LVUSD should be cautious when using chemicals

Parents of children in Las Virgenes Unified School District (LVUSD), please read this letter.

I’d like to share my experience with the LVUSD herbicide-spraying program.

A couple of weeks ago I was shocked to see herbicide being sprayed right along a long stretch of sidewalk used by many children each morning to walk to Lupin Hill Elementary at the exact time children walk to school.

Picture two adult men and a truck loaded with a large canister of liquid herbicide. One man drives slowly as the other walks the route with a long wand sprayer.

The man spraying wears a mask as he releases herbicide from the wand. The wand sprays in a circular pattern about four feet wide.

The area being sprayed is a mostly barren dirt hillside, so that as the children walk by, their faces are right at the exact level on which the herbicide has been sprayed moments or even seconds before they pass.

Yes, the school district sprayed herbicide where children would be walking to school at the exact same time (7:55 a.m.) the children would be passing by.

Common sense would suggest that if legal notification of herbicide spraying must be posted ahead of time because of potential health risks, then the district should schedule spraying at the time farthest away from the time students will populate the area.

Not so.

I called the school district and was directed to a voice mailbox for the maintenance department. I left a message; my call was never returned. I called the superintendent’s office, which redirected me to (LVUSD Assistant Superintendent) Don Zimring’s office.

The next day, when I spoke to Zimring, he instructed me to wait for a call back from the maintenance department.

When I received no call back, I called Zimring again.

He told me that he had spoken to the maintenance department and they would consider my complaint, but with so much area to be sprayed, they may continue to spray at the same time students used an area. Because they post a letter-sized warning paper before spraying (which no child would pay attention to), they are within the law.

This seems to be the way they measure and plan their behavior, never mind the health risks to small children exposed to chemicals meant to kill.

I am saddened by the attitude I encountered from people entrusted with all of our children’s welfare. Hopefully, the well-educated people at our school district can solve the puzzle of time constraints and the desired eradication of unwanted plant life so that the puzzle piece of children’s exposure to chemicals is placed where it should be—as far away (time-wise) as possible. Until the district devises a humane spraying schedule, parents should know the situation.

Leslie Albuquerque

Calabasas