The tiny city of Cudahy, California, is locked in battle with the mega-powerful KIPP charter chain over KIPP’s determination to build a charter school on a toxic waste site. KIPP is avoiding the usual environmental review that would be required for public schools. Local environmental activists and parents are raising money to fight the KIPP machine.
Larry Buhl writes in “Capital & Main”:
At issue are a state law allowing different building standards for different types of schools, and a planning code, obscure to most local residents, that allows a charter school company to build a new school without thoroughly cleaning up the site’s alleged toxins.
Using a process that allows the company to skirt state environmental rules, KIPP SoCal Public Schools plans to build a new elementary school on land that its own reports show contains toxic substances including lead and arsenic. The company can do that because the regulations for building or renovating charter and private schools are less restrictive than for state-funded district schools, and because Cudahy has, according to critics and plaintiffs in a lawsuit, used the wrong planning code to approve the project.
If charter schools were public schools, there would be a full environmental impact review.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another example of a double standard for whites and minorities. Outrageous!
That’s just deplorable! Why not just poison the children’s food/drinking water immediately and call it a day as it would be faster and more humane than having children slowly absorb chemicals into their bodies over time to die a slow and painful death? Do these people not know about the effects of lead poisoning/arsenic on the developing brain? Are these people not aware of what recently happened in Flint, MI? What parent would knowingly enroll their child/children into a toxic waste dump? DEPLORABLE!!!
Pasting here a comment I made from the post about Jamal Bowman’s opposition to standardized tests, the Congressman has a far better plan than KIPP’s.
The federal government is set to spend nearly $200 billion to safely reopen schools, boost state spending on low-income school programs and increase financial aid at universities as part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.
To Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), that spending looks more like triage than investment. On Saturday, the freshman congressman is set to unveil a $1.16 trillion proposal to fund climate-friendly retrofits at every K-12 public school in the nation, hire and train more teachers, and beef up funding for low-income and disability-focused programs.
Before COVID-19 killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and made in-person classes unsafe, nearly 8,000 public schools sat within 500 feet of highways, truck routes and other traffic-clogged roads where roughly 4.4 million students breathed air filled with toxic levels of exhaust pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 1 in 5 schools has at least one classroom with unsafe levels of radon, a radioactive gas that causes lung cancer. Countless more schools struggle with mold, toxic building materials and excessive heat, particularly as climate change worsens heat waves.
The proposal aims to spend $250 billion over 10 years to retrofit schools, remediating lead and asbestos, equipping facilities with solar panels and batteries, and increasing energy efficiency and air circulation. Once those upgrades are complete, it would slash emissions of planet-heating carbon dioxide by at least 29 million tons per year, the equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road. The work would also create demand for more than 100,000 construction and maintenance jobs, split roughly in half between red and blue states.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jamaal-bowman-green-new-deal-schools_n_604c3494c5b6cf72d09661cb?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
Charter schools often operate in buildings of questionable safety standards. Since they are not subject to the same health and safety standards as public schools, they are more likely to be housed in a building with asbestos with old pipes that leach lead in the water. Many charter schools are located in strip malls where there is inadequate security. In Mobile, Alabama a student from a charter school walked out of the building, and nobody noticed the child was missing for two hours. They later found the eight year old roaming through the mall. Luckily, he was fine. Kipp intending to build on a former toxic waste dump is a new low, however. They likely got a good deal on the building site, and profit seeking charter schools will put profit before students. They do not have to abide by the same safety rules that public schools do.
profit before children: three words which should be attached to every charter billboard
Our tiny Cudahy Community has suffered so much environmental injustice in the past. Now, Kipp claims that the grounds are safe but in their own superficial studies arsenic was found to be 200 times what is deemed safe and PCE at twice the level, plus other toxins. The site was used to process metal for 91 years and was on the California registered toxic sites list. A simple search before Kipp purchased the land would have determined that it is unsuitable for children and staff. We, Cudahy Alliance for Justice are fighting against a Goliath, but we won’t stop until justice for our community is served. We are in current need of funding for lawyer fees as we are in the process of a lawsuit against Kipp and the City of Cudahy for allowing such ministerial project. Our GoFundMe page is titled “Stop Environmental Injustice in Cudahy”. Any donation amount helps. Thank you!
No student should have to attend a school on what is considered a Superfund site. This is why so many minority majority communities are fighting for environmental justice.
Thank you for writing, Ayde, and good luck in your struggle. I will make a donation to your GoFundMe.
Our tiny Cudahy Community has suffered so much environmental injustice in the past. Now, Kipp claims that the grounds are safe but in their own superficial studies arsenic was found to be 200 times what is deemed safe and PCE at twice the level, plus other toxins. The site was used to process metal for 91 years and was on the California registered toxic sites list. A simple search before Kipp purchased the land would have determined that it is unsuitable for children and staff. We, Cudahy Alliance for Justice are fighting against a Goliath, but we won’t stop until justice for our community is served. We are in current need of funding for lawyer fees as we are in the process of a lawsuit against Kipp and the City of Cudahy for allowing such ministerial project. Our GoFundMe page is titled “Stop Environmental Injustice in Cudahy”. Any donation amount helps. Thank you!
*Stop Environmental Injustice in Cudahy
**Well . . . ** so much for reformers’ arguments that public schools benefit from having an uneven playing field. CBK
Let them build the school and THEn sue their a** before they are allowed to open.
Then they can brag about their high test scores and high arsenic scores.
Yes, they should be sued to hell and back now, in the future and forever. If they build the school, won’t they be using public tax money?
In any case, it is insane that Kipp could even make such a proposal in the first place.
It’s Southeast L.A., where you already can’t take two steps in any direction without bumping into KIPP. There is an ongoing hostile, corporate takeover of the area, and everyone knows that corporate takeovers do not stop just because harm is being inflicted on people. They want monopoly control, and the elected leaders responsible for protecting the community from KIPP have long had their heads buried in the lead and arsenic laced sand.
It’s probably a good guess that prospective charter parents are not informed about this issue of different building and environmental standards for charters operating on private property. The following assembly bill was recently introduced to address this “loophole” in the law:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB762
It will be very interesting to see what happens with this bill because the higher standards for public schools do increase costs of construction. Charters will certainly resist these extra costs. However, the 1994 Northridge earthquake and a previous one in Sylmar made it clear that higher standards are needed. FYI…..no LAUSD buildings collapsed and only minor damage was reported in these two earthquakes.
Kudos to the Cudahy community for standing up to this injustice.
Kudos to Larry Buhl and Capital & Main for addressing this issue. The rest of Los Angeles media is asleep at the wheel.
Who would send their kids there?