Sasha Vater’s son has an autoimmune thyroid condition, and when his physician recommended an independent environmental assessment of his classroom in September, she decided she wasn’t going to wait on Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to do it for her. “The school wouldn’t do it right, so I did it,” Vater said. In October, she commissioned her own mold testing at Chantilly Montessori, the roughly 300-student school on East Independence Boulevard where her son is enrolled.
The results, according to the Charlotte Observer, came back far from reassuring. Dust samples pulled from her son’s classroom and another classroom were sent to EnviroBiomics, a Texas-based laboratory, and returned ERMI scores of 20.4 and 24.4 — numbers the lab classified as very high. That stood in stark contrast to what CMS had told families two months earlier: that its own assessment, conducted after the district hired an outside contractor to perform air sampling on August 28, found no visible active mold growth or other conditions of concern, and that humidity levels were within an appropriate range.
Vater began contacting school and district officials in August, months before she ultimately paid for the outside testing herself. “I did everything I could possibly do to get the school system to help,” she said. Her frustration, she said, grew out of a lack of clear answers. “When they’re not giving you information, you fill in the blanks,” Vater said.
What the ERMI Scores Actually Mean
The ERMI test Vater used analyzes a dust sample for 36 mold species and produces a single relative score, according to EnviroBiomics. But the lab is explicit about the limits of that number: the scores indicate relative moldiness within the sample itself, not whether a building is safe to occupy. “They do not establish whether a building is safe to occupy,” the lab states, adding that “ERMI is an environmental analysis and does not diagnose disease.”…