Carroll Garden parents: ‘Get PCBs out of our schools!’
CARROLL GARDENS — Parents at two Carroll Gardens schools have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to intervene in their struggle to remove hundreds of PCB-contaminated lighting fixtures from their Carroll Gardens school building.
Despite letters, a petition and photos of leaking fixtures at the P.S. 146 Brooklyn New School and M.S. 448 Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies at 610 Henry St., the city’s Department of Education (DOE) remains unresponsive, advocates said.
Parents say that because the building contains both an elementary school and a middle school, children may be there a decade before the toxic fixtures are removed.
“Since finding out that BNS contains hundreds of T-12 fluorescent light fixtures made with PCBs, I have felt conflicted about sending my daughter — a cancer survivor — to school in this building,” said BNS parent Alexis Quy in a statement on Monday. “With the DOE’s proposed 10-year timeline for remediation, she could end up being exposed to PCBs during school hours for 13 years.”