[CPEO-BIF] Cesar Chavez High School, Houston, Texas

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Separate But Toxic
The Houston environmental magnet school that's an environmental catastrophe

by Dave Mann
Texas Observer
March 23, 2007

Climb into Juan Parras' rickety Jeep Cherokee, and he'll show you around 
the neighborhood. He calls it his "toxic tour." Parras lives in 
Houston's East End, the poorer, predominantly minority side of town that 
borders the Houston Ship Channel. A former union rep, he now heads an 
environmental nonprofit in the East End called Texas Environmental 
Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS) that wants the roughly 30 refineries 
and chemical plants in the East End to reduce their emissions. Clad in a 
green vest and cap, Parras steers the Jeep through a maze of back 
streets and overpasses to the environmental hot spots that worry him the 
most: two federal Superfund sites - one with chemicals still leaking 
from barrels; the bayous flooded with trash; an elementary school three 
blocks from the steaming Valero Energy Corp. refinery the kids call "the 
cloud maker"; and of course, the acrid-smelling Ship Channel, where 
supertankers sidle next to refineries and factories. "All the things 
nobody wants in their neighborhood, we got here," Parras says as we 
drive past a house bracketed on three sides by freight rail lines. The 
tour's final stop is the site that angers him most of all - Cesar Chavez 
High School.

Opened in 2000, Chavez is one of Houston's newest and biggest high 
schools, a state-of-the-art building the community desperately needed 
for nearly 3,000 kids. Parras was all in favor of a new school. But he's 
troubled by where the school district built it. Chavez sits within a 
quarter-mile of three large petrochemical plants

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2451

--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


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