Cindy Crawford's children were supposed to start school at Malibu High this week, but she's keeping them out for fear that the school building is harboring dangerous chemicals, including PCBs in classroom window caulking.
"I don’t feel 100 percent safe," Crawford told special correspondent Maria Shriver
on Tuesday's "Today" show on NBC.
According to Fox L.A., three teachers working on campus have come down with thyroid cancer, and believed there was an environmental factor at play in the school. After bringing in a professional team to conduct testing, school administrators were told that dangerous PCBs were found in four of the classrooms' window caulking. The district said that it will safely remove the caulking, bringing it up to EPA standards.
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PCBs were banned by Congress in 1976 after the chemical was discovered to disrupt immune and reproductive function, and, in the worst cases, cause cancer.
Crawford, her husband Rande Gerber, and other concerned parents at the school held a small rally last week, offering to pay for more extensive, ongoing testing to ensure the safety of the students.
"I think that air testing and water testing are a great piece of the puzzle," said Crawford. "Unless they're testing every day, how do I know that every day it's safe for my kid?"
The EPA commented on the district's action plan for PCBs, saying that after conducting "the human exposure pathways of greatest concern — namely air, dust and soil . . . EPA does not recommend additional testing of caulk."
This is not enough for many parents at Malibu High, however, who say that PCB levels can vary day-to-day depending on conditions, and that the federal government needs a better plan for dealing with the chemical in older school buildings across the nation.
"This is not a Malibu issue," Crawford said. "This is really an issue in a lot of older schools. I just think the laws need to be changed."
E! reported that Crawford earned a scholarship for chemical engineering at Northwestern University before becoming a model in the 80s.
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