SOUTH HADLEY — South Hadley High School will remain closed until further notice due to the apparent presence of mold, and district leaders are working to find alternative locations to start the school year.
At Thursday night’s School Committee meeting, Superintendent Jahmal Mosley said “it is not prudent or safe for this building to be occupied” for any reason until the district is “100% sure” that there is no danger, and there is no date for classes to begin.
“We’re not holding back on any type of testing to make sure we know what we’re dealing with,” said Mosley. “There is much, much more testing to be done.”
The district announced Tuesday that the high school would hold its first day — which was supposed to be Wednesday — remotely because of the discovery of a “white/black substance” inside the building, but state regulators said later that remote learning was not an option.
In a Wednesday letter to staff and parents, Mosley said that the first day of in-person learning at the high school “will be announced next week when we have more information.”
The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education “does not believe that remote learning qualifies as structured learning in South Hadley at this time,” Mosley wrote, meaning that any remote learning days would not count as official school days.
Mosley said that solving the problem is going to cost money, and DESE has not committed to helping with funds. In addition to finding a location, the district would have to provide transportation. Using space at one of the area colleges would require all students and staff to adhere to that institution’s COVID-19 protocols, he said, including any vaccination mandates.
Interim Principal Elizabeth Wood provided a timeline of the discovery of the apparent mold and how administrators responded, saying that last Friday, “we had a clean and stable environment.” She said it was unclear “how fast or why” the substance appeared, but mold tends to spread quickly under the proper conditions.
At 11 a.m. Monday, a teacher notified administrators about a substance found on a cork board in a classroom; within hours, the substance was discovered on furniture, walls, ceilings and fabric bags, among other surfaces, and some hallway floor tiles were found to be rippled from the presence of moisture underneath them.
Samples of the substance were collected by Fermata Home Services, which determined that there is a high likelihood that it is mold. The district is now contacting mold mitigation contractors to conduct a thorough cleaning.
“Prior to day one, we had our first wild curveball thrown at us, and it’s been really hard,” said School Committee Chairwoman Allison Schlachter.
Similar mold problems forced Northampton High School and the city’s JFK Middle School to delay the start of classes by one day; Mosley said the situation in South Hadley is not the same.
“We do not have a facilities manager for our schools. Northampton does. (In Northampton) there’s somebody watching this, there’s somebody testing HVAC systems,” Mosley said, stressing that the town needs to do a “self-reflection about how our district is constructed, with our human capital.”
Scott Beaulieu, president of the South Hadley Education Association labor organization, said the high school’s teachers are “ready to go” whenever classes begin.
“All of our educators at the high school want to be back with their students. That is their biggest concern,” said Beaulieu. “There’s no one here to blame. … The reality is, no one had control over it, and we need to be working together as a community to get ourselves out of this. We can do it.”
Mosley said the first week of school for elementary and middle school students has been “very successful.”
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.