Mold moves class at Cedar to the gym

Fifth-grade teacher Abbi Case parks her kids under a raised basketball backboard. Nearby, Sue Miller has to raise her voice a few decibels above her normal, soft-spoken tones just to make herself heard over the babel of voices. Down the hall, in what used to be the teachers lounge, decorated paper covers the candy vending machine.

"It needed to be disassembled [to be moved] and was such a big job that we just camouflaged it," Pam Edblad said as her students filed into a classroom they had never known until Monday.

Since a mold problem shut down eight portable classrooms at Cedar Creek Community School in Cedar last Friday, officials have been forced to shoehorn 207 of the school's 1,088 students into every available space not already being used for classes. Six classes are being held in two-thirds of the gym. One is in the teachers lounge. Displaced classroom No. 8 found its way into the science lab class, which is normally reserved for specialized science instruction.

"The first day, the kids thought, 'This is great, this is cool,'" school principal Darin Hahn said as he showed off his new gym "classrooms" to visitors Thursday. "The novelty is wearing off. When you have all six classrooms in here [at the same time], you have 150 kids sharing the space. The space eats the sound and booms it all back."

Hahn and his staff are counting on the mold problems being temporary -- about eight to 15 days, according to current estimates. Beyond that, the school will have to make other arrangements, either by reconfiguring more spaces in the school or moving kids to other buildings. That's what happened to many of the 250 students displaced at another St. Francis district school, St. Francis Elementary, where more severe mold problems were discovered about a week-and-a-half ago.

District officials began checking their portables because of complaints about window leaks and a musty smell in some of them. The district's initial inspection found the mold. As of Thursday, the sense was that the company that leased the portable units to the district -- ModSpace of Wayne, Pa. -- could repair the portable classrooms at Cedar Creek but would have to replace the St. Francis Elementary ones. Hahn said ModSpace officials were inspecting the mold damage to the district schools Thursday.

Prairie-dog gym

The school staff took the gym floormats and set them on their edges to separate the different classrooms. But the mats aren't much more than territorial boundary lines that do nothing to tamp down the noise, and precious little to cut down on the visual distractions.

"They're like prairie dogs," Case said of how her students handle the distractions. "They hear a noise and they look around to see what it is."

Hahn pointed out that the mold-related classroom rejiggering has ramifications beyond the school. For example, the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts used to meet in the teachers lounge. Now, they'll have to find a new space. Community sports teams that used the gym now must find facilities elsewhere.

Parent response has been mixed, but generally muted.

"Nobody's happy that their kids sat in a room that had mold," Hahn said. Still, "I can't say that I've had a parent come in and chew on me."

One parent praised the school in an e-mail for its swift response to the problem. Another with an allergy-plagued child wanted to know what kinds of chemicals would be used to clean up the mold. There have been a few complaints of heightened allergy problems, Hahn said.

School and district officials point out that the portable classrooms exist because the regular schools don't have enough space to hold all the students. District superintendent Edward Saxton said the district has tried several times to persuade voters to approve more tax money for a new elementary school, but those requests have been turned down. Though there is not a repeat request for bonds on next week's ballot, the district could at some point try again to persuade the voters that extra space is needed.

Norman Draper • 612-673-4547

Norman Draper • ndraper@startribune.com