ST. THOMAS – The Charlotte Amalie High School campus was full of students and teachers this morning, but no classes took place as teachers brought attention to the working conditions at the school by refusing to teach in moldy classrooms that they said violated their union contract.
“We are standing, and we are sitting out because we are tired of the mold and the conditions here at the campus,” Cynthia DeSouza, a 10th grade counselor at CAHS, said. “The teachers can’t work, and the children can’t learn. So, we need to have some action.”
DeSouza and CAHS teachers work out of the temporary modular classrooms, erected after Hurricanes Irma and Maria caused devastating damage to the campus in 2017. But DeSouza said recently the conditions of the modular classrooms, some of which have no working air conditioning or windows, have become untenable.
“These modulars been here since the hurricane; they’re falling apart,” she said. “If you go to one of the offices in there, you can look behind the wall and you see all the mold. Every morning I go into the office, and I spray down the place, and I have a dehumidifier, and I had to go home two weeks ago with mold on my lungs. It’s too much mold. It’s killing us slowly.”
The mold has even forced some teachers out of their classrooms, like Juanita Frett, who teaches biology. Frett said she battled the mold in her classroom all last year, and that despite reporting it to officials, nothing was done.
“Then this year, coming back off of summer, it got worse, and I started to get headaches and have immediate reactions to the mold in the room, and so I stopped using my room,” Frett said. “I've been holding my class in the auditorium with eight other teachers at the same time.”
Frett said her decision not to teach this morning was because she will no longer violate her contract.
“My contract says we are supposed to have a conducive learning environment with specific temperature, so it must have an AC in there, or open windows for ventilation,” she said.
Leontyne Jones, president of the St. Thomas/St. John Federation of Teachers, American Federation of Teachers (Local 1825), agreed the teachers were simply abiding by their contract.
“They were following their contract, which is what they were instructed to do, follow your contract,” Jones said. “Which means if your classroom is compromised, as far as malfunctioning AC units as well as mold and other irritants in the air, your administrators are supposed to find somewhere for you to work until the situation is rectified, somewhere safe and healthy.”
In response to today’s action, the Virgin Islands Department of Education stated that the union has open channels to communicate with school administrators. Had these channels been utilized, VIDE said in a statement that the union would have been informed that an AC vendor was already on campus this morning, and that a mold remediation team was on site preparing for work scheduled to take place this weekend.
Jones said she met this morning with Stefan Jürgen, the St. Thomas/St. John Insular Superintendent, as well as other officials from the Department of Education. She said they assured the union that they had mobile remediation teams on campus to address the issues in the classrooms.
“The students and the teachers that are still out of the classroom because their classrooms are compromised, they were instructed to go to the auditorium,” Jones said. “And all other teachers whose classrooms were fine, they were instructed to take their students back to class.”
According to Jones, this is how things will continue until the classroom conditions are addressed.
But even the classrooms deemed “fine” reek of mold. It was the first thing Alex De Pedro noticed when he started working at CAHS last week as a special education teacher. When asked to describe how strong the smell was, he said “from one to 10, I rate it an 11.”
“The smell of the classroom is awful,” De Pedro said. “We cannot deliver good and quality education to our students if we are facing problems like this. The No. 1 priority is to give them a conducive and healthy environment to learn.”
Iambakisye Richardson, who teaches journalism at CAHS, said it was obvious that the modular classrooms had outlived their time, but that the teachers have been making it work because they were dedicated to their students.
“I’ve always said our biggest problem in general is that we are too resilient, and we kind of make that part of our personality, so we adapt to things that usually go on for far longer than they need to, because we’re trying to make it work,” Richardson said. “And a lot of it has just been most teachers just try to make it work.”
