WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — For the past few years, Tracey Sherry and some of her neighbors on Victory Circle have sometimes encountered a smell in their neighborhood, as if a diesel truck has just driven by.
Eventually, Sherry said, she identified the source of the smell as the smoke coming from the Hartford Memorial Middle School and Hartford High School complex. Only when the breeze was from the north, and during the heating season, did she notice it.
In November 2024, a particularly bad episode, which took place while school was being dismissed for the afternoon and playing fields were busy with athletes, led Sherry to take action.
“I made a beeline for the house,” she said in a phone interview. She closed down her home’s ventilation system, and she called Jonathan Garthwaite, buildings and grounds director for the Hartford School District.
District officials have had the heating systems in their sights for several years, but complaints from Sherry and other neighbors added urgency to the need for updates. This summer, the district is replacing the chimney for the middle school, so its two oil burners can run more optimally, and the high school’s green wood chip boiler, which was shut down in 2025, will be replace with an oil-fired boiler.
The two projects, taking place this summer, are projected to cost $2.5 million. District voters approved in 2024 a $21 million bond for facilities repairs and the heating upgrades are one of many projects across the district’s buildings, Garthwaite said.
Sherry said she’s concerned that the new chimney and boiler won’t do away with the pollution she’s experienced. She has pressed district officials to turn to an emissions-free heat source, but the cost is prohibitive.
Since first contacting the district, “I have been agitating for them to find a clean energy solution to what’s going on here,” she said.
The middle school heating plant was replaced 12 to 15 years ago, said Garthwaite, who’s served the Hartford district for four and a half years. The chimney that vents the school’s two oil-fired boilers was built in 1964, with the original school.
The wood chip boiler, installed at the high school in 2010, was on a list of issues with the district’s buildings that Garthwaite compiled in 2023. It was a more obvious source of pollution, he said.
“The worst offender we probably had was the green wood chip boiler, and that’s been shut down for over a year,” Garthwaite said.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation issues permits for school heating systems, but recent inspections found that the middle and high school complex didn’t have any, John Wakefield, head of compliance for the DEC’s Air Quality and Climate Division, said in a phone interview.
“It appears somehow not to have gotten a permit,” Wakefield said.
The new chimney and boiler are intended to bring the schools into compliance, Garthwaite said.
That means the state will inspect the boilers to ensure that they’re working properly and could require that the district maintain a manual built around the manufacturers’ recommendations, Wakefield said.
The state doesn’t test emissions from a heating plant the size of what’s in use at the middle and high schools, he added. It would test “only if we saw something that was related to visible emissions,” he said, or signs that the boilers weren’t working properly.
The district is meeting the state’s expectations to come into compliance, Wakefield said.
“This is a small source in terms of air pollution,” he said.
But it will still be a source, and Sherry feels she and her neighbors have been given no assurance that they won’t continue to experience the immediate effects of that pollution.
“This is stuff you absolutely do not want to breathe,” she said. In a message to school officials, she said she has “health issues that put me at high risk from air pollution.”
She’s also concerned about the students. One of her neighbors on Victory Circle, Lynn Feenan, is a pediatric pulmonary clinical nurse at Dartmouth Health Children’s.
“It is clear to me that this issue has to be addressed soon to protect the health of those attending and working in the schools on Highland Avenue as well as the local neighborhood,” Feenan wrote in a May 6 letter to the Hartford School Board.
The state will inspect the heating systems once the work is done, and the next heating season will tell whether the problem is solved.
CORRECTION: Hartford resident Lynn Feenan is a pediatric pulmonary clinical specialist nurse. Her surname was spelled incorrectly in a previous version of this story.
