Garland ISD is working with a contractor on plans to remove soil near Sam Houston Middle School after a third-party contractor report found some areas with high levels of arsenic.
On Friday, Garland ISD’s executive director of facilities and maintenance, Paul Gonzales, sent out a letter to families attending the school announcing that there would be a cleanup process this summer.
The report, which obtained via an open records request, comes almost a year after the EPA alerted Garland ISD about its findings of lead contaminated soil at Park Crest Elementary, which is directly across the street from Sam Houston. The EPA began a cleanup process to remove the lead contaminated soil on district property and in the surrounding neighborhood last August.
The remediation process in the neighborhood near Park Crest — which entailed excavating soil, moving it to another location and replacing it with uncontaminated soil — was wrapped up in mid-April.
Between November 2021 and March 2022, Terracon, an engineering consulting firm hired by the district, took 243 soil samples in 119 areas on school grounds of Sam Houston to check for elevated levels of arsenic and lead after Garland ISD trustees voted to spend $70,000 on testing. The EPA has said multiple times that the agency had no plans to test the soil at Sam Houston Middle School.
Seven of the 119 areas across campus that were tested by Terracon had arsenic levels that met the guidelines for cleanup, according to the report. No areas had levels of lead that passed the cleanup threshold.
The contamination at Park Crest was related to a former battery manufacturing plant that shut down in 1995. The district opted to test the soil at Sam Houston because of its proximity to Park Crest.
It’s unclear why the soil at the middle school has high concentrations of arsenic. But the consultants hired by the district say that it’s probable that some of the arsenic naturally occurs in the soil in this region. Some of it also may have come from arsenic-containing pesticides that were used in the past.
Arsenic occurs naturally across the planet’s crust, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. But exposure to arsenic, even at low levels, can have negative effects including nausea, vomiting, swelling and skin redness, the agency says.
The arsenic-contaminated soil doesn’t present an “immediate health risk,” the district said in a letter to parents and faculty at the school.
The community near the two schools had concerns about human and environmental health for years prior to the federal government and school district’s decision to do soil testing. Neighborhood residents say they first approached the EPA with their concerns in the 90s.
The district is holding a community meeting at the school on Tuesday, June 7 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Community members with questions and concerns about pollutants and environmental contamination can contact the district at environmental@garlandisd.net.
