Elementary school children eagerly flooded the hallways of their newly remodeled campus Wednesday during a grand reopening ceremony, nearly a year after their school was closed due to asbestos concerns.
Hope View School in Huntington Beach was one of three schools in the Ocean View District forced to close last fall when trace amounts of the cancer-causing product were found during a re-modernization project.
Sixteen-hundred students across the district were shuffled around to other schools during the closures.
"We abated everything," Gina Clayton-Tarvin said, president of Ocean View School Board. "We cleaned out all the asbestos, all of the mold, all of the lead that had been existing from the 1950s and the lead paint."
Despite the major milestone of reopening, some family members still expressed their concerns over last year's findings.
"I'm sure everyone's going to be looking at 20 years down the line, is my kid going to be sick from asbestos," Libby Olinares-Northrub said, a grandmother of a student. "It's a cancer causing product, what do you do?'
Classes are scheduled to resume Wed. Sep. 9.
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The total cost of the cleanup and reconstruction of the campus totaled $5,000,000.
Included in the project were: upgraded heating and ventilation, modernized lighting system, modernized classrooms and new carpeting and linoleum.
