WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — As Hartford school officials consider the drastic step of tearing down and rebuilding major portions of the town’s high school in order to address chemical contamination, other Upper Valley school districts have yet to find out if their buildings are plagued by now-banned toxic construction materials.

Meanwhile, the state appears to have run out of the money to help schools pay for testing, and elected officials who helped pass the 2021 law requiring testing for polychlorinated biphenyls, known as PCBs, are urging school officials not to overreact.

School officials could get greater clarity later this spring when the Legislature finalizes the 2026 state budget, which is expected to include financial assistance for some of the worst affected schools, including Hartford.

Facing uncertainty, Hartford School District officials are left to figure out a path forward. So far that has meant relocating a culinary arts program out of the Hartford Area Career and Technical Center to a kitchen off campus. And it could include demolishing 60% of the high school building containing the highest levels of PCBs, which were commonly used in construction materials including caulking, paint and electrical fixtures prior to 1980.

“We don’t have to tear down 60% of the school next summer. We can do this in stages,” Jonathan Garthwaite, the school district’s facilities manager, told the School Board at a meeting on Wednesday. “There’s nothing that says we have to tear the school down this summer. What is very real are those things I’ve been saying over and over again about our obligation to safety, our obligation to the students, our obligation to the fiscal responsibility. We’ve got the compliance piece covered.”

In 2021, the Legislature passed Act 74, which mandated school districts test buildings built prior to 1980 for PCB air contamination. Hartford High School was built in 1972, Garthwaite said. Testing began in Vermont in 2022 and the deadline to complete it has been extended to 2027.

Air at Hartford High was tested last August and it was the first school in the Upper Valley to be identified with serious contamination concerns. Hartford Memorial Middle School tested negative under the state PCB threshold in air sampling tests in 2023.

The school district recently paid around $30,000 to have its pre-kindergarten through grade 5 White River School tested and the results came back below the state PCB threshold. White River School was scheduled to be tested in 2023, but after the state kept delaying it, the Hartford School Board decided to get it tested, in part because of the PCB levels discovered at the high school and technical center.

“There was a sense of urgency there,” Garthwaite said in a phone interview.

Other districts

While no other schools in the Hartford district are scheduled to be tested, other schools throughout the Vermont side of the Upper Valley remain on the state’s schedule.

The Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union, which includes the districts of Hartland, Mount Ascutney and Weathersfield, has three schools on the state’s list that are scheduled to be tested this summer: Albert Bridge School in West Windsor, Hartland Elementary School and Weathersfield School.

Schools in the supervisory union have not been scheduled for testing and there are no plans to do so at this time, Superintendent Christine Bourne said in an email this week.

In the White River Valley Supervisory Union, schools in Bethel and South Royalton all tested under the threshold level, according to state results. Rochester School has also tested negative.

Superintendent Jamie Kinnarney said that Stockbridge Central School is due to be tested this summer. Schools in Tunbridge and Chelsea are also on the list. He said he has not heard from the state that the testing has been put on hold and his expectation is that the state will pay for testing.

“I definitely have had parents inquire about when our testing dates are,” he said in a phone interview.

He questioned the wisdom of Act 74.

“I’ve been concerned with how they’ve handled this bill from day one. They started the testing … but they haven’t funded any of the remediation efforts,” Kinnarney said. “There’s just not good science that says here’s where this could become a health risk. That research is pretty nuanced. There’s not a lot of it.”

Questions about the seriousness of threat

The uncertainty over the science around PCB contamination was a subject of discussion at a public forum with local legislators and a representative from the Agency of Education on Monday.

State Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock, who was the senate majority leader when Act 74 was passed, said that Vermont faces $6 billion backlog in school renovation and construction needs and PCB remediation shouldn’t be the top priority.

“Clearly toxic chemicals are an issue, but we face huge costs in schools that are falling apart that are a bigger hazard to our kids than PCBs,” she said in a recording of the forum. “I have yet to really appreciate and have not heard of anyone getting sick from PCBs or a single major health disaster as a result of PCBs.”

She said that issues such as “sewage backing up in schools” ought to be addressed more quickly than PCB contamination.

State Rep. Jim Masland, D-Thetford, said that toxic chemicals are a concern: “We don’t want to bring our kids up in a school system that’s going to make them sick. That’s sort of the starting point right now.”

But he acknowledged that the testing mandate the state has given schools leaves several unanswered questions.

“We have yet to figure out how on Earth we’re going to pay for remediation,” he said. “I don’t know that we have what I would call a truthfully established air quality standard. We can approximate one but I don’t think we know where the bottom line is yet and so as such we really don’t know what the total cost is going to be.”

State Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, D-Norwich, noted that there are districts that have done millions of dollars in renovations and then have had PCB levels come back higher than they were before.

“We’ve got to be smarter here than we’ve been in terms of what we can afford to do, how we prioritize and target the buildings that need to address these urgent identified issues,” she said.

Megan Romano, an associate professor of epidemiology at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, studies the health effects of PCBs and PFAS, as well as other endocrine disrupting chemicals.

PCBs were considered to be an “attractive tool” for construction because they have chemical and thermal properties that help products they were added to “withstand lots of wear and tear over time,” Romano said in a phone interview. That includes paints and sealants surrounding windows.

PCBs became more prevalent in schools in the 1950s at the start of the population boom of school-age children after World War II that lasted through 1980, Romano said. In 1979, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the manufacture and importation of PCBs “based on mounting evidence that they were toxic to humans and wildlife.” PCBs are now classified as “probable human carcinogens” and listed in the top 10% of the EPA’s most toxic chemicals, according to the federal agency’s website.

“To a certain degree, I think there was a sense that we banned PCBs in 1979 and so they weren’t a problem anymore,” Romano said.

However, PCBs are considered a “forever chemical” meaning they take years to break down: “They stick around in the environment so long that even though PCBs have been banned for years they’re still showing up places.”

While Romano declined to comment specifically on the PCB results at Hartford High School, she said Vermont is ahead of the curve by requiring schools to test.

“Generally speaking, there is a strong case to be made for the benefits of removing PCBs from spaces where young people spend a great deal of their time during important years of their development,” she wrote in a follow-up email.

Possible state funding

Back in Hartford, Garthwaite, the facilities director, is in the process of putting together requests for proposals to do additional bulk material sampling in other buildings throughout the high school and tech center, as well as phase one of the abatement project which includes the gym, auditorium and cafeteria.

Finance director Jacob Vezina is exploring options for covering the “soft costs” of preparing for remediation work. Options include using part of a $21 million bond voters passed in 2024 for facilities upgrades. Another option includes taking out a separate loan for around $500,000 at a rate of 5.75% that would yield $28,750 in interest over the course of the loan repayment.

Hartford could be in a better position to receive state support than other schools. Hartford has been identified as one of six priority sites around the state, and VtDigger reported earlier this year that any new money allocated in the state budget for PCBs will mainly target schools with the biggest problems.

“I don’t know if that reflects any meaningful funds,” Garthwaite said in a phone interview about Hartford’s designation.

State Sen. Joe Major, D-Hartford, said legislators are currently discussing how much funding to include in the state budget proposal.

“I am hesitant to give a number because it is changing. Everything with education right now is changing,” Major said in a phone interview. “It is a kick in the gut to the taxpayers that have to in some way shape or form, at least in the immediate future, to foot the bill to either remediate or build a new school or something. It’s frustrating.”

Other schools face greater uncertainty. Mountain Views Supervisory Union Superintendent Sherry Sousa said that Woodstock Elementary School and Woodstock Middle and Senior High School are scheduled to be tested this summer.

“Our facilities team has been working to address any mitigating issues this year in preparation for this assessment,” Sousa wrote in an email. “Due to the age of these buildings and the years they were built, we too are very concerned about the potential findings of this testing and how we would cover the cost to address any issues.”

But the timing of the testing and who will ultimately pay for it remain unconfirmed, Sousa wrote.

“We don’t have a specific date, just that we are slated for testing late this summer,” she said. “As far as we have been informed, the State will cover the cost of our testing.”

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.