All 170 K-12 students at Monarch School in San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood have been relocated to temporary campuses while the building undergoes mold testing.<\/p>\n
The school, which serves youth experiencing homelessness, canceled classes Friday after mold concerns surfaced Thursday, according to Matthew Tessier, assistant superintendent with the San Diego County Office of Education. Students began attending temporary campuses Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t know the specific areas in the building. But I know that there were a couple of areas that they had concern about,\u201d Tessier said.<\/p>\n
The younger half of Monarch School’s students were moved to Perkins K-8 School, a couple of blocks away. Older students were bused to the South County Regional Education Center in National City and brought back to Monarch for parent pickup or after-school programming.<\/p>\n
School administrators said after-school programming would be held outside on Monarch’s campus Monday. For the rest of the week, administrators plan to coordinate with community partners to provide off-site locations.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA world of change has come to students struggling with issues related to homelessness at this San Diego school, NBC 7\u2019s Catherine Garcia reports.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The San Diego County Office of Education rents the space from Monarch School Project, a nonprofit that provides wraparound services to area youth experiencing homelessness.<\/p>\n
Monarch School Project President Tamara Craver said the nonprofit is testing the entire building for mold.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what was happening with the humidity, and the large heat index that we had in the past two weeks probably led to some of this,\u201d Craver said.<\/p>\n
While school officials said the latest mold concerns arose Thursday, a tip emailed to NBC San Diego said staff and students have complained for years about conditions inside classrooms.<\/p>\n
The source said classrooms have smelled bad and had excessive moisture, dehumidifiers filled up quickly, papers left in rooms became soaked and air-conditioning units leaked. The source also said people frequently became sick and that air quality testing last year found aspergillus, a form of mold, in one of the offices.<\/p>\n
When asked about that claim, Craver said she could not address it.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, I can’t speak to that. I wasn’t here a year ago,” Craver said.<\/p>\n
Tessier was also asked if he could provide insight into a longer history of mold concerns at the school.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can’t speak to that. But again, what I can speak to is this most recent situation and being very proactive.”<\/p>\n
The school’s operations team would not address previous mold concerns or whether mold had previously been discovered.<\/p>\n
Tessier said students will remain at their temporary campuses until testing is complete and administrators determine the next steps. He expects that process to be completed by Tuesday.<\/p>\n
This story was originally reported for broadcast by NBC San Diego. AI tools helped convert the story to a digital article, and an NBC San Diego journalist edited the article for publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All 170 K-12 students at Monarch School in San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood have been relocated to temporary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[24815,15,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-449693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-barrio-logan","tag-education","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}