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LOUISIANA RECORD

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

St. John's school board to shutter elementary school in the wake of environmental lawsuits

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Victor Jones, the Legal Defense Fund’s senior counsel, said the plan to shut down Fifth Ward Elementary was inadequate. | NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Amid ongoing litigation over chemical emissions and school desegregation, the St. John the Baptist Parish school board has voted to close an elementary school located about 450 feet from a petrochemical plant.

The St. John’s school board took the action at its Nov. 8 meeting, but the discussion among school board members indicated that they were weighing concerns beyond environmental litigation, such as declining enrollment at the Fifth Ward Elementary School, which is only about 0.4 kilometers from the Denka Performance Elastomer plant.

The board decided that Fifth Ward will be merged with a nearby school –  East St. John Preparatory – forming a larger K-8 campus. The issue was placed on the board’s agenda by the school district’s Strategic Planning Committee, which has been formulating plans to downsize district operations to make the district more efficient given its declining enrollments.

The decision comes in the wake of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision last year to seek a preliminary injunction in the Eastern District of Louisiana against Denka, which the EPA said must make greater strides in reducing the chloroprene emissions at the plant. Chloroprene, which the agency says is a likely carcinogen, is a liquid substance used at the facility to produce goods such as wetsuits, orthopedic braces and belts and hoses for vehicles, according to the EPA’s legal filing.

Last month, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund took part in a federal court hearing concerning a motion it filed that urged the closing of Fifth Ward due to air-pollution concerns and the disproportional exposure of Black students to potential pollutants. The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) said the school board’s Nov. 8 action did not fully resolve the concerns about the industrial emissions’ impact on students.

“The proposal to transfer many of the children to East St. John Preparatory is also wholly unacceptable,” Victor Jones, LDF’s senior counsel, said in a prepared statement. “Not only is East St. John Prep located within the danger zone, but as a middle school it is unequipped to provide 4- to 9-year-old children the facilities and resources they need to thrive.”

Denka (DPE) stressed that it had no involvement in the lawsuits directed at Fifth Ward.

“There is no emergency associated with the significantly reduced chloroprene emissions at the facility,” Denka said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “Since acquiring the site in 2015, DPE has invested over $35 million, established a voluntary agreement with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and leveraged the innovation of its nearly 250 employees to reduce emissions by over 85% – from 118 tons per year to less than 13 tons per year.”

The company also installed state-of-the-art monitoring equipment along its fence line in cooperation with the EPA, the statement said. This monitoring has shown that emissions from the plant remain at historic lows, according to the company.

Previously, Denka has pointed out that cancer rates in St. John’s Parish are in the bottom 25% of all the state’s parishes, based on Louisiana Tumor Registry data.

About two in 10 people living within 2.5 miles of the Denka plant are under the age of 18 and consequently vulnerable to “mutagenic carcinogens” such as chloroprene, the EPA reported.

The St. John’s school board voted 7-4 to close Fifth Ward, which is located in an industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”

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