Poway Unified School District officials received a boisterous, sometimes angry, reception from hundreds of parents as the superintendent gave updates about the status of mold-related issues at Del Sur Elementary.
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The family information meeting was held on Wednesday night at Del Norte High.
The Del Sur students were to begin the school year on Aug. 13, but had to remain home because the campus could not open due to what officials called at the time “moisture-related issues.” Following remediation efforts over the past week and additional mold spore testing, the school year’s on-campus start was postponed a second time.
Now parents learned the approximately 840 students will start school on Aug. 24, but nearly 3 miles away at Stone Ranch Elementary in 4S Ranch. Officials anticipate they will remain at Stone Ranch for a month.
A few parents at the meeting said they were looking for health and safety information. Others said they were curious how the district would handle combining Del Sur students with students at Stone Ranch while moisture remediation efforts continue at the Del Sur campus.
Approximately 840 students attend Del Sur and about 550 students attend Stone Ranch, said district spokesperson Josué Reyna. PUSD officials said they chose Stone Ranch because it has sufficient space to house all the students from Del Sur so that the grade levels would not be divided on different campuses. However, four classes will be held in the nearby 4S Ranch Boys & Girls Club.
Before Wednesday’s family information session got underway at the Del Norte High School Performing Arts Center, parent Blanca Landis said she wanted to get some questions answered about the school situation. Her daughter, now in eighth grade, formerly attended Del Sur and her son is in fourth grade at the school.
“I want it to be permanently fixed and safe,” said Landis, a Poway resident. “My daughter went there three years and one year she had eczema on her hands. She was in an affected classroom. As soon as she was out of the school she was fine. My son will be there for two more years and I don’t want him to have health issues.”
Parent Mark Pearson said he has a fifth-grade daughter attending Stone Ranch and is concerned about crowding at the campus while Del Sur students are expected to be temporarily housed there at least until Friday, Sept. 18.
The current tentative timeline is for Del Sur to reopen on Monday, Sept. 21.
Pearson said he was wondering if the school would stagger arrivals and dismissals for both schools on a shared campus and wanted to find out why some students were not being located to the nearby Design 39 Campus and Monterey Ridge Elementary.
“I’m very curious about why the structural integrity of the school and mold remediation should have been done over the summer or years ago but it’s been going on since 2022,” he said. “Obviously, kids have been sick in the past and I don’t want it to come around again.”
Superintendent Ben Churchill began the family information session by saying he appreciated the opportunity to share details with attendees. He said it was the beginning of a long-term conversation about the current and future status of the situation and noted the meeting was being recorded so families could access it in the future.
“The idea is to give a sense of where we are and what is next,” he told the crowd, adding that the issue of mold has been a recurring problem since 2023 and 2024.
Although the issues were remediated as recently as this summer, he said officials have still not identified the root cause of the issue. Within the next month he said officials plan to go beyond remediation and identify the source. He said they don’t want a band-aid fix, but a permanent solution.
Rather than having a back-and-forth dialogue, attendees were asked to submit their questions via a QR code.
While addressing the timeline of the mold-related issues, Churchill said Del Sur’s principal first became aware of the recent recurrence on the last day of July. A week and a half later, officials recognized the problem was not abating so they hired professionals to do testing. Just as the school year was about to start on Aug. 13, they recognized there was a larger problem and more work was needed, he added.
Eric Dill, associate superintendent of Business Support Services who oversees the district’s facilities, said as the issues grew, a larger crew and additional resources were needed. As of Tuesday, a few areas were still listed as “moderate” but not “elevated” concerns, Dill said.
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“We went through efforts to remediate mold,” he said. “That led to the announcement last night (Aug. 18) to relocate the campus. We need to get to the cause of why this persists.”
As professionals work to resolve the issues, he said an update on the work is expected in two weeks.
Alison Fieberg, associate superintendent of Learning Support Services, said school officials plan to create a similar experience for students at Stone Ranch as they would at Del Sur. Extended Students Services (ESS) for before and after school care would still be provided and students with individualized education programs (IEPs) would still be accommodated, Fieberg said.
She said the school’s staff was “excited” about welcoming the students.
“There will be staff on site to help navigate the campus,” Fieberg said. But details such as lunch schedules and play times are still being arranged, she added.
Other plans are also being developed. Details will be shared in the future about housing some classes at the Boys & Girls Club temporarily, when Back-to-School Night will be rescheduled and how missed instructional days will be addressed, she said.
For now, Churchill said bus transportation will not be provided to Del Sur students attending the Stone Ranch campus. Cuts to transportation have been made for the past several years and bus routes are determined based on the number of qualified drivers. The requests for transportation services exceeds the number of buses that can run, he said.
Churchill added that professionals have been entrusted with the mold testing and as officials continue to look for the root cause of the issues they will report on the results.
“I wish tonight that we had a written report,” he said. “I would love for you to see it. As soon as it’s in hand it will be in front of you.”
The audience clapped when Churchill told them there would be no online learning as there was during the COVID pandemic. Details about which room numbers have been affected by mold issues will be forthcoming so that families can seek information from pediatricians, he added
“Do we want the best possible experience for the student? Yes,” he said, noting that exceptional educators care deeply about the school experience for students. “Is it the way we choose to start the school year? No.”
Churchill ended the meeting by saying another will be held, and in two weeks officials will give a status update,
After the meeting Shannon Kowal, the parent of a fifth-grader at Del Sur, said she submitted multiple questions that were not answered by the administrators. Kowal said she was concerned that the district has known about the moisture issue for years, but added parents have been getting the runaround while “mystery illnesses” have been occurring.
“I wish I could believe this will be solved because that’s what the children deserve,” Kowal said. “Lots of families are taking their kids out of the school.”
Pearson said after the meeting that it seemed disorganized and that more questions could have been answered. He said he hopes the officials answer the questions asked via the QR codes on the Del Sur website’s FAQ section at tinyurl.com/DelSurFAQ.
“How many days will Del Sur be closed?” Pearson said. “I bet it will not be solved over the next month. When the super El Niño rains hit, there’s going to be water intrusion.”
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