All U-46 trailers will be tested

All 64 mobile units in Elgin Area School District U-46 will be now tested for formaldehyde, officials said Thursday.

The price tag? Between $60,000 and $80,000.

"I'm impressed and scared at the same time," Nature Ridge Elementary parent Beverly Jaszczurowski said upon hearing the news that all mobiles would be tested. "They must have found something bad."

An initial formaldehyde level test, conducted last week by the U-46 operations department on the four mobile classrooms at Nature Ridge, "did not return conclusive results," district spokesman Tony Sanders said.

The district then hired an outside consultant, who conducted another test at the Bartlett school last week.

Results from the consultant's Nature Ridge tests should be completed by next week.

The consultant is developing a schedule to test all mobile classrooms by the end of the school year, Sanders said.

"We decided we have to do this right," Sanders said. "We didn't have the internal capacity to do this on our own."

Jaszczurowski first raised questions about the health effects of mobile classrooms at a March 3 school board meeting, citing a study released Feb. 14 by the Centers for Disease Control.

The study found higher-than-typical indoor levels of formaldehyde in travel trailers and mobile homes provided to displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"Long-term exposure to levels in this range can be linked to an increased risk of cancer, and as levels rise above this range, there can also be a risk of respiratory illness," the study says.

Jaszczurowski suggested students attending class in mobile units for upward of six hours a day could suffer similar health effects as those in Katrina trailers.

"There are serious long-term effects of kids breathing in formaldehyde. … It's not healthy for anyone. It's just not safe," she told the board.

Lisa Aguirre, president of the Nature Ridge Parent Teacher Organization, expressed similar sentiments to Jaszczurowski's.

"As a parent, I'm actually really glad they're testing them," Aguirre said. One of her daughters, now in seventh grade, spent a year in the school's mobile units.

"It's somewhat after the fact for me now, but I do have a second-grader who might have to sit in those mobiles one day," Aguirre said.