The city today announced a 10-year plan to remove and replace all school lighting fixtures contaminated with PCBs, allocating $708 million in its capital budget to implement the plan which will also include an audit and recommendations by energy companies to determine  how to improve energy efficiency in each school.

The plan "will not only reduce any potential exposure to PCBs," the announcement states, "but is expected to reduce the City's greenhouse gas emissions by more than 200,000 metric tons per year - the equivalent of removing more than 40,000 cars from the road."

The announcement follows a month in which an alarming amount of PCBs - persistent man-made chemicals that have been linked to myriad toxic effects, ranging from immune suppression to cancer, and most recently, to high blood pressure - have been found to be leaking from light fixtures in several schools.

Parents have been pushing the Department of Education to act on this since even before the Environmental Protection Agency put the New York City Department of Education and the School Construction Authority on notice, that either they begin the process of inspecting and removing contaminated light fixtures, or the EPA would start sending its own personnel into schools to inspect them.

The DOE said they would prioritize schools for new or retrofitted fixtures in this order: (1) schools with visual leaks, (2) elementary schools built between 1950 and 1966, (3) secondary schools built between 1950 and 1966, (4) elementary schools built between 1967 and 1979, (5) secondary schools built between 1967 and 1979, (6) elementary schools constructed prior to 1950, and (7) secondary schools constructed prior to 1950.

See the city's announcement here.  Recent press coverage can be found on the Wall Street Journal, Daily News and on the New York Times Green blog.