Boston Public Schools fixes odor that made $73M Roxbury school smell like poop

An odor that permeated for months inside one of Boston’s newest schools, making the $73-million facility smell like “human waste,” has dissipated, according to district officials.

A facilities crew within Boston Public Schools made repairs during April break to a sewer gas vent pipe and a grease trap that had been the source of the “powerful and lingering sewage smell” at Dearborn STEM Academy in Roxbury.

Head of School Darlene Marcano wrote in an April 24 letter to the school community that the repairs to the equipment, in a wall within the boys locker room and kitchen, respectively, would hopefully “resolve” the issue that disrupted classes and made students and teachers feel ill.

District spokesman Max Baker confirmed to the Herald that the “smell has been fixed.”

“Environmental teams have visited our building multiple times since the odor was first reported and concluded each time that there is no safety concern,” Marcano wrote in the letter, which the Herald obtained on Friday. “I want to reassure you that we will continue to monitor this matter to ensure the health and well-being of all students, families, educators, and staff.”

The smell had been top of mind for students and teachers at the “state-of-the-art” facility, which opened in 2018, for most of the year, but it came to the district’s forefront in February and March.

A trio of teachers shared their stories of dealing with the smell during a School Committee meeting on March 27, as they called on district leadership to step forward to make the miserable experience go away.

“To be transparent, it is the smell of human waste so our school smells like poop,” said Steven Benjamin, a middle school reading specialist and special education teacher.

The district’s facilities management team conducted a test in late February and identified two areas within the school’s plumbing system that were believed to be causing the nauseating smell, Baker told the Herald in early April.

Officials told staff to pour water down drains to prevent the odor from growing, but the temporary solution came up short.

In March, the facilities management team scheduled another test to determine whether the smell was coming from beneath the 128,000-square-foot facility. But the test could only be performed on Thursdays, meaning it had to be pushed back to school break, on April 18, when nobody is inside the building, Baker said.

Gilbane Building Co., in partnership with JANEY Construction Management, completed construction of the school in the summer of 2018.

District officials met with the original building contractor on site on April 11 “to discuss additional solutions to minimize the odor within the building.”

The Dearborn opened to great fanfare in 2018, with the grade 6-12 early college academy marking the first new school construction project in 15 years at the time in the district. Officials hailed the facility as a model for future projects.

“The smell is unacceptable for student learning and my teaching,” tenth-grade science teacher Julia Kiely told the School Committee in March. “It is so intense that students say they can taste it.”

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