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OAK RIDGE — With its clean lines, sturdy brick construction and shiny-new appearance, the four-year-old elementary school doesn’t look like the setting for a mystery of epic proportions.

But Oak Ridge Elementary School poses a so-far unsolvable riddle for experts from across the Triad and, more recently, well beyond.

What caused headaches, coughing fits, red eyes, blurry vision, chronic fatigue, weird rashes and other allergy-like symptoms in a significant number of the school’s students and teachers?

Could it be a “toxic” mold that one activist says is present in potentially lethal quantities? Or is it something much more mundane, such as a faulty system for air distribution that might be fixed with some basic modifications?

Whatever the answer, the enigma now has attracted federal investigators and sparked the school’s temporary closure, triggering debate about such unusual topics as how teachers might decontaminate their lesson plans and other paperwork before taking them from the school to the alternate sites where Oak Ridge kids will start the next school year.

“This should have been taken care of way sooner,” Oak Ridge parent Marianne Wiener says of the school’s problems with indoor air quality, which caused her to home-school her ailing daughter this spring. “It’s like a scene from a movie. It’s absolutely unbelievable the way it has played out.”

But the school system already has spent nearly $600,000 — and is poised to spend more than twice that — attempting to find and address whatever might be making people sick.

Guilford officials say they have worked diligently to set things right, starting in July 2005 before the new school was even fully opened. Until recently, they felt no need to seek help from state or federal experts who focus on these types of issues.

“We had a lot of confidence in the health professionals we hired and in the local health department,” said Joe Hill, a retired Guilford administrator and now a private consultant helping the district deal with the school’s problems.

As part of Hill’s recent work, he assembled a 5-inch-thick dossier of all the air-quality tests, reports and repair bills that school officials accumulated in just the first year after the $10 million school project was completed.

“If anything is frustrating about it,” he said, “it’s that the volume of test data that we have here has not convinced (parents and employees) that the issues are not as serious as has been conveyed and that it hasn’t convinced some that the school system has tried to address the issues.”

Now, after a detailed inspection by federal researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the school will not open this fall. It could remain closed through October with its students parceled out to four satellite locations while work on the latest recommendations is completed.

'Children will be there ...’

Wiener and other critics say school officials were too slow in calling the feds to help battle the problem, which they see as little-changed since school board member Darlene Garrett urged then-Superintendent Terry Grier to do something about it in August 2005.

“Someone needs to determine the source of the problem (probably the HVAC system),” Garrett said in an e-mail to Grier back then, referring to the system that heats, ventilates and cools the building. “As you are well aware, children will be there in a matter of days and we should not be exposing them to the mold, nor should teachers be exposed.”

The air-quality problems at Oak Ridge were one more issue in a project that did not come together smoothly, suffering a series of setbacks during several years of planning and construction.

“It was delay after delay, everything from the weather to the soil they were going to build on was not acceptable, so they had to dig it out and bring in new,” said Sandra Smith, managing editor of the Northwest Observer weekly newspaper and vice chairwoman of the school’s project review team from 2001 through 2005.

The district impanels review teams of parents, teachers, school administrators, community leaders and construction personnel to help supervise major building projects. The Oak Ridge project renovated the school’s 80-year-old original structure and enveloped it in several wings of new construction.

Mold problems first surfaced in spring 2005, about the time the first wing of new construction opened, Smith said.

That summer, as the rest of the building was readied, the review team discussed leaks in the new roofing that had left puddles on floors and whether that triggered mold eventually found in six classrooms, several offices and the media center.

Mold also had formed on library books brought into the new building after being stored improperly in a mobile classroom with no air-conditioning.

Two days before the entire project opened in August 2005, “eradication of all mold continued today,” project team minutes noted amid discussion of whether the HVAC system was to blame.

Garrett “seemed perplexed that mold has been so prevalent,” according to the minutes.

Efforts to reach Garrett for comment were unsuccessful. Grier did not return a call to his office in San Diego — the school district he now leads — asking about his recollection of Oak Ridge’s problems and efforts to solve them.

Parents, teachers act

The issues at Oak Ridge didn’t boil over immediately, but arose in spurts over several years as school administrators called on outside contractors and in-house maintenance personnel in search of an elusive magic bullet.

This spring, dissatisfaction reached a critical mass when parents and teachers demanded that outside medical professionals be brought in to evaluate the situation.

By then, 15 ailing students had withdrawn from school. And parents of other students were picking up their kids before the end of school each day to minimize their exposure.

On May 26, several teachers protested what they saw as the school’s unhealthy environment by holding class outside.

Some parents said they reached their limit this year because it took that long to pinpoint the school as the likeliest source for their child’s persistent symptoms.

“It seems to be that the longer you’re exposed, the worse it gets,” said Tom Malone, whose fifth-grade son Hunter and first-grade daughter Madison both had symptoms, especially Hunter.

Many children went to the school and suffered no unusual symptoms. Some families saw different results in two or more of their children at the school, chalking it up to differences in their immune systems or to differences in the air flow to their separate classrooms.

“Our older son, for whatever reason, did not have the sensitivity that the younger one had,” said Oak Ridge parent Burton Matherly, adding that his third-grader, Andrew, “had pretty much all the symptoms, deep cough, rashes, flowing eyes, allergy symptoms galore.”

There’s no certainty that any or all of these problems are linked to mold. It’s clear that mold can cause respiratory and other problems in children and adults susceptible because of allergies or asthma.

But the science is still unsettled on whether normal amounts of airborne mold can cause greater illness. People breathe in a variety of mold spores every day, indoors and outdoors.

“The question becomes: Can people really get enough of a toxin to cause disease by inhaling?” said David Lipton, an industrial hygiene consultant with the state Department of Public Health. “Mold toxins can be a problem, but it’s where the exposure is just massive.”

Lipton inspected the school this spring after being alerted to the problem by Wiener.

He found several troublespots for mold, including roof leaks and damp carpet. But he also had questions about the building’s humidity levels, carbon-dioxide concentrations and its air-conditioning equipment.

A threat to life?

Illinois mold consultant Linda May injected a new level of controversy into the debate in mid-June when she came to town at the request of some of the Oak Ridge parents.

May said the school is infested with a life-threatening toxic mold and cannot be salvaged.

“They deliberately put those people in harm’s way,” May said of school officials. “I figure you have about 2,000 kids sick. I guarantee you that within two years.”

Such claims mystify Brian Kareis, a veteran hygienist who has run numerous mold-spore tests at Oak Ridge during the past few years.

“All the recent testing has shown that everything is normal and, in some cases, better than normal,” said Kareis of Workplace Hygiene, the company that has tested the school periodically since 2005.

May sought unsuccessfully to interest the State Bureau of Investigation in exploring criminal charges against some of the local officials involved in allowing Oak Ridge to open.

An Oak Ridge parent gave May the review team minutes, copies of Garrett’s e-mails to Grier and other documents after finding them at the school among items being thrown away.

May sent the material to the SBI, which was not impressed: “The SBI Diversion and Environmental Crimes Unit has reviewed the documents,” agency spokeswoman Noelle Talley said last week. “The SBI has not opened an investigation and is not aware of any indication of criminal violations.”

Textbooks to humidity

Back in 2005, school officials’ initial concern for air quality focused on improperly stored books carted back into the new building with mold on them, Joe Hill said, especially after a staff person unwrapping them complained of feeling sick.

The school system hired the first of many contractors to clean the books, the carts where they were stored and, later, some of the school’s other furniture.

Other contractors pulled up carpet where mold problems were found and replaced it with less mold-prone vinyl tile. Still others tested the HVAC system and installed a large-scale dehumidifier that cost $534,000.

Finally, Guilford administrators summoned NIOSH in June after a survey by Guilford’s health department found high numbers of Oak Ridge students and teachers reporting symptoms that might be traced to air-quality problems at the school.

Now school officials are preparing to do more work on the HVAC system in line with one of NIOSH’s preliminary recommendations.

All of this can’t end soon enough for people like Amy Pritchett, a third-grade teacher at Oak Ridge who describes her job as teaching in heaven.

She doesn’t think teachers and students will be able to return to the school until after the winter break. She’s willing to wait. She just wants to return to a school where people can feel safe.

“I want to walk in and think, 'Now I’m back in heaven,’” Pritchett says. “Not the other place.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com

Contact J. Brian Ewing at 373-7351 or brian.ewing@news-record.com