Class Dismissed: School Named After Obama Shuts Doors Indefinitely

Barack Obama Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia, will remain closed indefinitely due to concerns over noticeable levels of mold in the building, WRIC ABC 8News reported Monday.

Richmond Public Schools (RPS) Chief Operations Officer Patrick Herrel directed people to exit the building on Monday and said that the school would be shutting its doors, 8News reported. Multiple individuals inside the school at the time, including some parents, confirmed to the outlet that they noticed mold in the building, such as on laptops that had been kept in storage there during the summer.

RPS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras said in a statement released Monday that the school’s teachers and staff had “found additional areas of mold growth” in some areas of the building, such as “behind bulletin board paper.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to send everyone home so we could thoroughly re-clean the newly identified areas and perform additional antimicrobial fogging,” Kamras said. “We will then retest every single room in the school.”

“All of this is realistically going to take several days,” he continued. “So we will not be returning to the Obama building this week. Our goal is to do so by Monday. In the interim, we are working to get Clark Springs Elementary School ready as a temporary space. We’ll have more information about that by tomorrow. For now, school is closed on Tuesday.”

Kamras also said during a Monday town hall meeting that students and faculty may be able to move to Clark Springs for the first quarter of the school year, 8News reported.

“I think it would be unfair to the team at Obama to ask them to move everything, set up their classes, start at Clark Springs and then two weeks later come back to Obama,” Kamras said during the meeting, according to 8News.

Richmond City School Board member Ali Faruk told CBS 6 in an article published Tuesday that the elementary school had “an HVAC system that wasn’t working properly.”

“It was a wetter summer than we usually have, a hotter summer than we usually have, and an HVAC system that wasn’t working properly,” Faruk told the outlet. “So, sadly, all those came together to create the perfect awful soup for the looming … mold in a building that already had a proclivity to mold.”

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