Asbestos cancer lawyer mesothelioma

Asbestos scare that stalks the schools

How many of the nation's 121,600 public and private schools are unfit for students to attend?

That question gained urgency in mid-March when the Environmental Protection Agency fined a New Hampshire school $24,000 for not reporting asbestos in its buildings. Educators now are bracing for toxic-contamination lawsuits from former students who contract cancer.

No one is sure how widespread the problem may be. But anxieties are growing about the threat posed to 36 million students by asbestos flaking from classroom and hallway ceilings and walls. Education officials believe the cleanup may cost 1.4 billion dollars.

In Baltimore, asbestos dangles from the cafeteria ceiling in one elementary school and is inches deep in the attic of another. A mother in Hamlin, N.Y., said she withdrew her daughter from a school where the asbestos was so deteriorated that "children threw pencils at the ceiling to watch it snow."

Sprayed on ceilings and around pipes as an insulator and sound deadener in thousands of schoolhouses built between 1940 and 1965, asbestos is linked by scientists to asbestosis--a serious scarring of the lungs--and lung cancer, especially mesothelioma.

Four years ago, a federal law was passed requiring public and private schools to check their buildings for flaking asbestos and report hazards to parents and school workers. But Congress provided no funds for the inspections and cleanup, and roughly 80 percent of the nation's schools have yet to make the tests.

Few school systems can foot the $100,000 cost of cleaning up a single medium-sized school building. In Illinois, school districts have raised taxes and issued bonds for asbestos-removal money. At the state level, only Maine and Oklahoma pick up most of the tab.

Failure to face the issue may be even more costly in the long run. In Waterbury, Conn., asbestos manufacturers are being sued by the estate of an exteacher who died at 57 of mesothelioma, a cancer usually found in shipyard workers and others exposed to high amounts of asbestos fibers.

Ronald Simon, lawyer for the estate, predicts trouble in the courts for the school systems. "We'll see an epidemic of mesothelioma later on among former students," he says. "They will be filing suits against the schools."