DOE Lax on 9/11 Hazards

In last week’s article, “UFT Health Official: DOE Should Notify City Students at Risk of 9/11 Fallout,” Department of Education spokesperson David Cohen says that the DOE did outreach to students in lower Manhattan after 9/11 to alert them of the health risks of attending school near the disaster zone and inform them of the health services available to them.

I’m not sure which specific efforts Mr. Cohen is referring to, but as one such lower Manhattan student and the executive director of an outreach group that connects other young adult survivors to 9/11 health services, I can confirm that any efforts the DOE made were wildly inadequate and failed to reach a vast majority of downtown students. At Stuyvesant and many other neighborhood schools, students were encouraged to believe that the air was safe after 9/11 and didn’t learn about the potential health consequences of 9/11 and the WTC clean-up until the media began reporting it years later.