Hazardous phosphate chemicals discovered at Montebello Intermediate School in southeast Los Angeles County are now being cleared from the campus, as Montebello Unified School District moves to hire a licensed hazmat contractor for the cleanup.
The district posted the solicitation as one of its first procurement actions of the new fiscal year, a signal that school officials consider the removal a near-term priority. The work must be carried out under California Department of Toxic Substances Control and Cal/OSHA standards, and requires a contractor certified to package, transport and dispose of hazardous waste.
The district has not publicly disclosed what specific phosphate compounds were found, how much material is involved, or when and how it was discovered. That gap matters. Phosphate chemicals range from relatively benign salts to elemental white phosphorus, which ignites spontaneously in air and can become explosive as containers degrade. Older, forgotten stockpiles are exactly the kind of hazard that licensed crews are trained to handle carefully.
Montebello Intermediate is a long-established campus in a district where many school buildings date to the mid-20th century, when it was routine practice for chemistry programs to buy bulk quantities of chemical reagents that were used sparingly and then left in storage rooms for decades. The EPA flagged this "legacy lab chemical" problem in K-12 schools as far back as the late 1990s and launched a national Schools Chemical Cleanout Campaign in 2007. California's own toxic substances agency ran a parallel effort. Despite those pushes, many older urban campuses never completed full inventories, and hazardous stockpiles continue to surface during renovations, facilities audits or staff transitions.
Montebello, a working-class, majority-Latino city of about 62,000 people, sits in the southeast Los Angeles corridor that has faced repeated environmental justice concerns, including contamination from the Exide battery plant in nearby Vernon and Boyle Heights. Montebello Unified serves roughly 12,000 students, many from low-income families, and has operated under heightened Los Angeles County Office of Education oversight amid state audits that flagged financial mismanagement and facilities problems.
The district has not said whether it has inspected chemistry storage areas at other schools on its aging campus footprint. That question will likely press for an answer as the Montebello Intermediate cleanup moves forward.
