follow up: Mold at Adams

PACT members,
Last week at the PACT meeting Catherine Walker mentioned that a room at Adams had been closed due to mold. This is follow-up regarding questions of type of mold (? "bad" or "toxic" _ stachybotrys vs. other) responses are below:

From Catherine Walker:
Director of Facilities, Cliff Gurnham reported to me that a recent air
quality test had registered a low level of "bad" mold. You could check with Cliff regarding the specific species, if it was determined to be stachybotrys (Black mold). When he said "bad" mold, that is what I took it to mean, since this is the mold that caused us to abandon the basement for over a month in the fall. Cliff said the levels were low, and that Mystic Air might even have considered it a misread, but until we receive the second round of test results, I made the decision not to take a chance to expose students to a known risk.
Catherine

From Tom Forcella:
Catherine's explanation is correct. Mystic Air said the level was so low that it might have been a misread. We remediated the area and they have already done a retest and the results will be back at the end of next week. We conduct regular testing at Adams and will continue to do so. Mold has not been found in the basement since the incident in the fall. We will put in place a systematic testing program for the 2009-09 school year.

From Cliff Gurnham:
…there was no mold found through visual inspections, it was only found through testing. The test shows multiple types of mold, stachybotrys appears as black mold and there was a trace in the one room.

Regarding follow up testing/retest, timing and frequency, also from Cliff:
We did a retest and are waiting for the results which should be back at the beginning of next week. Testing is normally the last resort when finding mold, however if we have any problems we normally follow up with a test to be safe. Due to past problems in this building we do random tests a couple of times a year, it is not feasible to test every signal space in the building.