Board hears Tzouanakis questions, concerns

With the closure of the Tzouanakis Intermediate School building now nearing the one-month mark, the Greencastle School Board spent a second straight monthly meeting fielding questions about mold, moisture and the best path forward for a school that, for the time being, is without a building.

On Monday, the board had time and space for such a meeting, relocating to Parker Auditorium at Greencastle High School.

While the crowd didn’t quite live up to the opening night of a GHS spring musical, a larger-than-normal crowd was on hand to hear the latest on mold remediation at the intermediate school.

Following a few routine matters, School Board President Mike White opened the public comments portion of the meeting with a statement from the board.

The board first of all thanked all Greencastle Schools employees for their efforts during a “disruptive and taxing time.”

White also addressed the misconception that Tzouanakis is closed as a school, not simply as a building.

“Although the building is closed, school is open for TZ students,” White said. “The TZ staff is working diligently to provide students with their educational needs. While we understand the level of this inconvenience, please know that teaching and learning is occurring daily in the temporary classrooms. We are grateful to the TZ staff and would ask parents to ensure their children attend school daily.”

White went on to address the current focus and future goals of the work on the building.

“Please understand the focus and priority of this board is to return TZ to normal operations and to reopen the building as soon as responsibly possible,” White said. “Our focus will then shift to identifying the issues that resulted in having to close the school. We are determined to seek answers to difficult questions to ensure this or any similar problem is avoided in the future.”

Once the floor was opened for questions and comments, one topic that kept coming back up was that of a timetable for reopening the building. Parents and other family members expressed their frustration with the unknown of the current situation.

However, school officials were non-committal regarding an estimated reopening date, not wanting a repeat of the early part of the process, when it seemed that re-entering Tzouanakis was only days away.

Since then, Hubble and board members have been careful to call the length of the closure “indefinite.” They kept to that terminology on Monday, emphasizing the amount of cleaning and testing that still needs to happen throughout the school.

Some members of the team of experts the school has addressing the problem felt a little more comfortable at least addressing tentative timetables.

Steve Ambro, industrial hygienist for AP Inspections and Environmental Services, said the team is currently going through the process of cleaning, fogging and sanitizing the rooms and particularly the unit vents in each room.

“That’s another two weeks yet,” Ambro said. “That timeframe is what we’re trying to shoot for.”

However, even this timetable is dependent on the test results that come back afterward.

“Do I see it going past fall break? No, I do not,” said Erica Graham of Moore Advanced Service Group. “But we need to make sure all of this is addressed. We still need to make sure all of those rooms samples come back and that’s anywhere from a one-to-four-day turnaround.”

Fall break is nearly three weeks away, putting Tzouanakis kids in alternate locations for seven weeks should such an estimate turn out to be true.

A number of other questions, though, centered on the quality of the learning environment for students, particularly fifth-graders being housed at Greencastle High School.

Parents pointed out the reduced classroom time caused by pick-up and drop-off at Greencastle Middle School, but instruction taking place at Greencastle High School.

“I think we’re missing some very important classroom time for these fifth-graders who are preparing for some pretty big tests and a big transition,” fifth-grade parent Kacey Seaver said.

Of even more concern for some parents is the environment their 10- and 11-year-old are in among teenagers.

One parent of two fifth-graders said the family recently moved here from Franklin on the heels of her son with special needs having been bullied and assaulted by other kids. She praised the teachers and kids for the environment they have provided.

However, she pulled her kids out of school a week ago after learning what her kids were hearing and seeing in the halls of the high school.

“This could go on indefinitely,” she said. “My children are allowed a free, appropriate education. It is not appropriate for them to be in the middle of high school.”

Tzouanakis Principal Jon Strube agreed that there are challenges to having the fifth grade in the high school and said that he and GHS Principal Chad Rodgers are working together on solutions. These include different passing periods for high school and fifth-grade students, as well as staff members escorting fifth-graders should they need to use the restroom.

“Being in the classrooms, a lot of our normalcy from TZ is being replicated,” Strube said. “It’s not TZ, but our teachers are providing normalcy as well as possible.”

School officials said other possibilities have been explored, such as having kids at DePauw or Ivy Tech, but both came up empty, as the fifth-graders would have to be split between multiple buildings.

More than one parent also brought up the possibility of temporary classrooms, but two school officials with prior experience in temporary classrooms said these would not be viable.

“I taught in a portable classroom,” said board member Lisa McCoy, a former teacher. “They have more issues than what we have at TZ. Mold was always an issue at in a portable classroom. We had security issues with kids going out in a field. In my opinion as a former teacher, it is not a viable option.”

Strube also spent five years teaching in a portable classroom at Avon. He said safety was a problem, as well as the timetable of setting up temporary classrooms.

“To get a portable set up for our entire school, it would take many months,” Strube said. It took an entire summer to set up eight classrooms for us at Avon.”

White also addressed the perception that money may be what keeps the board from moving to temporary classrooms.

“Money has never been discussed as to how it is to do this right. Money does not come into play here,” White said. “We simply want to make the best choices for No. 1, the kids followed closely by the staff at TZ and for all the schools that are being taxed.”

Warts and all, officials feel they have found the best solution for now. Hubble discussed sharing his story with 18 other superintendents recently.

“When I told the story of what was going on, another superintendent stopped me and said, ‘Count your blessings that you have enough classrooms in your corporation because I have no elbow room in my corporation,’” Hubble said.

The superintendent also addressed the exact nature of the mold in question, telling the crowd that aspergillus/penicillium, the type of mold found at Tzouanakis, is simple bread mold. This prompted a rather interesting observation from parent (and DePauw biology professor) Jim Benedix.

“It’s bread mold. I have a bread mold issue in my house,” Benedix said. “Are we doing the right thing by our kids by protecting them from this bread mold and putting them in this shortened days and awkward situations.”

However, Ambro said that calling it simply bread mold “might be a little bit of an over-simplification of it.”

Both he and Graham called aspergillus/penicillium and “indicator mold.”

“Once it’s growing, we know there’s an opportunity for other things to grow that may be harmful,” Graham said.

She also compared this type of mold to peanuts. It’s not hazardous to most people, but it could trigger allergic reactions in others.

Ambro also said they would like to have the mold under control before returning kids to the school.

“We don’t want you second-guess us once you take over the school again,” he said.

One question to which no real satisfactory answer was found was how the problem started. The various officials all agreed that it’s fundamentally a moisture issue and the mold is more of a symptom.

But how did the high humidity originate? Many in the community say it has always been a problem at Tzouanakis.

“We have always had mold in that building,” retired teacher Eve Stark said. “This is not new.”

However, what happened to make the humidity go even higher this past summer and facilitate the new mold growth?

It seems that something happened with new HVAC components were installed earlier in the year. An extra rainy season may have also contributed.

Doug Peine of Peine Engineering said they are fighting against an HVAC system in which many of the components date back to the 1980s.

He added that an important element to ensuring that the air no longer facilitates mold growth is keeping track of the air entering each classroom. If it can be kept at 55 degrees, it is below the dew point.

With a digital system that’s been installed, these temperatures can be monitored and regulated.

Unfortunately for school officials, many questions remain to be answered.

Will this round of cleaning take care of the mold issue? Will the students and teachers be moving back into Tzouanakis soon? How will officials continue to maintain the moisture level once things return to normal?

The short and difficult answer is, only time will tell.

“We simply do not know how long it will take us to get the building right,” White said. “As soon as we can get that building right, that’s what we’re going to do. But we do not know at this time.”