LeRoy, N.Y. – The frustration and confusion that’s spread throughout LeRoy over the past few months seemed to boil over at a meeting with parents and the superintendent Saturday morning, as hundreds of people packed the high school auditorium looking for answers as to why at least a dozen girls in the small town have developed a mysterious illness.
“There’s no environmental cause or infection cause to the condition that we’re seeing in our students,” Superintendent Kim Cox reassured parents.
Saturday was the first time Cox publicly addressed the media’s and parents’ concerns about the uncontrollable “tics” similar to Tourettes syndrome exhibited by the girls.
At least three parents stood up at a microphone in the middle of the auditorium and began yelling.
“We aren’t buying what you’re selling!” said Patrick Frauley.
On multiple occasions, Cox and a panel from Leader Professional Services, Inc. — an independent testing firm from Pittsford — tried to respond to parents’ questions about testing that’s being done on school grounds, but were interrupted by people in the crowd.
“You are not doing your job! You are not doing you job at all,” one parent yelled from the audience. “You need to prove to us that [the high school] is a safe place to put our children.”
Prior to the meeting, Superintendent Cox told reporters that environmental tests done so far by the New York State Health Department have shown there is nothing in the school that is causing the girls to get sick. However, Leader Professional Services, Inc. will be doing independent air quality tests over the next few weeks as a way of double-checking those findings. After those tests are done, a company spokesperson said they will determine whether or not to test the soil around the building and school grounds.
“Seeing that the parents are concerned, we wanted to do more deliberate, more comprehensive, detailed sampling protocols to further confirm those results,” explained Mary Ellen Holvey, who works for LEADER. “We were hired to review the current air quality study that was done back in December.”
Speaking to concerns that the illness is being caused by some type of common factor in the high school, Superintendent Cox said, “If we had an environmental cause here we would see this in a wide spread spectrum of folks. We wouldn't just see students; we wouldn't just see predominately girls.”
In the coming weeks, LEADER says they will test the air quality of the entire school, looking at everything from temperature and relative humidity to carbon dioxide levels.
But even after the meeting, some parents were still left wondering how all of this will impact the community in the long run.
“I think parents need to focus on getting kids better and you do that by controlling your own emotions,” said Beth Miller, who has three children in the LeRoy school system. “To stand up in a room full of people where everyone's fearful, everyone's angry, you have to control it because if you can't do that, how do you expect these kids to?”
