Hazardous chemicals pile up in K–12 science labs

When Maria Giesler, then a high school science teacher, opened the chemical cabinet in her classroom laboratory for the first time in 2020, she felt a chill down her spine. Giesler saw before her rows and rows of corroding and spilled chemicals stacked all the way from the bottom of the wooden shelves to the ceiling. “This is not safe, and I don’t want to be in here,” she remembers thinking. “Those things shouldn’t be next to each other.”Giesler, then a physics, chemistry, and physical science teacher at St. Michael the Archangel High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, understood why there would be bottles of hydrochloric acid, but there were also mercury, naphthalene, sodium perborate, and glacial acetic acid—some of them linked to cancer and damage to the kidneys, nervous system, and respiratory system––not to mention unlabeled containers filled with who knows what. It seemed as if no one had cleaned the cabinet in years. Giesler is one of the thousands of K–12 teachers across the US facing a similar problem: labs filled with aging, unlabeled, and unstable chemicals, waiting for someone to notice and dispose of them or else setting the stage for a dangerous incident. These chemicals have been in schools for decades, but teachers started paying more attention in the past 5 years. The increased concern probably has to do with teachers resuming classroom activities in full after the COVID-19 pandemic, explains Christina McKeon, director of operations at the Lab Safety Institute (LSI), a nonprofit educational institution