Ambiguity is the last thing you want when dealing with potentially hazardous substances. But that’s exactly what Maria Johnson encountered when she stepped into her classroom’s storage closet several years ago.
The Wakefield High School science teacher was troubled and dismayed when she discovered jars full of expired, mislabeled and even unlabeled chemicals were resting in a room only a few feet from where her students sat.
"There were unlabeled chemicals and some only had their [technical] names so laymen wouldn’t know what they were," Johnson said.
She devoted an entire summer to going through all the chemicals in her classroom with a reference book to label the useful ones and properly dispose of the expired ones.
When word got out of her project, the school asked her to go to the other classrooms and help them get rid of any problematic chemicals. Then teachers from other schools began contacting her for advice on what to do with their chemicals.
Eventually, Johnson began to conduct training seminars for schools from across the county on how to safely handle hazardous substances.
She said that she derived her vigilance towards science safety from her previous job with PPL Theraputics, the pioneering British company that in the mid-1990s made Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned animal.
"I worked in a lab where you had to know your chemicals," Johnson said.
BECAUSE OF JOHNSON’S INITIATIVE, the EPA decided to kick off their school cleanout campaign at Wakefield High last week.
The EPA, along with the Department of Education and several other corporate sponsors, started the nationwide campaign to remove inappropriate chemicals from schools and to raise awareness of the issue.
"Going school by school [to help with chemical clean up] isn’t going to get us very far," Susan Bodine, an administrator at the EPA, said. "We have to create a campaign and [make] partnerships."
EPA representatives praised Wakefield for realizing their chemical management problem and working to remedy it.
"They were very proactive," Bodine said. "Wakefield is a model and it’s an example [for other schools]."
"Here they recognized they had a problem," EPA spokesperson Mimi Guernica said, "But they addressed that problem and they set up a management program. Then they did it across the county."
At the ceremony kicking off the EPA’s campaign, Wakefield senior Nina O’Malley was also honored for her efforts in making her school and community more environmentally friendly. O’Malley started a "Save The Earth" club at her school and is interested in going into urban forestry.
Upon receiving an award from the EPA, she spoke to a group of teachers, federal officials and her fellow classmates about the necessity for her generation to solve the world’s ecological problems.
"We are the stewards," O’Malley said. "The future of environmental health is in our hands."