This essay is reproduced here as it appeared in the print edition of the original Science for the People magazine. These web-formatted archives are preserved complete with typographical errors and available for reference and educational and activist use. Scanned PDFs of the back issues can be browsed by headline at the website for the 2014 SftP conference held at UMass-Amherst. For more information or to support the project, email sftp.publishing@gmail.com
Teachers Organize: Asbestos in the Classroom
by Nancy Zimmet
‘Science for the People’ Vol. 14, No. 5 September-October 1982, p. 19 — 23
Nancy Zimmet has been an English teacher at Newton North High School in Newton Massachusetts for seven years. She worked with other teachers, parents, and students to remove asbestos from the high school.
Mesothelioma is a relatively rare form of lung cancer associated with exposure to even low levels of asbestos. No symptoms appear until fifteen to forty years after the victim first breathes asbestos; only then will mesothelioma show up on a lung x-ray. No cure or treatment exists: by the time cancer appears, the patient has less than one year to live.
In 1972 neither teachers nor staff at Newton North High School had heard about mosthelioma. Today they know a great deal about it. They were exposed to asbestos the first time they walked into the still unfinished high school in June 1972. For the next ten years they were exposed to low levels of asbestos whenever they entered the building. Theirs is the story of a struggle that lasted from 1972 to 1981 — a struggle of a few parents, teachers, and students to force the city to take action — and of the city’s opposition at each step of the way. It is the story of teachers learning that education alone will not bring change.
In 1972 contractors used standard construction techniques to build a new high school in Newton, Massachusetts, an upper-middle class suburb of Boston. Standard procedures included the spraying of asbestos on all internal support structures. Used as a fire retardant in the United States since World War II, asbestos is now in approximately 15% of the 1,500 Massachusetts schools inspected by the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission on Asbestos in the late 1970s.
At Newton North, not all of the asbestos remained on the steel beams. As teacher Justine Kent-Uritam testified to the Newton Board of Aldermen in 1973, much of it lay in chunks on floors, on furniture, and on top of lockers. Over the few years following the initial spraying the asbestos dried out as its dust further contaminated the air within the building.
Teachers organized the Asbestos Removal Task Force in 1973, and students and their parents joined. Membership turned over rapidly, however, students graduated and parents left when they no longer had to worry about their own children. A small group of teachers made up the nucleus.
I joined the Asbestos Removal Task Force in 1976 after a year of teaching at Newton North. Intrigued and troubled by the asbestos controversy, no one had told me about asbestos when I interviewed for the job or when I began teaching. At a faculty meeting one afternoon however, a colleague asked what was being done about the asbestos. No one could answer her questions, but the principal went into great detail explaining why we should not be concerned. His elaborate protest was my first clue to the danger.
The federal government stepped cautiously. In August 1978, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Joseph Califano wrote to all state governors warning that “any exposure probably carries some risk of disease.” The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established guidelines for asbestos cleanup.
Workers in business and public offices began looking at their own ceilings. In 1981 file clerks at the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company in Boston asked Nine to Five, the organization for women workers, for help regarding an office filled with asbestos. In one busy area asbestos lay in chunks on the floor and on filing cabinets. Nine to Five helped clerks plan a demonstration press conference outside the John Hancock building. Without glancing at the EPA’s guidelines for cleanup, the company ordered their maintenance men to simply sweep up the asbestos, according to Elaine Taber of Nine to Five.
Asbestos Dangers Get National Coverage
The task force was relatively inactive during the school years 1975-1976 and 1977-1978. The faculty was busy dealing with the heating and ventilating system, which had never worked properly. National awareness of the dangers of asbestos increased greatly during these years, however. As teachers at Newton North followed struggles similar to their own across the country, they thought about new strategies.
In the 1970s, U.S. newspapers documented the rising number of deaths, the rising number of suits, and the rising evidence of a cover-up of asbestos dangers by its manufacturers. The dangers were discovered much earlier but they were being publicized for the first time.
In 1971, before Newton had even sprayed the first beam, one parent in Howell Township, New Jersey, demanded that the local school board close its schools until all asbestos was removed. When other parents joined him by threatening to boycott the schools, the board closed the schools for four weeks and spent $180,000 to remove the asbestos. The parents’ fight in Howell Township was the first of many. Throughout the seventies parents, teachers and students in New York City, in Allen, Pennsylvania, in Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut, and in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts fought successfully for asbestos removal.
In the early years the task force tried to teach the community about the dangers of asbestos by holding seminars and bringing in national experts. City officials responded, however, only by arranging to have an unreliable air test performed in the school building. In 1974 the task force brought in William Nicholson, an expert on asbestos from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who recommended that the exposed areas be covered without delay. “Damage to the exposed fireproofing material can occur at any time and would give rise to significant asbestos air concentrations not detected in a short-term sampling program.” He had found asbestos — large chunks of it — on floors and fixtures, in storage areas and in the gym. In one area, a magazine storage room in the library, he found what he described as “the worst example of this type of pollution I have ever seen; I would never work in there!” In spite of Nicholson’s warning, the board refused to appropriate money to enclose the exposed asbestos.
The connection between success and action rather than education became clear from the start. On November 13, 1974, frustrated with official inaction, students wearing face masks marched on city hall. Newspaper and television news reporters marched with them. On November 21, 1974, Newton aldermen appropriated $90,000 to begin boxing in the asbestos. When reporters left, the aldermen dropped the issue. On March 29, 1975, four months after the march and the aldermen’s initial commitment to remove the asbestos, no reporters covered their meeting, no television cameras recorded their posturing. The aldermen, now claiming that the asbestos posed no health hazard, voted down a second request for $80,000. Some of the asbestos was boxed in with the 1974 appropriation, but much remained.
While people who worked in asbestos-filled rooms in the seventies fought for removal, people who had worked in asbestos-filled rooms in the forties and fifties, whose lives had been ruined by asbestosis and lung cancer, fought for restitution. In May, 1979 Gloria Zwerdling, a former school teacher, filed a suit for $2.5 million in Manhattan Supreme Court against 14 corporations, claiming she had contracted lung cancer from asbestos insulation in schools. By 1979 more than a thousand lawsuits, with claims totalling over $2 billion, had been filed against manufacturers of asbestos. During the various court hearings attorneys showed documents indicating that asbestos manufacturers such as Johns-Mansville and Raybestos had known the dangers of asbestos since the 1930s.1
Newton City officials read newspapers during the seventies. They watched television. And yet, like Johns-Mansville, they did not act until the Task Force organized in Newton and fought for asbestos removal there.
A Disgusting Issue
In the late 1970s no one at Newton North wanted to organize. There was nothing exciting or fun about cleaning up asbestos. As English teacher Stan Bomstein said, “This is a disgusting issue. A nice issue would be saving whales or bringing an alternative program to the school. If you succeed at them you can see people smile. But this issue is disgusting because if you win you are going to cost some people a lot of money. If you win people will turn around and say, the place looks the same to me. I didn’t see the problem in the first place.” Although he tried to avoid the problem as long as he could, Bomstein eventually concluded the task force had to renew its work. Previously, he said, “you could be in your room and it was in another room and you could isolate yourself. But after a few years it was apparent that it wasn’t a matter of specific space. It was the entire school… exposure was not in your own control.”
In 1978 Bomstein, Lynne Rossman, another English teacher, and I began to reorganize the task force, at first ignoring the lessons of the early seventies. We too thought knowledge would make the difference: if officials only understood the problem they would immediately act on it. We sent innumerable memos, gave lectures, and attended board of aldermen meetings to explain the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission’s recommendations that Newton North remove or box in its asbestos immediately. It seemed to us that the board refused to act simply because members did not understand the theoretical basis for the commission’s advice. A year later, we were still trying to make them understand. We thought the words of a world renowned expert on asbestos would have an impact.
In 1979 we encouraged city officials to attend a lecture by Irving Selikoff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Head of the public health department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and one of the country’s leading experts on asbestos-related diseases, Selikoff made the same recommendation that his colleague Nicholson had made years before: “When an institution can identify asbestos, it should be removed, because there is no safe level of exposure.” He agreed with Nicholson’s appraisal of air testing as unreliable because “what was low one day might be high another.” Furthermore, he said, any amount of asbestos is dangerous. “You don’t need much of a carcinogenic to get cancer… With even low levels of exposure, because there can be such a long latency period, the young are particularly susceptible. That is why it is so important that in places like Newton North the asbestos be removed.” Only one member of the board of aldermen was listening, however, and there was no official reaction to Selikoff’s recommendations.
Representatives from Newton’s health department, the Newton building commissioner, and the city’s director of support services all urged the school committee not to adopt the recommendations of the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission. The cost to box in or remove the asbestos, in excess of $500,000, was unjustified, they claimed. The school committee agreed and voted to continue testing the air bimonthly.
Their rationale for inaction was the result of a phase contrast microscope test, which had failed to detect asbestos fibers in the air at Newton North High. Such a test is inadequate, according to Charles Spooner, an environmental scientist in Bedford, Massachusetts. It relies on a technique that is “totally inappropriate for identifying the relatively large fiber bundles in bulk samples because the identification is based on shape and size of fibers alone and on no other property… Moreover, the possibility is always present that the air samples simply failed to pick up the low number of fibers one would expect in the interior of a school.” A much more accurate technique for estimating low levels of asbestos makes use of the polarized light microscope. Spooner points out that such a test, in addition to being accurate, is rapid and sufficiently inexpensive for surveying purposes.”2
The Task Force Goes Into Action
Our tactics had to change, we realized at last. Education would never be enough; a more public course of action was necessary. First, we convinced the board of aldermen to hire Dr. Spooner, who, we believed, would give an honest and thorough report on the extent of the asbestos problem. Second, we publicized the report.
Pressuring members of the Newton Board of Aldermen to hire Spooner did not take great numbers; it took organization and persistence. Before any board meeting in which we knew asbestos or Spooner’s hiring would be discussed, we would hold our own meetings to plan a strategy and assign tasks. Members of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association (PTSA), which generally supported our efforts, would plan to bring up the issue at their next meeting. We would talk over our plans with Newton North’s principal, who often spoke at school committee and board meetings. We would write letters to the editors of local papers, and we would make certain each board member received a personal call from one of us. We would designate one of our group to make a statement, and others to ask questions designed to raise important issues. When we wanted to pack the hall, we would call everyone on our telephone tree and each task force member would call or bring others.
When we first suggested to the board that it enlist Spooner’s help we were yelled at. During one meeting in 1979, Alderman Robert Stiller said he did not want an expert coming in unless it could be proven beforehand and without doubt that students and teachers would get cancer from the asbestos in the building. He questioned whether there was any danger at all from asbestos. “What would happen if I stood in a closet with a bag of asbestos over my head? Can you prove I would get cancer?” And he suggested that discontented teachers should look elsewhere for jobs. “A lot of anxiety was shown, a lot of fear has been evidenced and yet… they have not availed themselves of the opportunities of requesting transfers to other schools.”
Stiller postured, but undaunted we packed meetings with parents, teachers, students, and increasing numbers of reporters. Despite Stiller’s protests, the board hired Spooner. In his report of December, 1979, Spooner stated, as others had before, that the asbestos should be removed. The friable material was “clearly a source of asbestos fiber” in the air, he said. Furthermore, there had been “considerable deterioration of the asbestos containing material due to maintenance or vandalism.”3 He recommended that removal in three stages begin in the summer of 1980, when the school would be closed.
As teachers we still could not resist educating, but this time we would educate with the entire city watching. We took Spooner’s report to the press. Then we scheduled a public meeting for February 5th. Early in January we began planning for the event: we needed a large audience, media coverage, and a panel that would attract both. We advertised in local and Boston newspapers, and the PTSA announced the event in their meetings and newsletter. Dozens of posters covered school walls. Nearly everyone in the school wore a button reading “Remove Asbestos.” We sent personal invitations to faculty members, the mayor, the school comittee, and the board of aldermen. During the last week in January we mailed press releases to local and Boston papers and to radio and television stations; we followed them up with phone calls.
In addition to Spooner, our panel included representatives of the Harvard School of Public Health, the EPA, the National Advisory Commission on Asbestos, and the Massachusetts Special Legislative Commission. Members of the audience repeatedly voiced their concern about future legal recourse for students, teachers, and staff. Michael Baram, a Boston attorney specializing in environmental cases and a member of the National Advisory Commission on Asbestos, talked about possibilities. The refusal of the school systems “to respond adequately to the problem will result in nuisance, negligence, strict liability suits and a variety of creative legal actions that can be brought, as well as people seeking court orders to enjoin continued operations of schools.” Newspaper, radio, and television reporters recorded every question from troubled parents.
Two weeks later, the board of aldermen appropriated $800,000 for the first phase of asbestos removal, to begin the following summer. After a delay of eight years, one-third of the asbestos was removed in the summer of 1980.
In the spring of 1981 when we asked about plans for the second phase, first we were ignored, and then we were told the city had no money to continue the project. We thought we would have to gear up for another full-scale publicity event. To our amazement, however, simply letting the mayor and the board know the task force was still alive brought an immediate change of plans. We made a few calls, wrote a few letters, and the mayor somehow found money to continue. In the summers of 1981 and 1982, Newton completed the asbestos removal.
Get Organized and Take Power
In spite of our eventual successes, the years of organizing were not easy. As Bornstien explains, organizing did not always foster pleasant relations with colleagues. “As soon as you make somebody aware of asbestos you are going to tap into the main line of their fears and their insecurities. The person who believes that this is an issue is going to get a little scared or maybe a lot scared… I like being liked by people. I don’t want, when I walk down the hall, for anyone to think, he’s the one who scares me. I don’t want to be the source of fear in that building.”
Rossman, too, felt her colleagues were cutting her off, and she resented this reaction. “I’m really, I think, angry. I think I’m harboring a lot of anger and frustration at the lack of support from our faculty, and from administrators, and from the city, and from parents. Maybe that’s the way anything works, any kind of lobbying or any political movement… Maybe it’s always a small vanguard of people that have to do all the work.”
Most people at Newton North did not join the Task Force, did not raise their voices to officials, did not fight at all. They went about their daily lives as if teaching were their only concern. On the surface, at least, they appeared unconcerned about asbestos. That was not the case. As I talked with colleagues I found that fears were pervasive and, occasionally, overwhelming. Bobbi Black, a counselor, told me how she panicked one day: “I remember the time I brought in this beautiful hanging plant. I put a hook over the ceiling panels. As I lifted a panel all of this stuff fell out. I immediately got a sore throat. I had this vision that, oh, that’s all asbestos I’ve just ingested. I really got ill, both physically and psychologically. That was the first year in the building. I still think about that.”
My colleagues’ failure to join the struggle, then, was not due to their peace of mind. They remained aloof for the same reason they work at Newton North: they take the concept of professionalism seriously. No matter what happens at school — no matter how many fire drills interrupt classes, how many after-school meetings are held, how many students are put in each class, or how many classes a teacher must teach — they hold themselves responsible for the quality of education their students receive. The teachers at Newton North are there because they have been able to hold fine classes under all sorts of pressures. Asbestos was just one more problem for each to deal with alone. This time, though, none were successful. This time no individual could solve the problem.
The extent of each person’s involvement with the task force became a touchstone by which almost all teachers judged themselves. John Harris, who had not become involved, was painfully honest. “I didn’t get involved because of inertia and cynicism. And now I feel stupid and selfish.”
Those of us who had been active in the task force only felt positive about ourselves and our work. We had improved the condition of the building; we had proven the power of organization; and some of us had become different human beings. Rossman told me “I think being aware of the asbestos and working for removal has changed me as a person. I’ve put myself in situations that eight years ago I would never have envisioned being involved in — speaking in front of the Board of Aldermen — I’m much more political.”
We were never a large organization, nor were we politically sophisticated. But we fought at a time of growing national awareness of asbestos and the health problems it causes. When we finally understood that learning technical details and teaching them to others was only a beginning, we used political pressure. We spent our evenings and weekends organizing supporters. Success came, most of all because of our dogged persistence over ten years.
>> Back to Vol. 14, No. 5 <<
REFERENCES