Supermodel Cindy Crawford attended a city council meeting last night where she and a group of concerned parents urged officials to pressure the school district to conduct further testing on toxicity levels at Malibu High School.
A major story broke last October after at least three teachers at the institution were diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
Shortly thereafter, more instructors and students reported that they were suffering from bladder cancers, respiratory illnesses, headaches, unexplained hair loss and skin rashes.
The teachers began to speculate that their illnesses were directly related to chemical exposure from campus construction and classroom mold.
A test later revealed that elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB’s, were present in window caulking in multiple classrooms.
Congress banned PCB’s in 1976 once it was learned that the chemical posed a serious risk to the immune and reproductive systems.
The unified school district has since cleaned the classrooms, instead of removing the window caulking, and declared that the areas were safe.
Crawford’s dissatisfaction over the district’s lack of urgency toward the issue led her to extract her two children from the school system. The supermodel even offered to pay for the source testing herself.
“I really feel like the only reason that they wouldn’t let me pay for it is that they don’t really want to know what those results would be,” she told KTLA prior to the counsel meeting.
After hours of deliberation, officials finally listened to the pleas of cancer victims, parents, scientists and celebrities.
Council members came to a unanimous decision and agreed to conduct further testing for the cancer-causing chemical nearly a year after the crisis.
Photo: Richard Shotwell/AP
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