Monday's report was the first in a series of stories that had their roots in the closing of a school three years ago.
The Three Rivers School District near Cincinnati closed Meredith Hitchens Elementary School in Addyston, Ohio, after air samples from a plastics plant across the street showed high levels of chemicals. The estimate was that the risk of getting cancer from that air was 50 times what the state of Ohio considers acceptable.
The USA Today team spent eight months examining the impact of industrial pollution on the air outside schools across the nation. The model is a computer simulation that predicts the path of toxic chemicals released by thousands of companies. USA Today used it to identify schools in areas that are considered toxic hot spots — a task the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had never undertaken.
The computer found more than 400 schools where the air might be even more toxic than at Meredith Hitchens School — including Cormier School and Early Learning Center in Ashwaubenon and Aldo Leopold Community School in Green Bay.
It's important to emphasize this is a computer simulation, not actual measurements of the air at the 127,800 schools in the study. Government and business officials expressed skepticism, and that's a healthy approach to take about any such study.
But the newspaper prepared the data using the companies' actual emissions reports to the EPA and applied the government's most up-to-date model for tracking toxic chemicals.
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20081209/GPG0602/812090563/1269/GPG06
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