School can’t sniff out stench

SANDPOINT – Call it the case of the mysterious smell.

For five weeks, a musty, moldy odor has permeated the halls and classrooms of the east end of Sandpoint’s Farmin-Stidwell Elementary School, sometimes wafting throughout the 40-year-old building. Student attendance has been normal, according to the district, but teachers have complained of symptoms including headaches, dizziness, chest pain and watery eyes.

District and school officials have been struggling to find the source of the stench. One day the smell will be gone; the next day it’ll be stronger than ever.

Now the state has stepped in.

“We will find this,” state school safety project manager Elaine Hill told school and district employees Friday before beginning a daylong inspection of the school. “We will get it like a pit bull.”

A Sandpoint doctor contacted the school safety division of the state Public Works Department late Wednesday afternoon and said he is concerned with the number of teachers he is seeing with symptoms they blame on the smell.

Hill arrived in Sandpoint on Thursday. Joined by David Moore of Spokane’s L&S Engineering and Harry Beaulieu, president and senior scientist at Industrial Hygiene Resources of Boise, Hill spent Friday inspecting the east wing of the school.

“They feel like the school is safe for occupancy,” said Dick Cvitanich, superintendent of the Lake Pend Oreille School District. “We’re really happy about that – that was our biggest concern.”

Hill, Beaulieu and Moore will draft a list of recommendations, some short term, others long term, to give to the district next week.

After learning of the state inspection, district officials had prepared for the worst, scheduling a meeting Monday to discuss what would happen if the 600-student school – the largest elementary school in the district – were ordered closed

“We feel fortunate we don’t have to go in that direction,” Cvitanich said. “Obviously, they didn’t say the air quality was perfect – they recognized that – but it is safe to occupy.”

The struggle with the stench began five weeks ago when a teacher complained of a musty smell in her classroom. Janitors inspected the room and, finding nothing, entered the dirt-floor utility tunnels beneath the school building, where they discovered a black mold under the classroom.

An abatement contractor treated the mold with a disinfectant Nov. 11 and 12. Teachers working in the building Nov. 12, a Sunday, complained of the smell that day. Janitors repaired a leaky water heater and replaced nearby floor tiles and wall boards.

An environmental engineer from Spokane’s Enviroscience mold inspection has been working with the school for the past few weeks trying to address the problem. Multiple air quality tests showed nothing unusual.

“We thought we’d taken care of it,” Cvitanich told Hill. “But then it will come back, and it will move around.”

About 20 teachers at the school signed a petition saying they were experiencing symptoms from the stench and included a description of the symptoms. None exactly matched another.

“The fact that it’s repeated people is the part that concerns me,” Hill said.

Students haven’t been showing as many illness signs as some of the teachers, but according to a written summary of the problem and methods used to address it, some students were feeling dizzy just a few days ago.

Hill said the district has shown due diligence in attacking the problem but that another set of eyes should help find a solution.

“It’s not really that obvious. If it was that obvious, you would have found it by now,” Hill said.

In his first year as superintendent, Cvitanich said the stench has changed his life for the past month. His entire work day revolves around the problem and working with the school to fix it.

He receives daily updates on the status of the stench from the school’s principal, Anne Bagby, and said his inbox has been flooded with messages from across the country, filled with tips on what the source of the smell could be and how it might be addressed.

This is the third school safety inspection the state has done this year. The others were in Idaho Falls and Lapwai, in Latah County.