The original building contractor for Roxbury’s Dearborn STEM Academy is scheduled to meet with district officials at the school next week to discuss ways to minimize an odor that has disrupted classes and made students and teachers feel ill.
A “lingering and powerful sewage smell” has been top of mind for students and teachers at the $73 million building, which opened in 2018, for most of the year, but it has come to the district’s forefront in recent weeks.
The district’s facilities management team conducted a test in late February and identified two areas within the school’s plumbing system that are believed to be causing the nauseating smell, district spokesperson Max Baker told the Herald this week.
Officials told staff to pour water down drains to prevent the odor from growing, but the temporary solution came up short.
A trio of teachers shared their stories of dealing with the smell during a School Committee meeting last week, as they called on district leadership to step forward to make the miserable experience go away.
“To be transparent, it is the smell of human waste so our school smells like poop,” said Steven Benjamin, a middle school reading specialist and special education teacher.
In March, the facilities management team scheduled another test to determine whether the smell is coming from beneath the 128,000-square-foot facility. But the test can be only performed on Thursdays, meaning that it will happen during school vacation week on April 18, when nobody is inside the building, Baker said.
As a tenth-grade science teacher, Julia Kiely has described her experience with the stench being even more profound. Her second-floor room has seven sinks and two floor drains underneath a safety shower.
The odor smells the worst on Mondays and Tuesdays after the drains dry up over the weekend, Kiely said. For it to dissipate, she said she runs all seven sinks between 10 and 20 minutes while filling 1,000 milliliters of water and pouring them over the drains constantly.
“The smell is unacceptable for student learning and my teaching,” Kiely said. “It is so intense that students say they can taste it.”
As the smell continues to permeate, district officials have scheduled to meet with the original building contractor on site at the Dearborn next Thursday “to discuss additional solutions to minimize the odor within the building,” Baker said.
“We fully understand the discomfort an odor has caused to students and staff in parts of the Dearborn STEM Academy,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said in a statement, “and we are committed to addressing it as quickly as possible. Environmental teams have visited the building multiple times and have concluded each time that there is no safety concern.”
Gilbane Building Co., in partnership with JANEY Construction Management, completed construction of the school in the summer of 2018.
The grade 6-12 early college academy marked the first new school construction project in 15 years at the time in the district. Officials hailed the facility in Roxbury’s Nubian Square as a model for future projects.
School Committee Vice Chairman Michael O’Neill, during last week’s meeting, called for action to be taken as soon as possible, and the timeline in solving the issue to be expedited.
“I hope we’re going to get some very professional plumbers out to a (new) building – a matter of fact, let’s get the contractors who built the building out there – and find out what the heck is going on there,” he said.
District officials will share results from the April 18 testing to the community on April 22 and provide information on next steps to mitigate the odor, Baker said.
