Activists: No schools on toxic sites

Enviromentalists and community activists yesterday called on Gov. Jon Corzine to order studies to assure New Jersey schools will not be erected on dangerously polluted properties.

"You should not allow a situation to occur where your children are in jeopardy," Algernon Ward, a Trenton activist who led the campaign to tear down a partially built elementary school that was built atop contaminated fill, said at a Statehouse news conference. "It's a tragedy."

Demolishing and rebuilding the partially built Martin Luther King Elementary School in Trenton has cost the state's school construction program about $27 million.

Participants in yesterday's news conference said the project was part of the millions of dollars in taxpayer funds required for cleanup of dangerous pollution on the school sites chosen for use in the state's $8.6 billion school building program.

Existing schools, meanwhile, feature poor ventilation, contamination and pollution that expose students to dangerous toxins, said Jane Nogaki, of the New Jersey Environmental Federation.

Concerns about environmental dangers in schools came to a head in 2006, when mercury vapors were found in a Gloucester County day care center that operated on the site of a former thermometer factory. The day care center, Kiddie Kollege, was closed and razed.

The episode prompted new legislation that requires the Department of Environmental Protection and state Department of Health and Senior Services to sign off on properties slated for use as schools.

"It's a situation that is being addressed and has been addressed," Jim Gardner, Corzine's spokesman, said. "The DEP has very clear and stringent cleanup standards."

Critics say the DEP is understaffed and ill-equipped to ensure adequate cleanup occurs, and the standards DEP measures safety by are based on adults, not the more vulnerable children.

The advocates said further study is needed now because lawmakers on Monday approved another $3.9 billion in borrowing for the school construction program. They are seeking an executive order from Corzine that would set up a commission to analyze the problem and solutions for what they called "toxic schools."