They wrestled with the dreaded speckled air that engulfs and troubles El Marino Language School at last night’s School Board meeting, and the air won. Or at least it did not lose.
Further talk about potentially difficult breathing for students and grownups who are on campus, near the dirt-spewing San Diego Freeway every day.
But no further decisions.
“As I understand it,” School Board President Nancy Goldberg said on the morning after, “we still are in the process of finding out through our research just how effective the (yet-to-be-installed) filtering system will be.
“But we do project to include filtration for most of the rooms.
“The issue may be, do they also want to try for air conditioning. That is a bone of contention,” Ms. Goldberg said, “because if put it in El Marino, the other schools in the District would want it as well. We do have hot days that come up” with less than a month left in this term.
All corners of the School District concur that the dubious winner of the worst campus air in the community is El Marino, sunk in an exasperating crisis situation for years.
From President Goldberg’s perspective, “the problem is: Financial realities meeting the children’s needs.”
At the Board meeting, there was a thorny debate about a so-far insoluble matter.
Even if the classrooms are maintained as a satisfactory filtering level, uh, did anyone notice that at this and all other elementary schools, children go out to play?
How do you purify the environment that envelopes them?
Well…?
(To be continued)
It seems our school board is interested in only funding A4CAEM’s partial solution of filtering and air conditioning the El Marino’s classroom air and will continue to ignore the outside playground issue. It is not just that the El Marino school site is polluted; we chose to live in a large metropolitan area, all of the Los Angeles basin is polluted to some extent. The particular problem with the El Marino site is due to its location right next to the heavily traveled 405 Fwy and the high concentrations of particulates raining down onto the school site.
The district claims that the health and safety of the students are its top priority. Well, the district needs to prove it. The community should demand each board member put our money where their mouth is and move these children elsewhere to a much healthier site, within our district.