Anthony Carnevale Elementary School, Springfield Middle School,
Robert Bailey Elementary School, and Adelaide Avenue High School
Providence, RI

Rhode Island is one of twenty-one (21) states that has school siting policies that direct or suggest school siting officials “avoid” siting schools on or near specified man-made or natural environmental hazards, or direct the school district to “consider” those hazards when selecting school sites.  Despite these policies, Rhode Island’s capital has become the poster child for poor school siting decisions. 

In nearly every year since 1998, Providence has constructed one new school building or renovated an existing building for use as a school.  Nearly all the sites chosen for new schools were contaminated by hazardous substances by prior users of the sites.  In 1999, the Anthony Carnevale Elementary School and Springfield Middle School were constructed on top of the former Providence City Dump.   Concerned parents, neighbors, and the tenant association of a nearby public housing development sued the City and state Department of Environmental Management (DEM) challenging the school siting decision and the cleanup plan for the site. 

In a landmark 112 page ruling handed down in October of 2005, the trial court ruled that DEM violated the state’s contaminated site cleanup law (the Industrial Property Remediation and Reuse Act or “IPRARA”) by failing to consider “issues of environmental equity for low income and racial minority populations” when it approved the cleanup plan for the school, and failed to “develop and implement a process to ensure community involvement throughout the investigation and remediation of [the] contaminated [school] sites,” as required by IPRARA.  The Court also ruled that the City failed to give proper notice to abutting property owners and tenants concerning the City’s site investigation of the school site, that the failure to give proper notice rose to the level of a procedural due process violation under the federal and state constitutions, and that DEM was also liable for the City’s failure to give proper notice since IPRARA requires DEM to insure proper notice is given.    

Following the controversy surrounding the schools built on the former City Dump, Providence continued to build schools on contaminated sites. In 2000, the Robert Bailey Elementary School  was  built on the site of a former factory where high levels of lead and beryllium were found in the soil.  In 2004 and 2005, respectively, two high schools were proposed on separate contaminated sites, both formerly used for industrial purposes.  One site was abandoned by the City after an incinerator ash dump was discovered on the site and DEM required the City to perform additional environmental tests.  Instead of proceeding with that site, the City renovated a nearby commercial building for what became the E Cubed Academy so it could be opened on schedule (Fall 2004).

The second school, the Adelaide Avenue High School, was proposed to be built on a portion of the now demolished Gorham silver factory, one  of the nation’s largest silver manufacturing facilities.  The soil where the school is proposed is contaminated with unsafe levels of trichloroethylene (TCE) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and high levels of arsenic and lead are found in soil on other parts of the Gorham site where no remediation is planned.  The City stopped work on the Gorham site school in the spring of 2005 when DEM filed suit against the City to halt work until a clean up plan only for the portion of the Gorham site where the school was proposed was reviewed and approved by the agency.  The Court forbade the City from undertaking even limited work on the school site until a plan for that limited work was reviewed and approved by DEM.

While the litigation challenging the dump school has not yet affected the City’s choice of sites for schools, the litigation has forced DEM to more closely scrutinize clean up plans for contaminated school sites.  DEM has also required the City to hold more community meetings where results of environmental testing and proposed cleanup plans are discussed (Fischbach, 2005).