‘Toxic Crusaders’ Aren’t Afraid of a Good Fight

They had their 15 minutes of fame, and they were not impressed by it.

Three teens, known as the Toxic Crusaders to their friends, have earned national recognition from Time magazine, a TV salute as environmental heroes, and all sorts of kudos from government and school officials.

What have Fabiola Tostado, 16, Maria Perez, 16, and Nevada Dove, 19, learned from their experiences fighting the system?

Never let your guard down, never trust The Suits and always keep working toward your goals despite the temporary seductions of celebrity.

That is why after the trio battled certain bureaucrats of the Los Angeles Unified School District, showing what they viewed as incompetence, uncaringness and outright mendacity, the girls did not stop to savor the fruits of their labors.

Sure, they had managed to help prevent the Jefferson New Middle School from opening for a year, keeping it closed from July 1997, when it was said to be ready, to July 1998. It was the first new school built in South-Central in nearly three decades, a seeming cause for celebration. But the trio of teens helped prove that it was built on toxic land that had once been used for munitions and other manufacturing, land whose emissions might cause illnesses ranging from the minor to the potentially fatal.

And it was being built across the street from a former chrome-plating plant, a site so contaminated that it was scheduled for cleanup under the federal Superfund program.

It was their work helping to get the facts about the school’s contamination known throughout their community, and helping to keep the school closed until plans for cleanup could be formulated, that won them their few minutes of fame.

Last weekend the three teens were hailed on the Arts and Entertainment channel’s hourlong TV tribute to “Heroes of the Planet.” They received similar recognition in April from Time magazine’s children’s edition, Time for Kids. And last year, Time devoted a full-page article to the teens, calling them “tough and unafraid.” That could refer to the many times the trio confronted and challenged school board and environmental officials, asking for straight answers and cutting through the insulting disinformation they and the grown-ups in their community were being fed.

There was the time, for instance, when the girls helped organize a meeting to inform parents that their kids would soon go to a school that posed potential health risks. They invited members of the toxic substances control board, the Air Quality Management District and the water assurance board, some of whom wound up in the hot seat. The girls had studied every aspect of bureaucratic folly. Fact: Not only was the school built on a contaminated site, the girls said, but state officials had also conceded that the school board may have purchased lead-contaminated dirt from Caltrans to replace the chromium-contaminated dirt they were attempting to get rid of.

Melanie Dove, an organizer at Concerned Citizens of South-Central and mother of one of the trio, remembers: “This guy gets up and says in response, ‘You don’t understand. Just because there’s lead in the dirt doesn’t mean that it’s dangerous.’ Then he talks on and on about levels of lead, parts per billion. And he is totally incorrect in all he is saying. Of course, the kids were well-educated on this subject, and they told him he was wrong and corrected him right in front of everyone.”

And there was the time, after Jefferson New Middle School opened, that the girls sifted through tons of paperwork from the Department of Toxic Control Substances and other organizations to find out if the vapor extraction system being used to remove contaminants at the site even while emitting another carcinogen, was actually being used legally and with a permit. They had learned through research that the state Air Resources Board does not allow such systems to be used within 1,000 feet of a school, because it is a health hazard.

Melanie Dove recalls that the girls found the original permit granted for use of the system at Jefferson. And they discovered an amazing incongruity. The person who filled it out had accurately given the name of the site: Jefferson New Middle School. But the next question asked if the site was within 1,000 feet of a school, and “no” had been checked.

The permit was granted. If the three girls, two then about 15 and one 17, had not caught the inaccuracy, the vapor extraction system would still be in use, Dove says.

Angelo Bellomo, interim director of the environmental health and safety branch of LAUSD, says the Concerned Citizens group, and especially the three teens, have had more of an effect on the school district than they may know.

By relentlessly bringing public attention to the problems at Jefferson, and to the fact that the school board began by denying there were any problems--by probing and researching and persisting in uncovering the strong need for reforms--he says, the course of how the building of new schools is handled has been permanently altered.

A new law, effective Jan. 1, 2000, mandates that henceforth, all school sites will be fully evaluated and made safe before school construction ever begins. The law came about, in large part, Bellomo says, because of the work done by Concerned Citizens and its proteges Tostado, Perez and Dove.

“It wasn’t entirely due to them alone, but they were certainly greatly instrumental in uncovering” wrongs that must be righted,” he says.

Bellomo also credits them with raising public awareness that ultimately focused attention not just on Jefferson, but also on what was soon to become the Belmont Learning Complex environmental hazards debacle and the subsequent discovery of problems at no less than 12 other school sites around Los Angeles. “Government people are not always motivated to act as aggressively as the task requires,” Bellomo says. And Concerned Citizens has elevated the level of attention being paid to officials’ lackluster performance.

Melanie Dove says the three girls “are all good students, but certainly not exceptional ones. But on this one issue, they became outstanding academics. They read every environmental fact sheet they could find, learned about toxins, hung out at night for hours reading scientific reports and information.”

Trio Could Outline What Had Gone Wrong

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) eventually contacted the girls, Dove says. She recalls that the Belmont school problem had begun to surface by then, along with problems at other schools. “Hayden was holding hearings to learn how did we get to this point of building schools on contaminated sites, then spending millions to try and clean them up. The girls had done so much research that they were able to outline, step by step, what had gone wrong in the process. The girls went to all the hearings in various places around the city, and all three testified at each hearing because Sen. Hayden said he so much admired the work they were doing.” In print articles he has lauded them as “very focused, very educated, very driven to understand the way the system works around them.”

The attention is all very nice, the teenagers say. But they can’t relax because they still haven’t solved the problem.

Jefferson New Middle School opened while it was still contaminated. And since mid-1998, about 1,200 children of South-Central have attended classes there daily, while toxic solvents are being purged from the soil beneath the school and while subsurface soil and groundwater have been found to contain hexavalent chromium--a tasteless, colorless, odorless carcinogen that has been measured there by the school district and state Department of Toxic Substances Control at 540 times the accepted safety levels.

School officials have said testing indicates there is no immediate danger to students, therefore school closure is not warranted. But they have recommended expanded and continued testing, according to Bellomo.

The three young women fear that many children are already becoming ill, and they are knocking themselves out to prove it.

They regularly knock on doors in the Jefferson school area and ask if children in the house are having any health problems. They have identified about 60 to 80 parents so far who are convinced that their children’s illnesses are directly related to environmental hazards at the school.

They also went to three other middle schools in the vicinity and met with school nurses to learn how many children come into the nurse’s office on an average day and what their complaints are. They have painstakingly compiled statistics and compared results.

Jefferson New Middle School gets 60 to 90 kids with health complaints each day in the nurse’s office, the girls found; other schools in the area get about 25 visits daily.

The girls brought this information to the school district late last year and were told the high degree of health complaints at Jefferson was “probably due to something called new building syndrome.” It is nothing to worry about, they were told.

Of course, they have learned not to always believe what they’re told.

It was little more than two years ago--when Tostado and Perez were 13 and Dove was 16--that the three met and started working on all this. All three showed up in 1997 at Concerned Citizens, an activist group that works to improve the neighborhood--and all wanted nothing more than to make a little money and perhaps find a way to keep out of trouble after school.

Instead, they found a shared passion for justice, an ability to do great work and a goal to help accomplish the seemingly impossible: to make bureaucrats care about children who live in South-Central as much as they care about children who don’t.

“Can you imagine a school being built on contaminated land in Beverly Hills?” asks a somewhat cynical Nevada Dove. “There’s no way it would happen. And if it ever did, it would be handled within five minutes with a few well-placed phone calls.” Dove, who plans to start community college this year, started work at Concerned Citizens when she got interested in the conversations she overheard during visits to her mother’s office after school.

It Started Out as Just a Saturday Job

Perez came to the project with the goal of “earning some cash for myself and to help my family.” She had been working Saturdays for Clean and Green, a program to keep kids out of trouble after school by giving them jobs helping to beautify their neighborhoods. From that, she earned a paid summer job doing clerical work at Concerned Citizens of South-Central.

Tostado was also working for Clean and Green, and attending year-round school in 1997. She was looking to earn money during those long stretches in the schedule when she and her friends were out of school for weeks at a time.

“Going to [Concerned Citizens] was exciting. It was fun. It was better than going home and watching TV. You had something to do, and some cash in your pocket,” Tostado says.

And, it turned out, she and her two new friends, Perez and Dove, also had the beginnings of what could turn out to be full-fledged careers waiting for them, if they chose to participate.

They did.

Tostado recalls that she, Perez and Dove were “basically doing clerical work when we heard the adults around us talking about LAUSD and how the new school was contaminated with chromium, which was deadly, and how they denied that the school was even unsafe. They were basically asking the kids to choose between an education and an early grave. It was so shocking to us. We didn’t think it was possible for LAUSD to do such a thing. Supposedly, kids always come first; everybody says they must get their education.” Tostado recalls that she and her two friends started studying, reading for hours at a time, learning about contaminants and the ins and outs of environmental studies. “We had nights where we would all take home thick books and binders and read about hexavalent chromium, and all sorts of things teenagers would never normally know about. My stepmother was, like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. You’re doing so much good.’ ”

Perez also remembers, “I wanted to learn more, so I started taking home the notes and the big binder books filled with stuff I never thought I could understand. But I learned how to read the test results, the charts and tables of where the contamination is, what wells it was focused on. It’s not the funnest thing to do, but you have to do it because it is your community and you feel so strongly about it inside.”

As the teens became more and more involved, the adults at Concerned Citizens realized the power and benefits that such impassioned and intelligent youth could bring to the neighborhood betterment group.

“We decided to form a youth component, and, of course, these three girls were the first three we hired. We have now about 15 kids,” the elder Dove says.

Today, the teens say they are determined to tackle the many remaining problems in the community, and to change how the residents of South-Central are perceived and treated by those outside the neighborhood.

The Crusaders say they have no desire to simply finish school, get rich and move away from South-Central. They want to finish school, become successful and stay in the community they love. They hope to help restore it to beyond its former glory as a mellow place of pristine small homes and well-kept gardens, where there was lots of culture and a sense of neighborliness.

Dove, who wants to become an environmental lawyer, prefers to live in the South-Central community where she grew up and which she loves.

“I hear stories about what this area used to be. Why can’t it be that way again? There is such great diversity already here--Hispanics, Salvadorans, Cambodians, to name a few. . . . I came out all right as a person, and I grew up right here. I have never dodged a bullet or seen a gang fight. I can walk down the street at 8 in the morning or 8 at night and I am not afraid. I really love my community. I want to help make it stronger and better. “

Perez agrees.

“Everybody here is together. You know your neighbors. You can go next door and borrow milk. . . . I think people have the wrong impression . . . I want to stay here because I want to be part of this community.”

Tostado is so into making things better that she barely has time to talk to the press. One day last week she was dashing out “to help paint an older lady’s house. She can’t afford to hire painters, and she’s too old to do it herself.” Then she’ll be off to a group called Girl Talk 2000, at which volunteers help teach little girls the basics of good grooming, self-protection and other vital information.

All three say they see their future, and it is not one insulated by the things money can buy. It is, they say, a future built on a sense of community, a sense of shared responsibility for making neighborhoods clean, safe and friendly.