Last week, a group of Brooklyn parents called for the governor of New York to resign over an indoor air issue at their children's school. The school is P.S. 372, The Children's School, a special-needs and inclusion elementary program in Gowanus, one block from the canal that has been a federal Superfund site since 2010.
Whatever you make of the political demand, the facts behind it are worth looking at. They show what can happen when contamination is discovered, a mitigation system is installed, but nobody has a clear and continuous picture of what is happening inside the building.
What happened
In March 2024, state investigators found elevated petroleum-related compounds in the school's annex, including benzene, a known human carcinogen.
The annex serves some of the youngest children in the program, including three-year-olds and students receiving occupational and physical therapy.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recommended mitigation, but school opened that September with no permanent system yet in place. Officials said the concentrations were only slightly above typical background levels and did not represent an increased health risk.
In March 2025, the DEC installed a sub-slab depressurization system. This is a standard response to vapor intrusion. The system pulls air from beneath the foundation and vents it outside before contaminated soil gas can enter the building.
But it did not close the case.
Results reported this summer showed that several volatile organic compounds remained above typical background levels in the annex cellar, including petroleum-related chemicals such as benzene.
The state says the levels did not exceed applicable health guidelines and that the system appears to be working as designed. That is important. The evidence does not necessarily show that the system failed. It shows that the continuing indoor-air pattern has not been fully explained.
More than two years after the original discovery, parents are still asking where the vapors are coming from and whether the annex is safe for their children.
The real problem is the gap between tests
The pattern is familiar.
A problem is found during one round of testing. A mitigation system is installed. Indoor air is tested again months later. If the results still show a problem, nobody has a complete record of what happened in between.
The gap is visibility.
Knowing that a mitigation system is running is not the same as knowing what is happening in the room. Contaminants can enter through another pathway, originate indoors, move through utility spaces, or change with HVAC operation, weather, and building pressure.
Periodic testing gives you a snapshot. It does not show you when conditions changed, how long they lasted, or whether a corrective action actually improved the occupied space.
That leaves building operators reacting after the fact.
What continuous monitoring could have changed
Continuous indoor air monitoring would not have identified benzene by itself. Most building-level VOC sensors detect broad changes in volatile organic compounds. They do not identify individual chemicals or determine whether a specific compound presents a health risk.
That requires targeted sampling, laboratory analysis, and qualified environmental professionals.
But continuous monitoring provides something laboratory testing cannot: visibility between tests.
It creates a baseline and shows how ventilation, particulates, broad VOC patterns, temperature, and humidity change over time.
At P.S. 372, that could have helped investigators see whether indoor conditions changed after the mitigation system was installed. It could have shown whether unusual patterns appeared in particular rooms or correlated with HVAC cycles, weather, occupancy, or other building conditions.
It also could have helped investigators decide when and where to conduct more specific laboratory testing. If VOC readings repeatedly rise in one part of the building or under certain conditions, that is valuable information, even if the sensor cannot identify the individual compound.
The two approaches should work together.
Targeted laboratory testing tells you what specific chemicals are present. Continuous monitoring tells you what is happening between those tests.
The question should be a chart
Parents are now asking whether the mitigation is working, why VOCs remain above background levels, and what changed after the system was installed.
Not every one of those questions can be answered by a dashboard. But many of the operational questions should be visible in the data.
Did overall VOC conditions change after mitigation? Are certain rooms behaving differently? Do readings rise when the HVAC system changes modes? Did conditions improve after additional ventilation was added?
Parents and facilities teams should not have to reconstruct two years of building conditions from technical letters, meetings, and occasional test results.
Those questions should be charts.
Transparent monitoring does not eliminate concern, and it does not replace environmental testing. It replaces the empty spaces between tests with information.
The broader lesson
Air quality monitoring is still treated as a response tool in many buildings, something brought in after a complaint, an odor, or a regulatory finding.
The Gowanus case argues for a different approach.
Schools and other public buildings should establish continuous indoor air quality baselines before a problem is discovered. Buildings near known contamination or operating active mitigation systems have an even stronger reason to do so.
This does not mean installing a sensor and declaring a building safe. Sensors do not remediate contamination, diagnose every pollutant, or replace environmental professionals.
They provide the visibility needed to detect changing conditions, investigate sooner, and document whether corrective actions are working.
The parents at P.S. 372 are asking for clear answers and documented protections before their children return to the annex. Those are reasonable demands.
A mitigation system should never be something we simply trust.
It should be something we can verify.
And verification should start on day one.
AirSafe Intel provides continuous indoor air intelligence for schools, healthcare facilities, senior living communities, and commercial buildings. The platform tracks CO₂, PM2.5, broad VOC patterns, temperature, and humidity, turning real-time data into alerts, trends, and actionable insights.
Continuous monitoring does not replace compound-specific environmental testing. It provides visibility between tests, helping operators detect changing conditions, investigate faster, and document whether improvements are working.
Sources: Gothamist, September 2024; Gothamist, July 2026; Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group letter, July 2026; Red Hook Star-Revue, August 2026; New York Post, August 22, 2026; and the P.S. 372 parent petition.