New Jersey schools sit on or near toxic hazards. What can you do about it?

Nearly 30% of New Jersey schools sit within a mile of a known brownfield site. The children inside have no way to know what’s in the soil.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 44% of pre-K-12 schools across the United States are located within one mile of an environmental hazard site tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency: Superfund sites, brownfields, and Toxics Release Inventory facilities. 

Nearly 10,000 schools, enrolling 3.36 million students, are within a quarter-mile — the distance at which exposure risk is most acute—and environmental data places New Jersey squarely in the center of this national crisis.

An analysis of the state’s brownfield inventory, cross-referenced with school locations, found that 409 schools — 28.9% of all schools in the state — are within one mile of a contaminated property.

One hundred seventy-seven schools are within half a mile. Sixty-four schools, serving more than 40,000 students, are within a quarter-mile.

These are not abstract numbers.

They are children who walk through school doors every morning into buildings that sit within a few hundred yards of soil and groundwater contaminated with lead, PCBs, arsenic, petroleum products, and volatile organic compounds.

In Trenton, P.J. Hill Elementary sits less than a tenth of a mile from the Thropp Site. Gregory Elementary is the same distance from the Anthony Storcella Property, where testing has found lead, PCBs, and other metals at actionable levels.

In Camden, Cooper’s Poynt Family School is less than a tenth of a mile from the Harrison Avenue Landfill — 85 acres of lead, petroleum products, and volatile organic compounds.

In Jersey City, Liberty High School is 0.12 miles from Mill Creek.

In Newark, Ann Street School is 0.18 miles from the Synfax landfill, a site contaminated with PCBs, SVOCs, and heavy metals.

“It was shocking to us to discover how common it was for schools to be located near toxic sites and industrial pollution,” said Matthew Kraft, a professor of education and economics at Brown who coauthored the study. “This is something we need to be concerned about in nearly every community and across every state in the U.S.”

New Jersey is one of those states. The data is public. The sites are known. The contaminants are documented. And the children are already there.

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What you can do:

• Look up your child’s school on the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Known Contaminated Sites database at nj.gov/dep.
• Ask your school board whether the district has conducted environmental testing on school grounds in the last five years.
• Contact your state legislator and ask what steps New Jersey is taking to prioritize cleanup of brownfields within one mile of schools.
• The New Jersey Work Environment Council (WEC) is an alliance of labor, community, and environmental organizations working to secure a healthy environment.
• Report chemical storage issues or unsafe waste handling to the NJDEP School Chemical Management Program.

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