money? Is it staff? Is it materials? Do we need the proper person running it?”
McCarthy reiterated, “The Board of Education is its own system.”
The city engineer, for instance, “can’t take on a Board of Education project because he doesn’t have that purview. He doesn’t have that zone.”
“What we’ve tried to do over the past 12 or so months,” he added, “is blend” the work of city departments with the work of the Board of Education “more than we’ve ever blended them.”
“I’ve never seen this much collaboration between the city side and the Board of Education side,” McCarthy said.
Hours later, at that same meeting, NHPS Supt. Madeline Negrón told alders about the school district’s planned transition to an in-house facilities management team, as opposed to relying on outside contractors.
Negrón returned back to Melendez’s question about what the district needs, offering a simple answer: “Money. Resources. Materials.”