Black mould closes classes
The discovery of black mould has shut down four classrooms at a Waikato school, and there are hundreds of potentially leaky school buildings around the country.
Te Awamutu Primary School was asked to ‘‘isolate’’ four classrooms about a fortnight before students were due back at school this year, after black mould was found.
Once the rooms were locked and slapped with restricted access signage, staffers and parents moved the school around and converted spaces for the 472 pupils.
About 600 school buildings around New Zealand are considered at risk of leaks, according to the Ministry of Education.
However, that’s a big drop from the 2400 on the list when a nationwide assessment was conducted in 2011.
Since then, 1800 buildings have been fixed, bowled, or taken off the list because further testing showed there wasn’t an issue, a statement from acting head of education infrastructure services Rob Campbell said.
Buildings with health and safety issues and those considered high risk are always first priority, he said.
In Te Awamutu’s case, moisture and mould was found in the framework of the buildings, not the classroom itself. Testing didn’t indicate how much mould was there and isolating the buildings was ‘‘a precautionary measure’’, Campbell said.
The ministry has agreed to pay for replacements but can’t yet say when they might be in place.
In a social media post, the school told parents there were unsafe levels of a kind of black mould – stachybotrys chartarum.
‘‘Every member of my staff has been amazing,’’ principal
Sharon Griffiths said in an email.
School spaces had to be converted – including a resource room and an old boardroom and radio station space – to accommodate children who returned back on February 3.
‘‘[Staff members] have worked extremely hard, as a team, to prepare the spaces,’’ Griffiths said. ‘‘Likewise, our parent community has been very supportive and have offered words of support, kind gestures and even some labour, for which we have been very grateful.’’
Two other classrooms at the school are out of action for a planned refurbishment.
The school told its community on Monday that the four classrooms affected by mould would soon be removed and would be replaced.
Three of the affected classrooms were built in the early to mid 90s, and one around 2010, the Ministry of Education said.
‘‘At this stage, we do not have similar concerns about the school’s other buildings,’’ head of education infrastructure Kim Shannon said in a statement.
There’s a team at the ministry dedicated to ‘‘legacy weathertightness issues’’, she said – each school is visited at least once a year and has a dedicated property adviser. Very occasionally, a building not previously identified as at risk is added to the programme, a statement from acting head of education infrastructure services Rob Campbell said.
Lower-risk buildings are monitored and the ministry aims to schedule repairs as part of other planned work, because it’s less disruptive and more efficient, he said.
That’s why it’s hard to isolate the cost for weathertightness work. Overall, the ministry puts $600 million to $800m a year into maintaining and expanding the state school property portfolio.
Nasa engineer turned passive house certifier Jason Quinn is used to the American view of black mould ‘‘being a huge thing that causes people to move out of buildings and tear them down’’.
‘‘It’s taken a bit of adjustment moving to New Zealand where it’s sort of accepted as a more normal thing.’’
It seems to be a cultural difference, he said, as New Zealanders know of the health issues, for example through researchers such as Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman.
‘‘When you figure kids are spending potentially a quarter of their week in a school building, [finding black mould is] a big deal.’’
The Ministry of Education is facing a tough challenge, Quinn said, as the overall prevalence of leaky buildings in New Zealand is ‘‘pretty scary high’’.
He’d love a couple of schools to be built to passive house standards, to show the difference, and said better ventilation could take care of many problems in situations where there weren’t leaks.
But the effects of mould can vary, depending on a person’s health and how close they are.
‘‘You might have one child that could be in a mouldy classroom their entire life and feel no ill effects other than maybe sneezing a bit, and another kid who would develop asthma very quickly and be going to hospital fairly frequently,’’ he said.
Monitoring for mould is more complicated than checking temperature or humidity, Massey University senior lecturer in the School of Built Environment Dr Mikael Boulic said.
He’d love more monitoring but said New Zealand probably doesn’t have the experts to do it.