Buried in yesterday's Times, there's news of an October 16 court decision that implicates the DOE for lack of environmental oversight on a long-beleaguered new school project, planned on a toxic 'brownfield' in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. With a new school construction budget proposed last week, Class Size Matters' Leonie Haimson points out a new and novel line item -- nearly $1 billion of the $3.7 budgeted for new construction is to be held back for "potential site specific/environmental code costs."

Like so many DOE gestures, this one has multiple layers of meaning: First, it's an acknowledgment that new schools may sit on old manufacturing or industrial sites and that environmental threats are real. That's real progress. It's also troubling to think that parents, children, and teachers can't be assured that new schools will be built on never-toxic sites. And it's a tacit admission, long due, that DOE must carefully plan for environmental remediation (as well as academic catch-up, once the schools are built). Whether Haimson's assertion is correct - that the DOE will spend more to clean up the polluted site than they might have spent on another, cleaner site - is hard to know, especially in the current economic abyss. But one can only hope that her concern "that the SCA is planning on building as many schools as possible in [the] future on toxic sites" is wrong, and that DOE planners will work to make sure that dire prediction is, in fact, false.