JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Paxon School for Advanced Studies is no run of the mill school. It is one of the best in America and an elite place of learning.
It’s a school where in the last five years, 73% of the students have gotten college scholarships and 29 students have been accepted at Ivy League schools.
Paxon sounds like a great place to learn. But one major national newspaper isn’t on board with the accolades. It claims the air at Paxon is exposing kids to toxic chemicals.
But when you look at what students at Paxon are achieving things don’t sound right. So Action News did some fact finding of our own. And what we found is that it’s easy to manipulate numbers and tell a story.
The real story is what’s going on inside the schools.
“We don’t have any knowledge of a connection between a school and a students' health,” said Duval County Schools' spokesperson Jill Johnson.
According to the report, other local schools sitting in the most toxic air are:
- James Wheldon Johnson - formerly Paxon Middle
- Palm Avenue Exceptional Student Center
- Reynolds Lane Elementary
- Biltmore Elementary
The newspaper claimed that companies near the schools are releasing chemicals into the air and that's making things pretty awful.
When asked should parents be concerned at all that their kids are breathing in the air around the schools in that area Johnson said, “No, I don't think so.”
Dr. Richard Lipsey is a leading authority on air pollution who lives in Jacksonville. We wanted to hear what he had to say about the toxic air study and so we asked.
“It'd have to be a perfect day in perfect conditions. And we'd have to be between the factory and the school. No, we're not going find it. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Lipsey.
That needle is so tiny in fact, that not Dr. Lipsey, The School District or anyone else Action News spoke with knew of anyone who had been harmed by the air they were breathing.
“No, again, we don't believe that there are any health effects at the schools and we have not received any information of any students or faculty or staff,” said Johnson.
And Dr. Lipsey likes to put it another way.
“You have to put everything into perspective. So we didn't want to scare anybody by saying there was e. coli in the St. Johns River, you know there is because of septic tanks,” Lipsey said.
So by digging a bit deeper and going beyond the scary headline, Action News discovered things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem.
“On a scale of 1 to 10 I would say the Paxon schools, the ones that are listed there, I'd say they're risk on a scale of 1 to 10 would be a 1 for any lasting, harmful effects,” said Lipsey.
