The superintendent for the Scioto Valley Local School District in Pike County, Ohio, is asking the U.S. Department of Energy to help underwrite the cost of a new building to replace a middle school adjacent to the Portsmouth Site.
Zahn’s Corner Middle School has been closed since May 2019, after Northern Arizona University researchers concluded air and soil samples collected around the campus contained enriched uranium and neptunium-237. Later sampling performed by DOE detected only trace amounts of contaminants, which the agency said are far too limited to endanger human health.
No environmental remediation has occurred at the school property.
That position, however, is proving to be a tough sell to parents and local health and education officials around Pike County. Zahn’s Corner Middle School “is no longer suitable” for classroom education, District Superintendent Wes Hairston said in an Aug. 27 letter to Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. “The public will not accept sending their children to a school building they believe posts a risk of waste exposure.”
As a result, the school district favors construction of a new school farther away from the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant to replace Zahn’s Corner Middle.
Community organizations, such as the Pike County Health Department, have contended that at least trace elements of radioactive contamination around Zahn’s Corner are linked to dust generated by excavation and construction for an on-site disposal cell for waste at the neighboring DOE facility. “The DOE’s decision to continue the construction and disposal means that the middle school building will forever be within two miles of radioactive waste,” Hairston wrote in the letter to Brouillette, first reported this week by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper.
In an email Thursday to Weapons Complex Monitor, Hairston said he has not yet received a response from the Energy Department. The district already has enough land to build a new school, which would not require a great deal of site preparation, and the cost of construction should be in the neighborhood of $30 million, he said.
“It is our opinion that the Federal Government should pay for the school with some help from the Ohio Facilities Construction Committee,” Hairston said in the email, said adding that environmental hazards from the Portsmouth Site forced the locality to abandon Zahn’s Corner.
The local school district is working with Zack Space, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, to plead its case for financial assistance from DOE, Hairston said. Space now has a firm called Sunday Creek Horizons, which provides “advocacy” and “communications” for Appalachian communities, according to its website.
The DOE “showed be ashamed for leaving this rural community behind,” Space said in an Aug. 23 Twitter posting with a link to a Columbus Dispatch article on Zahn’s Corner Middle School.
Some Pike County residents have litigation pending against current and former Portsmouth Site contractors, alleging the firms failed to contain contamination within the DOE property.
Starting in the 2019-2020 academic year, the school district relocated all 320 students and 30 staff from Zahn’s Corner to other local schools. But this situation is not sustainable over the long term, Hairston said, adding that former closets are now being used as makeshift offices.
Long-anticipated third-party sampling by an Ohio-based Solutient Technologies was delayed in April because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Pike County Health Department has said the sampling will occur at the school, public spaces, private properties, and waterways within a 6-mile radius of the Portsmouth Site. Samples will be analyzed both by a DOE laboratory and a lab picked by local stakeholders.
The Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment as of deadline.
