The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction took a first pass Wednesday at telling state lawmakers how much it would cost to fully protect students from the risks of carbon monoxide and radon gas in classrooms.
The answer: $85 million, though school facilities director Nathan Maune told the state Board of Education that numbers are preliminary.
Many older North Carolina schools don’t have carbon monoxide detectors, and radon mitigation systems in schools are almost unheard of.
Last year, the General Assembly ordered DPI to survey schools to figure out the cost of adding carbon monoxide detectors to older schools, as the building code now requires for new construction, and testing for radon.
Maune said not all school districts have responded to the survey, but so far it looks like almost 3,800 classroom buildings have fuel-burning boilers or appliances that could create a carbon monoxide leak.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association, which recommends CO detectors in classroom buildings, reports that students in several states have been sickened when the odorless gas seeped into classrooms. In 2015, several students went home sick with carbon monoxide poisoning and a teacher was hospitalized after a dead owl blocked a boiler pipe at an elementary school, according to local news reports.
The report that will be sent to the General Assembly indicates that Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Iredell-Statesville school systems have CO detectors in all buildings with fuel-burning devices. Union, Gaston, Cabarrus, Catawba and Lincoln counties appear to have buildings without the detectors. But Maune cautioned that data collection is still in progress and the table breaking down results by district “should not be taken verbatim.”
Maune said the best current estimate for providing CO detectors and making sure all older buildings meet the current safety code is $40 million.
“Certainly all these facilities were designed and constructed to the codes in place at the time they were constructed,” Maune said.
The General Assembly also ordered DPI to ask about radon gas, which is linked to cancer risks for children. Maune said it’s extremely rare for schools to have any type of radon mitigation system.
“There are multiple tests required in a building of any size to adequately test for that hazard,” Maune said. “And we have made the assumption that every classroom building would need that detection, that exercise conducted in order to determine where the hazards are.”
The General Assembly didn’t require DPI to survey the state’s 210 charter schools, which are often in leased buildings, about their CO and radon detection systems. But members of the state Board of Education said those schools, which served about 145,000 students last year, should also be included.
