Friday, April 30, 2010 was my last day as an assistant teacher in the 1st & 2nd grade classroom. The school and I knew about this for two weeks, but neither side took a lot of action to figure out where to place me come Monday, May 3, after I helped out with that class’ movie field trip.
On Monday, I showed up for work and got through the field trip and was no longer needed by 11:30am. I tried to find the director so we could discuss where next to place me, since I am still not ready to go back to the outdoor classroom.
The director was not in.
I wrote a letter to the director and placed it in her box. The letter detailed the time off I will be needing for doctor’s appointments and my upcoming trip to Michigan to see family I’ve not seen in six years. I ended the letter with a note about needing to discuss my chemical sensitivity issues, as it would affect my next placement.
She never got back to me, so I talked to the school secretary, who told me to phone the director at home.
I phoned and left a message.
She called later that night, and with a weary edge to her voice, told me to just come in on Tuesday.
I showed up on Tuesday, and the director was not there. She never set foot in the office, which meant she never read my letter.
I decided I would see how much I could take of one morning in the outdoor classroom.
I found out that in an effort to accommodate me, the owner of the school had purchased new foam floor pads to replace the old mildewed pads, and had also purchased some kind of anti-microbial light-weight carpet to replace some of the mildewed carpets.
The outdoor classroom is covered by a burlap roof, with a corrugated plastic roof over the top of that. One wall is cinderblock, as it divides the property from the neighborhood behind the school. One wall is old wood over drywall (with an indoor classroom behind it), one wall is plastic sliding doors which separates the classroom from the playground, and the fourth wall is what appears to be the original back of the building, as it is made of brick.
In the Montessori sense of the word, this is not an actual outdoor classroom at all. A true outdoor classroom would be akin to a large backyard, brimming with shrubbery, trees, gardens, flower beds and the like, for children to learn gardening, botany and observation of the natural world.
This is however a first step for the school I work at. This outdoor classroom is basically the art room; it contains all the messy jobs teachers don’t want the pre-kindergarten students doing inside.
As such, this particular outdoor classroom has a lot of tempura paint, a sandbox, a topsoil container to dig in, water pouring jobs, colouring jobs, play-doh, and water colour paints.
Recently added to this classroom is some kind of clay, which has gotten everywhere, because my co-teacher thinks her students should be free in their association with very wet clay - she wants to provide the maximum sensory experience for them, but unfortunately the parents and teachers are complaining about how messy the children and their clothes are, and the brand new carpets are already coated in the stuff.
When I set eyes upon the classroom I have been absent from for two months, I nearly panicked, it was such a mess.
The co-teacher told me she was ordered by the school owner to wash the filthy carpets, so she flung them from the floor and I saw to my horror that the teacher had laid the new carpets on top of the old mildewed foam padding. I told her the old padding had to go. She thought we could just put the new flooring on top of the old flooring for extra padding. I told her no way, sorry, it has to go.
Beneath the foam padding is dirty, dusty asphalt. The teacher set to work sweeping after she peeled up the old foam pads, and I stood back, and wondered if I should just leave altogether.
But of course I didn’t. It’s that whole ‘if I can’t see the damage then it isn’t happening’ type thinking again. I knew full well there were dust particles and major allergens in the air, but I did not observe them directly, so I did not leave the scene.
Once my co-teacher finished sweeping, she flung down a new pack of padded Best Step Anti-Fatigue Flooring for me to help her open. It made a huge dust cloud and I jumped back, covering my face. She apologised and laughed nervously - she did not expect the dust cloud because in her mind, she’d just cleaned.
We set to work opening up the new padded flooring, and immediately I was choking on the chemical offgassing. It smelled like auto tires, but 100 times stronger.
I had already been chemically exposed first thing that morning by walking into two classrooms to drop off clipboards (because parents are still sending heavily perfumed children to school), but unwrapping the flooring put me over the limit, and I developed a headache and sore throat.
I removed myself immediately from the outdoor classroom and looked up the flooring. It is made of Ethyl Vinyl Acetate (EVA) foam, and per the company’s FAQ, they do not use any lead or latex during the production of the foam, and they do not chemically treat the foam, despite the packaging also saying it is anti-microbial and water resistant.
And yet there I was, choking, gagging, sore throat, headache. The company that makes the foam, and my workplace will say I have been accommodated.
The company FAQ also says, “All EVA foam products will have an odor when you initially open them up. This odor will dissipate over time. The odor is not harmful. Putting them in an open air area will help with the initial odor,” and that it is safe for children.
Ugh.
I went to Healthy Child based on the links Susie sent me. They have an article on EVA foam, and they say, “Ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) has been the safer substitute for PVC for several years.”
At that point, I felt like I’m falling through the cracks. I removed myself from the outdoor classroom and I wrote my director another letter. This time, the letter focused on chemical sensitivity. I included the link to the new fragrance free guidelines at the Centers For Disease Control. I included a link to the Healthy Child, Healthy World website, which has information on getting one’s school on a fragrance free policy.
I didn’t hear back from the director.
I went back to work to help with the lunch rush for four different classrooms, and then took my regularly scheduled lunch break. On my lunch break, I asked teachers where I could assist them that afternoon. Nobody needed me, so halfway through my lunch break, I left work for the day.
Today I tried it again. I showed up at my scheduled time and unloaded children from their cars and saw the children off to their classrooms. After that, I was on my own. The director of course was nowhere to be found once again, and the fragrance overload was in full force in the pre-kindergarten rooms I used to work in all the time a year ago.
The classroom I had spent the last two months substituting in no longer needed me, now that their head teacher had returned from sick leave.
So I went back to the outdoor classroom and asked if I could help set anything up. My co-teacher was fuming that the carpets she’d hosed down yesterday still were not clean enough. She said something, though:
“I thought about what you were saying about chemicals, and do you know what? When I was hosing down the carpets yesterday with plain water, foam bubbles that looked soapy came out of the carpets, and I thought AHA! This is what Steph was talking about! They say it’s not chemically treated, but it is!”
I am so glad someone there is GETTING IT.
I found a dust mask and while my co-teacher re-hosed the carpets, I set to work with gloved hands and hot soapy water to remove the clay-encrusted tables and chairs in the outdoor classroom. Once that was finished, I sharpened all the coloured pencils for my teacher, and found a giant moth and moth’s nest in one of the pencil baskets. Feathers or something flew everywhere. That poor classroom has been so neglected in my absense! I was not wearing my dust mask when the moth’s nest incident occurred.
While the co-teacher took a group out to the front of the school for gardening class, I stayed behind with some students who wanted to do general outdoor classroom jobs, like colouring, sorting, sandbox, pouring, and other Montessori Practical Life and Art “jobs”.
At 11am, I helped my co-teacher close the classroom for the morning so we could transition to the lunch hour. I got through the next hour and a half of what I call The Lunch Rush, and that’s when the director finally appeared to me and called me in her office.
She and the teacher I had been substituting for had been talking. The teacher is back to work but not 100% yet, and can only work half days, so they need me to fill in at several points during the day. We went over the schedule and it takes care of me pretty nicely so that I can remain employed and working inside again. Out of all of the classrooms, it seems that the Kindergarten room, the 1st/2nd room, and 3rd/4th/5th room are the only three rooms where I can function without need of a hazmat suit. I have no idea why parents, children and teachers prefer to bathe in fragrance and chemicals in the other classrooms.
It’s a temporary solution for me, but works for now.
After we got past that schedule, I asked the director if she had time to read the two letters I’d sent her. She said she had not yet touched the letters.
So I rehashed everything - my new regular schedule of doctor appointments for pain management for the endometriosis, and my ongoing limitations that crop up as concerns chemical sensitivity.
Her response to the chemical sensitivity is that the world is becoming more and more aware of environmental issues, and as people become more aware, they might become sensitive to things, but really, people just have to remember that they were always fine before, and nothing is different now except for the fact that we are conscious of environmental toxins all around us.
I sat through all of this commentary, and thought carefully about my words.
When the director was finished, I started at the beginning; I was allergic to a lot of things in childhood, but my mother exposed me to these things despite knowing I was allergic, because she didn’t have the coping tools or the financial resources to help me. The worst thing it seemed I battled, according to my own memory, was second-hand cigarette smoke. By the 1990s, I became chemically sensitive to perfumes and colognes. By the year 2000, I could no longer wear scented oils because of chemical sensitivity.
And that was the extent of it, until September 2009, when within a span of thirty days, I had gotten my house sprayed with Deltamethrin to stop the numerous ant invasions (after trying most if not all available natural remedies), purchased a new foam bed and new foam pillows to try to help soften my and my husband’s severe dust mite allergies, and I began working in the outdoor classroom.
Working in the outdoor classroom also coincided with the regular change of season to Autumn, and the regular cycle of cold and flu season.
A perfect storm for an immunological freakout, if I ever saw one.
I think this got through to my director.
I then mentioned the CDC recently going fragrance free, and the Healthy Child, Healthy World references to creating a fragrance free school.
The director withdrew her understanding and sympathy at this point, citing how enough parents are already upset with the recent change last year to a nut-free school environment, and one parent even took her child to a new school because of the nut-free policy. She does not want to chance, in this economy, losing more parents and teachers for that matter to a forced fragrance free policy.
We ended our discussion with her saying I am one of her best employees, and that she’d hate to lose me, and that she’ll do what she can within reason for the school’s sake… but…
I told her we will both see what we can do, and for how long, and whatever happens, happens.
So right now it’s a battle to get to the end of the school year on June 11 - just over one month - and then I will take the summer off as planned to go to school to finish my head teacher certification.
Sadly, during my meeting with the director, my husband left me a message, which I retrieved right after my emotional meeting with the director:
The departmental head at his work just handed in his notice, and now the future of the entire department is uncertain - it may be absorbed into other areas of the company, or killed outright. My husband could lose his job very soon.
This means I cannot go back to school this summer. It means both of us are likely losing our jobs and we both have to start job hunting quick. It will be a lot easier for my husband to get another job, and he’s the much highly paid head of household, anyway.
And we’ve already got a bunch of money spent and allocated to a trip back home next week to visit my family whom I’ve not seen in six years.
I’m a bit stressed out at the moment, which I know isn’t going to help my compromised immune system. I came this close to breaking my 125-day sobriety streak (sobriety meaning I’m a social-setting alcoholic, not a full time at home, at work, sneaking drinks type alcoholic).
Instead of drinking shots, I ate sushi. :p