Addyston, Ohio - The growl of air-monitoring equipment has replaced the chatter of children at Meredith Hitchens Elementary School in this Cincinnati suburb along the Ohio River.

Children are often exposed to dangerous chemicals at home and in schools. (Photo: Garrett Hubbard / USA Today)

    School district officials pulled all students from Hitchens three years ago, after air samples outside the building showed high levels of chemicals coming from the plastics plant across the street. The levels were so dangerous that the Ohio EPA concluded the risk of getting cancer there was 50 times higher than what the state considers acceptable.

    The air outside 435 other schools - from Maine to California - appears to be even worse, and the threats to the health of students at those locations may be even greater.

Also see:     

Part II: "Weird" Smell Set Off Probe at Ohio School    •

Part III: Toxics Can Affect Kids, Adults Differently    •

Part IV: Air Tests Reveal Elevated Levels of Toxics Around Schools    •

    Using the government's most up-to-date model for tracking toxic chemicals, USA Today spent eight months examining the impact of industrial pollution on the air outside schools across the nation. The model is a computer simulation that predicts the path of toxic chemicals released by thousands of companies.

    USA Today used it to identify schools in toxic hot spots - a task the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had never undertaken.

    The result: a ranking of 127,800 public, private and parochial schools based on the concentrations and health hazards of chemicals likely to be in the air outside. The model's most recent version used emissions reports filed by 20,000 industrial sites in 2005, the year Hitchens closed.

    The potential problems that emerged were widespread, insidious and largely unaddressed:

At Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in East Chicago, Ind., the model indicated levels of manganese more than a dozen times higher than what the government considers safe. The metal can cause mental and emotional problems after long exposures. Three factories within blocks of the school - located in one of the most impoverished areas of the state - combined to release more than 6 tons of it in a single year.

    "When you start talking about manganese, it doesn't register with people in poverty," says Juan Anaya, superintendent of the School City of East Chicago district. "They have bigger issues to deal with."

The middle school in Follansbee, W.Va., sits close to a cluster of plants that churn out tens of thousands of pounds of toxic gases and metals a year.

In Huntington, W.Va., data showed the air outside Highlawn Elementary School had high levels of nickel, which can harm lungs and cause cancer.

At San Jacinto Elementary School in Deer Park, Texas, data indicated carcinogens at levels even higher than the readings that prompted the shutdown of Hitchens. A recent University of Texas study showed an "association" between an increased risk of childhood cancer and proximity to the Houston Ship Channel, about 2 miles from the school.

    The 435 schools that ranked worst weren't confined to industrial centers. Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania had the highest numbers, but the worst schools extended from the East Coast to the West, in 170 cities across 34 states, USA Today found.

    In some school districts, emissions from the smokestacks of refineries or chemical plants threatened students of every age, preschool through prom. Outside those schools, reports from polluters themselves often indicated a dozen different chemicals in the air. All are considered toxic by the government, though few have been tested for their specific effects on children.

    Scientists have long known that kids are particularly susceptible to the dangers. They breathe more air in proportion to their weight than adults do, and their bodies are still developing. Based on the time they spend at school, their exposures could last for years but the impact might not become clear for decades.

    That was the case in Port Neches, Texas, where more than two dozen former students of Port Neches-Groves High School have been diagnosed with cancer several years after they graduated, according to court records. So far, 17 have reached legal settlements with petrochemical plants located less than a mile from the school. In court filings, the plants' operators had denied they were to blame for the illnesses.

    The EPA, which has a special office charged with protecting children's health, has invested millions of taxpayer dollars in pollution models that could help identify schools where toxic chemicals saturate the air. Even so, USA Today found, the agency has all but ignored examining whether the air is unsafe at the very locations where kids are required to gather.

    If regulators had used their own pollution models to look for schools in toxic hot spots, they would have discovered what USA Today found: locations - in small towns such as Lucedale, Miss., and Oro Grande, Calif., as well as in large cities such as Houston - where the government's own data indicated the air outside schools was more toxic than the air outside the shuttered Hitchens.

    "Wow," says Philip Landrigan, a physician who heads a unit at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York focused on children's health and the environment. "The mere fact that kids are being exposed ought to be enough to force people to pay attention. The problem here is, by and large, there's no cop on the beat. Nobody's paying attention."

    Smokestack Effect: Problems Are Widespread

    Factories, chemical plants and other industries are the lifeblood of many towns, providing the jobs and the tax base that sustain communities. The industries and the schools nearby often have co-existed for decades. For just as long, residents in cities large and small have tried to accept - or simply ignore - the tradeoffs: air pollution that leads to breathing problems or worse.

    To identify locations where dangers appear greatest, USA Today used a mathematical model, developed by the EPA, called Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators. It estimates how toxic chemicals are dispersed across the nation and in what quantities.

    COMPLETE COVERAGE: Toxic air and America's schools.http://content.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/smokestack/index

    The good news: The model showed levels of industrial chemicals declined at three-quarters of U.S. schools since 1998, a trend that mirrors improved air quality across the nation.

    The more ominous news: Outside one-quarter of schools, the model showed students were exposed to higher levels of industrial pollution in 2005 than they were 10 years ago.

    Regulators caution that conditions at some schools may be far different than the model makes them appear. That's because the data used in the model are based on estimates submitted by the companies themselves. Clerical errors or flawed interpretations of what needs to be reported can result in misleading impressions about what's released.

    Of the 435 schools that ranked worse than Hitchens, Ohio EPA toxicologist Paul Koval believes about "half of those could be better but half could be worse." The economist who helped create the model for the EPA, Nick Bouwes, takes a different view. The modeled results, he says, "may be a gross underestimate," in part because companies only approximate what they release. Without long-term monitoring, Koval and Bouwes agree, no one can be certain which schools have problems and which might not.

    Among the hot spots that might justify monitoring, the government's model identified:

Deer Park, Texas, near Houston, where students at elementary, middle and high schools faced dangerously high levels of butadiene, a carcinogen, and other gases from petrochemical plants on the Houston Ship Channel.

Lucedale, Miss., where kids at five schools faced air with high levels of chromium, a metal that, in one form, has been linked to cancer.

Oro Grande Elementary in California's Mojave Desert, where students breathed a variety of metals, including chromium, manganese and lead.

    BEST OR WORST: Where does your school's air quality rank?http://content.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/smokestack/interactive/4

    The likely exposures weren't simply the product of living in a part of town where pollution is heavy. In thousands of cases, the air appeared to be better in the neighborhoods where children lived than at the schools they attended, USA Today found.

    At about 16,500 schools, the air outside the schools was at least twice as toxic as the air at a typical location in the school district. At 3,000 of those schools, air outside the buildings was at least 10 times as toxic.

    But in all of these cases, precisely what risk children face remains a mystery - to parents, school officials and government regulators responsible for protecting public health. No laws or regulations require the sort of air monitoring that would tell them.

    "There are health and safety standards for adults in the workplace, but there are no standards for children at schools," says Ramona Trovato, the former director of the EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection, who has since retired from the agency. "If a parent complains, there's no law that requires anybody to do anything. It's beyond belief."

    Smokestack Effect: "What if We're Next?"

    Cancer found Matt Becker before he turned 16. It gave him nosebleeds that lasted for hours and a melon-size tumor inside his chest. It kept him in the hospital for weeks at a time, a tube draining quarts of fluid from the lining of his lungs. It stole his sophomore year of high school and almost took his life.

    "I never thought a kid my age could go through what I went through," he says now, as calmly as if he were recounting a boring day at school. For eight years, Matt went to school across the street from his house, at Sayler Park School in the Cincinnati neighborhood of the same name.

    Now, at 17, he's back in the classroom, in a different school not far from where he lives with his parents and younger brother. His cancer, a non-Hodgkin lymphoma, was diagnosed in 2006 and has since gone into remission, and his life seems much the same as it was before he got sick.

    He goes fishing and shoots pool. His hair, closely cropped, has grown back brown and full. Except for a 7-inch purple scar along his right shoulder blade - where doctors went in for exploratory surgery - cancer appears to have left no marks.

    Matt knows better. His life has barely begun, but already he harbors a fear no child deserves: He worries that the chemotherapy needed to save his life may have left him sterile. "There's a good chance," says his mother, Pam.

    The causes of many cancers, especially those in children, are varied and often unknown. Epidemiologists usually fail to pinpoint the culprits, and no one knows what caused Matt's cancer. His mother is haunted by a fear: that the same chemicals that prompted the shutdown of Meredith Hitchens Elementary, 2 miles away, might be to blame.

    Like most kids, Matt spent much of his childhood outdoors. He remembers seeing and smelling what came out of the plastics plant. But, like most kids and many parents at schools across the country, he seldom considered what he was breathing and how it might affect his health.

    After the diagnosis, "my doctor ... asked me if there was any kind of pollution where I lived," Matt recalls. "It never really crossed my mind how bad it could be."

    The model used by USA Today indicated the school where Matt spent kindergarten through eighth grade - Sayler Park - and his home across the street were touched by the same chemicals that led to the closure of Hitchens. Although the concentrations of carcinogens outside Matt's school were not nearly as high as those found at Hitchens, the model indicated elevated levels there, too.

    Ohio EPA's Koval, who supervised monitoring at Hitchens, says concentrations from the model showed cancer risks at Sayler Park would have been about six times higher than what the state considers acceptable.

    The company cited by the Ohio EPA - Lanxess Corp. - no longer runs the plastics plant. But a company official who used to manage the Addyston facility says state regulators overstated the dangers. "The situation wasn't so dire that there was a serious public risk," says A.J. "Sandy" Marshall, now president and managing director for Lanxess Inc., the company's Canadian subsidiary. In 2005, Lanxess reported emitting 55,000 pounds of butadiene and acrylonitrile, both considered carcinogens by the Ohio EPA.

    Marshall says the state EPA used flawed or outdated studies to claim that cancer risks were high. Although Marshall says Lanxess took major steps to curb its emissions, he says the company does not believe the 369 kids moved from Hitchens faced any serious dangers.

    The Ohio EPA says otherwise.

    In its air-quality study issued in December 2005, the agency explained how it determined the risks outside Hitchens were 50 times higher than acceptable. The state considers an "acceptable" cancer risk as one additional cancer for every 100,000 people, based on the idea that residents would breathe the air there for 70 years.

    At Hitchens, the air showed concentrations of chemicals that the state concluded could cause 50 more cancers for every 100,000 people. It also noted that "children may be at higher risk" than adults.

    During the years Matt was growing up, Koval says, equipment problems at the plastics plant meant emissions of one of the carcinogens probably were much worse than what monitoring found. That's because an industrial flare, a tall flame used to burn off butadiene, wasn't working properly, Koval says. That problem, Koval says, and fewer regulations on what the plant could emit likely meant butadiene was being released at levels Koval calls "alarming."

    Lanxess' Marshall says the company believes it ran the flare properly and met its permit requirements. How much butadiene Matt or the children at Hitchens breathed will never be clear.

    Marshall cites a study released in 2006 by the state and county health departments, which found a higher-than-expected number of cancers in Addyston and concluded that "smoking history and multiple other risk factors are likely to play a role" in the excess cancers. But the study also said that "exposures from the Lanxess facility cannot be ruled out" as a cause. It never examined cases in Matt's Sayler Park neighborhood, nor did the state monitor there.

    Children's health experts such as physician Landrigan say "it's plausible" that Matt's cancer might be related to his exposure to the chemicals. Too little is known - about childhood cancer and toxic chemicals - to ever be certain, and Landrigan made clear he did not examine Matt or his medical records.

    Lanxess' Marshall also cannot say. "I feel for the family," he says of the Beckers. "When these diseases hit, there certainly is a lot of questioning as to what happens, what causes it and so on."

    That's no comfort to Pam Becker. She worries when Matt loses weight; every pound he drops might be the cancer returning. And she frets about her younger boy, Nick. At 13, he only half-jokes that he holds his breath near the plant.

    "How guilty do we feel if we gave our kid this because of where we live and where we sent him to school?" Pam Becker asks. "What if Nick's next? What if we're next?"

    Smokestack Effect: Cancer at Port Neches

    A few blocks beyond the trees around Port Neches-Groves High School in Port Neches, Texas, gray towers jut into the air. The towers help cool factories that use chemicals to make rubber and plastics - the kind of chemicals that former students there say gave them cancer.

    The federal government built the plants in Port Neches during World War II, searching for a substitute for rubber supplies that had been cut off. Now they're owned by ISP Elastomers and Texas Petrochemicals.

    For decades, butadiene was released from the plants, often at levels that state monitoring showed could be harmful. So much escaped that it sometimes formed sweet-smelling clouds hovering over roads near the school, remembers Dave Cerami, who graduated in 1984.

    Cerami, 43, is in his fourth bout with cancer. This time, it has spread to his brain.

    "The last time I was diagnosed, that was a big kick," he says. "It's like, how many times can you dance this dance? How many times can you push your luck before your luck runs out?"

    It is one of many questions that he - and those he grew up with - cannot answer. Another: How bad was the air at their schools?

    "If you lived here and you have kids in the school, you don't want to believe it's harmful. And if you're the school, you don't want to believe that having a school there would be giving kids cancer," says Dale Hanks, a Beaumont, Texas, lawyer.

    Hanks has represented 27 graduates of Port Neches schools, including Cerami, who sued the chemical plants, their former owners and others after being diagnosed with cancer. The emissions they blamed took place before the plants' current owners took over.

    Seventeen of those cases have been settled out of court since the late 1990s, and confidentiality agreements bar the plaintiffs from discussing agreements. Ten more complaints are pending. No trial dates have been set.

    Five years after Cerami graduated, state regulators tried to find out how bad the air was. When Texas authorities looked in 1989, their monitors detected levels of butadiene near the schools that were more than four times higher than the state's safety standard. A decade later, state workers sent to monitor the air reported dizziness, nausea and "facial numbness," according to a 1999 report by the state Commission on Environmental Quality. Another report, in 2003, noted butadiene levels as much as 120times higher than the state's standard.

    After monitoring began, the state pressed the chemical plants to upgrade their equipment to curb emissions; butadiene levels fell sharply. Texas considers its efforts a success.

    But Vic Fair, head of the commission's regional office until he retired in 2001, says he never talked to the school district about what the monitors showed, and the school district never asked. "We didn't really have a way to tell people whether this is dangerous or not," he says. "What can we say?"

    Smokestack Effect: Who's Responsible?

    Regulatory responses, even slow ones, remain more the exception than the rule - especially at schools. Children's health experts have tried, with limited success, to push the EPA to make better use of its own tools.

    As early as 2002, an EPA advisory committee now led by Melanie Marty, a California EPA toxicologist, questioned the agency's failure to be more proactive. The group, called the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, is composed of 30 experts from industry, state governments, academia and advocacy groups. It reports to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

    Hundreds of pages of correspondence reviewed by USA Today show that among the committee's recommendations were calls for the EPA to develop better information about the exposure of children to toxic chemicals. One letter, sent by the committee to then-EPA administrator Christie Whitman on May 2, 2002, urged a more aggressive approach by the EPA to "environmental health threats at schools."

    Although the letter focused on concerns about air quality inside schools, it asked the EPA to "identify environmental considerations" that communities could consider as they select school sites. Among them: proximity to "hazardous facilities."

    "School communities need reliable information about the risks to children's health from exposure to environmental contaminants," the letter read.

    A response came almost three months later, from Assistant Administrator Jeffrey Holmstead, restating the agency's commitment to children and listing a variety of programs it supported. The letter did not mention proximity of schools to hazardous facilities.

    The EPA has taken many steps toward making children safer.

    It has worked with schools to improve air quality inside buildings, primarily by identifying toxic cleaners and other chemicals that might harm students.

    Today the EPA is investigating whether athletic fields made with synthetic turf expose children to unsafe levels of toxic chemicals.

    What the agency hasn't done is use its models, as USA Today did, to look for potential problems around schools - then follow up by testing for toxic chemicals. "Honestly, it didn't occur to me to do this study when I was there, and if it had, we would've initiated it," says Trovato, who directed the EPA's children's health office from 1997 to 2002.

    "This isn't something you want to ignore," she says of what USA Today found. "If I were still in that job, the only thing I'd feel is, 'I wish I'd thought of it.' "

    The current head of the children's health protection office, Ruth McCully, sees her role differently. "It's not my job responsibility to initiate those types of activities," says McCully, who took over this year. "Do I personally have any idea of the chemicals that might be outside kids' schools? Well, I'm not going to answer that," she says. "I'm not out there doing air monitoring."

    That's precisely the problem, critics contend: a lack of urgency and initiative on the part of EPA.

    "That's the argument EPA puts up: 'We don't know so we don't have to act,'" says Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, an advocacy group that focuses on children and schools.

    John Balbus, chief health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the EPA children's advisory committee, frames the problem more practically. "To me, the greatest failure of this administration has been the failure to focus on where problems may be occurring now and take action."

    At Meredith Hitchens, the Ohio EPA concluded the risk of getting cancer was 50 times what the state considers acceptable. If a school is one of the 435 where the model indicates air worse than at Hitchens, what should parents do?

    "If it were me, I would be going to the school board. I would be going to my legislators and raising Cain," says Marty, the California toxicologist.

    And the companies near schools? "I would think that responsible industry would be very supportive of monitoring," says Rick Hackman, a former member of the EPA advisory committee and the associate director of regulatory and technical relations for P&G North America.

    And what about regulators, state or federal, primarily responsible for protecting health and safety? Says the EPA's Bob Lee, an economist who directs the team that manages the pollution model: "I'd suggest they go do some monitoring."

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Part II: "Weird" Smell Set Off Probe at Ohio School

Monday 08 December 2008

»

by: Blake Morrison, USA Today

Also see:     

Part I: Toxic Air and America's Schools    •

Part III: Toxics Can Affect Kids, Adults Differently    •

Part IV: Air Tests Reveal Elevated Levels of Toxics Around Schools    •

    Addyston, Ohio - The toxic chemicals that led to the closure of Meredith Hitchens Elementary School here became impossible to ignore in 2004, during the annual Oktoberfest celebration at the school.

    The air outside the building, never pristine, "smelled weird and everyone noticed it" that Saturday, recalls Ruth Breech, a community activist.

    Ohio Citizen Action, an advocacy group for whom Breech worked, had begun a public awareness campaign aimed at curbing emissions at Lanxess Corp., which ran a plastics plant across the street from the school.

    Not until weeks after the festival did Breech spot the reason for the "weird" smells: Lanxess had reported a leak that weekend to county environmental authorities. It had accidentally released about 1,500 pounds of dangerous chemicals over two days. "Had we not looked," Breech says, "we would never have known."

    Two more accidental releases prompted a Hamilton County health office to request help from the Ohio EPA. The question: Did chemicals in the air outside the plant - and outside the elementary school across the street - pose a serious public health risk?

    The state put monitors on the roof of Hitchens to find out what residents, including schoolchildren, were breathing.

    Anne Mock's two sons attended Hitchens and she volunteered at the school. Some days, she says, she noticed the air smelled foul. "You would taste it in your mouth. You would smell it in your clothes," Mock recalls. Her elder son sometimes mentioned that he wasn't feeling well. "He would complain about headaches and stuff," she says.

    At first, Mock says, she could barely pronounce acrylonitrile and butadiene, two of the chemicals emitted by Lanxess, both carcinogens. Now, she talks like a toxicologist, and so do her children. "After a year," she says, "they could tell you all the chemical names."

    In December 2005, after seven months of air monitoring, state regulators reported their findings: The two chemicals from the plastics plant were drifting over the school at levels that made the risk of cancer 50 times higher than what the state considers acceptable.

    The school district, which had been considering closing one of its elementary schools, acted promptly. It decided to close Hitchens and transfer its 369 students - from pre-K through first grade - to schools farther from the plant. "The director of Ohio EPA said, 'You need to move the kids now,' so we did," recalls Rhonda Bohannon, superintendent of the district. "I don't think we had any choice whatsoever."

    Air monitoring at Hitchens shows levels of the most dangerous chemicals have declined "significantly" since 2005, Ohio EPA toxicologist Paul Koval says. But levels remain "over our risk goals," he says.

    Even so, Breech, the activist who rallied parents, says closing Hitchens was the right move. "It was a really nice school," she says. "A really nice school in a really bad location."

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Part III: Toxics Can Affect Kids, Adults Differently

Tuesday 08 December 2008

»

by: Blake Morrison and Brad Heath, USA Today

Also see:     

Part I: Toxic Air and America's Schools    •

Part II: "Weird" Smell Set Off Probe at Ohio School    •

Part IV: Air Tests Reveal Elevated Levels of Toxics Around Schools    •

    Outside almost every school in the country, the model used by USA Today indicates the presence of at least one or two chemicals capable of causing a variety of ailments. Whether the chemicals could cause harm depends on which are in the air and at what levels.

    Some chemicals, such as butadiene, are classified as known carcinogens by the federal government. Even very small amounts of butadiene can slightly increase the risk of contracting cancer; authorities usually become concerned when the levels are high, especially if people are exposed to those levels for a long time. The monitoring that led to the closure of an elementary school in Addyston, Ohio, found butadiene levels that would cause a cancer risk far higher than what Ohio considers acceptable.

    Other chemicals have more limited effects. They can irritate the eyes or cause headaches, even at heavy doses. Still others, such as ozone, can exacerbate asthma, a leading medical cause of school absences, the American Lung Association says.

    For those, regulators try to determine how much of a chemical a person can be exposed to without getting sick, a value the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls a "reference concentration."

    Most assessments are based on the effect chemicals might have on adults, as shown in workplace studies.

    "It's one thing to be able to detect the chemical," says Melanie Marty, a toxicologist with the California EPA. "It's another thing to know whether the concentration to which the kids are exposed is going to be harmful."

    The impact of one man-made chemical, acrylonitrile, illustrates how much more vulnerable children can be. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says kids have died after being exposed to vapors of the chemical "that caused only minor nose and throat irritation in adults." The chemical, used to make plastics and rubber, was found in the air outside the Addyston school.

    Philip Landrigan, a physician at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, says chemicals could interact to pose greater dangers.

    "The fundamental problem is truly how little we know about interactions," Landrigan says. "When you compound that situation by simultaneously exposing children to a number of chemicals, there are just gaps in knowledge that (are) really of grave concern."

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Part IV: Air Tests Reveal Elevated Levels of Toxics Around Schools

Monday 08 December 2008

»

by: Brad Heath and Blake Morrison, USA Today

Also see:     

Part I: Toxic Air and America's Schools    •

Part II: "Weird" Smell Set Off Probe at Ohio School    •

Part III: Toxics Can Affect Kids, Adults Differently    •

    Midland, Pa. - In this borough of 2,900 in the westernmost part of the state, the steel industry used to be the primary employer. Today, Midland's schools offer the most jobs - and now are beginning to unravel a mystery that could affect the health of their students.

    For five days this fall, USA Today monitored the air near Midland Elementary-Middle School, a red-brick building blocks from the riverside steel plants that defined the town for generations. It was one of 95 schools in 30 states where the newspaper teamed with scientists at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland to take samples and analyze toxic chemicals in the air.

    The highest readings appeared near seven of the schools, including Midland. At those locations, USA Today's monitoring showed pollution at levels that could make people sick or significantly increase their risk of cancer if they were exposed to the chemicals for long periods.

    Among the chemicals found in the air near the seven schools: the metals manganese and chromium, and the carcinogens benzene and naphthalene, all in concentrations that could be well above U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety thresholds for long-term exposure.

    At 57 more schools, the results showed combinations of chemicals at levels that were lower than at the seven worst locations but still higher than what some states consider acceptable. At about half of these schools - including some along Louisiana's Gulf Coast as well as in affluent suburbs such as McLean, Va., and Lakewood, Colo. - benzene was primarily responsible for the potential health risks. The chemical is often found in refinery emissions and automobile exhaust.

    Experts say even small amounts of toxic chemicals can do irreparable harm to children, who breathe more air per pound than adults do, and whose bodies process chemicals differently.

    Exposures "may be causing mutations in a child's cells that begin the pathway to cancer," says Philip Landrigan, one of the nation's foremost experts on pediatric medicine and a physician at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

    "Those mutations, once they take place, they're hard-wired," Landrigan says. "They may go on to cancer. They may go nowhere. But they certainly put the child at greater risk of cancer, and that risk is life-long."

    Regulators usually examine cancer risks by asking how many more cases might result from pollution. If the risk, based on a lifetime of exposure, is less than one additional case per 1 million people, the EPA considers the air safe. But if the risk is higher - for instance, if the risk of an additional cancer exceeds one in 100,000, a level USA Today found at 64 schools where it monitored - regulators might work with industries to curb emissions.

    "These results suggest that we need to be concerned about what the children are breathing while at school," says Patrick Breysse, a scientist with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who helped oversee USA Today's efforts.

    Breysse, director of the Center for Childhood Asthma in the Urban Environment at Hopkins, cautions that the results from USA Today's monitoring represent only a "snapshot of pollution." He says parents "shouldn't take these results and abandon their schools. But they certainly need to start asking people in authority to find out more."

    He says the findings should prompt the government to act "with some sense of urgency" to investigate pollution outside schools where health risks appear to be the greatest. In some cases, that may mean regulators working with industries near schools to cut their emissions, he says. "In extreme cases," he says, "it may mean shutting down or moving schools."

    "Just Stunned"

    To select where to monitor, USA Today used a government computer model that shows how industrial emissions are dispersed throughout the country. About two-thirds of the schools chosen appeared hard-hit by toxic chemicals; the other one-third were in areas where the air seemed relatively clean.

    At some schools, USA Today's monitoring involved placing charcoal badges near schools to capture toxic chemicals. At other locations, reporters also used pumps and filters that collected samples of metals and other compounds.

    In both cases, USA Today followed established protocols and used the same equipment employed by many universities and industries to monitor air quality. The monitoring lasted four to seven days, a short amount of time compared with the months-long monitoring that state and federal regulators can do.

    Regulators, however, seldom check for toxic chemicals outside schools. "We're trying to show that we can flag some schools based on the limited data collected by USA Today," Breysse says. "Now we're calling on the EPA and other health authorities to do it more thoroughly."

    That's exactly what is happening in Midland, where USA Today's monitoring found high levels of chromium. Airborne chromium can take two forms - one can cause cancer, the other is relatively harmless.

    What remains unknown is what type of chromium was in the air. The more dangerous form, known as hexavalent chromium or chromium 6, can be released during a variety of industrial processes, including steelmaking and cement production. It has no odor or taste and is difficult to detect without more sophisticated monitoring.

    If the chromium were the more harmful form, the dangers in Midland could rival those found outside Meredith Hitchens Elementary, a Cincinnati-area school where the Ohio EPA concluded the risk of cancer was 50 times higher than what the state considers acceptable. The district closed Hitchens in 2005.

    Last year, three companies operating near Midland - a steel mill and a foundry blocks from the school, and a power plant across the Ohio River - filed reports with the EPA that showed combined releases of at least 7,500 pounds of chromium into the air. The EPA doesn't require the companies to say what type of chromium.

    Dan Greenfield, a spokesman for Allegheny Ludlum Corp., which runs the steel mill in Midland, says it's "extremely unlikely" that any chromium 6 came from the mill. "We have state-of-the art environmental controls," he says.

    A representative of Whemco, which operates the foundry, declined to comment. Ellen Raines, a spokeswoman for FirstEnergy Corp., which runs the power plant, says its emissions are diluted by high smokestacks, and that scrubbers on those stacks trap most of the chromium before it's released.

    Monitoring at Midland also showed manganese, a metal that can damage the nervous system, at a higher level than what the EPA says is safe.

    The newspaper's findings prompted the district's superintendent to push for action.

    On Nov. 19, the day a reporter told him of the high chromium readings, Superintendent Sean Tanner asked the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to put an air monitor at the school. The agency installed one on the roof the next morning. "I wanted something done, and I didn't want to wait," says Tanner, who says he was "just stunned" by USA Today's findings. "I thought that was necessary to protect our students, our staff and, ultimately, our community."

    Since USA Today monitored, slumping demand prompted Allegheny Ludlum to mostly idle its Midland steel mill, Greenfield says. It's not clear when production will fully resume.

    Pennsylvania authorities said Thursday that initial air tests for chromium and other airborne metals did not indicate reason for concern. Two days of samples - both taken since the Allegheny Ludlum plant reduced production - showed chromium levels 10 times lower than what USA Today detected.

    An agency guide on air monitoring notes that results of such monitoring often vary based on the weather, or whether a factory is "operating on one sampling day, but not on another." A spokeswoman for the state's environmental agency, Teresa Candori, says regulators plan to collect samples at Midland for at least six months.

    "Lip Service" to Kids.

    The government routinely monitors for six chemicals, most notably those that cause smog. A report three years ago by the EPA's inspector general highlighted shortcomings in the agency's monitoring for about 180 others, all toxic. It concluded that "many high-risk areas" for chemicals do not have monitors.

    In the past decade, for instance, USA Today's search of EPA records found only about 3% of the nation's schools were within a mile of a long-term monitor set up to detect hazardous air pollutants. Even fewer - the newspaper identified only 125 of almost 128,000 schools - had monitors within a few blocks.

    Although the EPA provides grants for monitoring at locations where pollution models indicate problems, officials say such monitoring is primarily left to each state. The EPA has increased its grants since the inspector general's report, says Robert Meyers, the agency official in charge of air issues. Since 2004 it has spent $37 million on new monitoring stations.

    He concedes that those grants - and subsequent decisions on where to monitor - put no emphasis on schools, even though the agency acknowledges that children are particularly susceptible to toxic chemicals.

    Despite strict limits on pollution that causes smog, the EPA has no standards for how much of a toxic chemical can be in the air before the agency takes action. That makes assessing dangers children face inexact at best.

    "There may have been some lip service about paying attention to children Ö but they're not putting their money where their mouth is," Melanie Marty, a toxicologist with the California EPA, says of the U.S. EPA. "If we don't know anything, we can't say we're protecting the general population out there, let alone kids."

    Sources Hard to Identify

    USA Today did not place monitors on school grounds. Rather, reporters, editors and others - including local volunteers and journalists from Denver television station KUSA and local newspapers owned by Gannett, USA Today's parent company - found locations that generally were within 100 yards of schools.

    At those locations, often homes or businesses, the air would be similar to what was outside the school buildings.

    Scientists from Hopkins and Maryland analyzed the samples for about 40 chemicals.

    The chemicals might have come from a variety of sources: heavy industries such as refineries and steel mills, smaller businesses that aren't required to report their emissions to the government, gas stations and automobiles. The monitoring could not pinpoint sources.

    Benzene levels were especially high outside at least three schools: Jotham W. Wakeman School in Jersey City; Wayne School in Erie, Pa.; and H. Byron Masterson Elementary School in Kennett, Mo. There, benzene levels were high enough that they could cause at least one additional cancer for every 10,000 people exposed throughout their lives, Hopkins found.

    Studies have linked benzene to leukemia.

    "These are still based on limited data," Breysse cautions. "But they should stimulate further investigation."

    Monitoring Is Key

    Other locations appeared less troubling. In Ashland City, Tenn., for instance, the EPA computer model indicated the air at Ashland City Elementary School was rife with manganese. The model ranked it among the very worst schools in the nation for industrial pollutants.

    USA Today monitored the air twice near the school. Although the snapshot samples aren't definitive, both tests found levels of manganese thousands of times lower than what the model estimated would be in the air there.

    Why the vast discrepancy? The EPA model relied on reports submitted by A.O. Smith, a water heater manufacturer in Ashland City. The company reported to the EPA that it released 33,788 pounds of manganese into the air in 2005.

    A spokesman for the company, Mark Petrarca, says its emissions reports are accurate but that its manganese is trapped in flakes that usually fall to the shop floor and are moved off the site. Only "trace amounts," he says, would be emitted from the plant.

    That's consistent with what USA Today found and underscores the need to monitor before concluding that the air outside any school is dangerous.

    Even with the monitoring by USA Today, Hopkins' Breysse sees merit in checking further.

    Others echo his assessment. USA Today's monitoring "really is a first snapshot, and you need to see the movie to see the whole thing," says Paul Koval, a toxicologist with the Ohio EPA who spearheaded the seven-month monitoring effort that led to the closure of Hitchens.

    "Discovering what's happening in your community," he says, "still needs to be done, no matter what."

    Contributors: Mark Hannan, Rhyne Piggott.

    Contributors to air-monitoring project:

    USA Today monitored air quality at 95 schools across the nation, under the supervision of Patrick Breysse of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Amir Sapkota of the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

    Fieldwork was done by Dan Reed, Kevin McCoy, Rick Jervis, Chris Woodyard, Dennis Cauchon, Judy Keen, Larry Copeland, Rick Hampson, Byron Acohido, Haya El Nasser, Mike Tsukamoto, David Lindsey, Noah Grynberg, Nicholas Persac and Linda Mathews of USA Today; Nicole Vap, Anna Hewson and Byron Reed of KUSA-TV in Denver; James Bruggers, Stefanie Frith, Tracy Loew, David Castellon, Brian Passey, Ben Jones, Jennie Coughlin, Kathleen Gray, Tim Evans, Lori Kurtzman, Jeff Martin, Adam Silverman, Greg Latshaw, Grant Schulte, Ron Barnett, Gunnar Olson, Dirk VanderHart, Kevin Paulk, Clay Carey, Maureen Milford and Dan Nakaso of Gannett newspapers; and local volunteers Deborah Corcoran, R.E. Corcoran, Michael Corcoran, James Mathews, Donald DeWees, Maureen Gallagher and Pauline Cross.

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