The city of Gainesville, Florida, needed to choose a site for a dump. Of all the places it could have chosen during its search in the late 1950s, the local government settled on an unlikely location: the backyard of a school. Joseph Williams Elementary sat on the east side, in the predominantly Black part of town.

Where children played, the ground bubbled. Birds swarmed, feeding on trash. At one point, a pile of 20 dead dogs and cats were dropped in the yard of the elementary school, just 100 feet away from classrooms. This was no ordinary playground.

A horrific stench of dead rats and decomposing garbage was impossible to escape, recalled Wayne Fields, who still lives in his childhood home opposite the site. “The smell was so bad, during school, after school,” said Fields, a 69-year-old businessman. “It was ridiculous.”

Both of Fields’s parents were teachers at the school. “We used to say that when we turn off the light we can all see each other because we are glowing from the chemicals,” he said.

Despite violating multiple health statutes, the local government was unbothered. “This is a necessary evil. I think we’re doing a very fine job,” then-City Manager William Green said in 1963. Besides, he said, the city poured “glorified perfume” on the garbage every so often.

This “necessary evil” has haunted this Florida community for decades. Sixty years later, the site is overgrown grassland, but contamination at the school still poses a large risk to students’ health. In the last few years, community members have called on the Alachua County school district and state agencies to assess the connection between the contaminated land and health issues in the area.

It is often difficult to show a direct link between a contaminant and adverse health impacts, and no such investigation has yet been done at the school. But for years soil and air testing have consistently revealed evidence of substantial environmental toxins on the property. Levels of the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene peaked in 2020 at a concentration up to 218 times higher than what is considered safe for direct exposure in residential settings. Researchers, meanwhile, have pinpointed East Gainesville as an asthma hot spot.

For decades, a rotating cast of city, county, and state officials have been aware of the contaminants in the school yard — and have taken little action to address the problem, The Intercept found in an investigation based on hundreds of public and archival documents, government emails obtained through records requests, and interviews with dozens of Gainesville residents.

Alachua County officials have proposed renovations to the school and overseen the removal of some contaminated soil from the property in the last decade, while a local nurse’s advocacy prompted the state health and environmental protection departments to order additional soil testing in recent years. Their primary focus has not been the former landfill but another contaminant discovered decades ago: abandoned oil tanks. Yet what’s needed, former school district employees and community members say, is nothing short of the removal of the school in its entirety, a full cleanup of the site itself, and a comprehensive assessment of the impact of soil toxins on students’ health. Neither the school district nor the Florida Department of Environmental Protection seem willing to go that far.

“Williams Elementary is safe,” said Jackie Johnson, a spokesperson for Alachua County Public Schools, in an email to The Intercept. She added that the school board hasn’t received a formal recommendation to demolish or majorly reconstruct the school and that the district has no current plans to do so.

District representatives met with the Department of Environmental Protection in January, Johnson said, and “it was made clear that there is currently no health threat to students or staff at the school.”

But just last month, the school board and the environmental protection department approved another round of soil and air testing at Williams.

The state Department of Health “has responded to many community concerns regarding Williams Elementary School,” Paul D. Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email. The state environmental protection department “continues to monitor the successful remediation at Williams Elementary” and will keep working with the school district and city “on any contaminated or potentially contaminated properties,” wrote Kathryn Craver, an external affairs director at the department’s northeast district.

An Intercept investigation reveals:

• The city of Gainesville, Florida, placed a landfill in the backyard of Joseph Williams Elementary School in the 1950s. The dump was closed 60 years ago, but even after other environmental issues were discovered on the site, it was never fully cleaned up.
• Years of soil and air testing have revealed substantial evidence of environmental toxins on the property, which sits in a chronically underfunded and predominately Black part of town. In 2020, the level of one carcinogen detected at the site peaked at up to 218 times higher than what’s considered safe in residential areas.
• The Alachua County School District has cleaned up some soil from the property. But neither the county nor the state has agreed to fully clean up the site or conduct a comprehensive study of the toxins’ impact on students’ health.

This situation in Gainesville is not an anomaly. Dozens of schools across 35 states sit on or adjacent to former, or currently open, landfills, according to The Intercept’s analysis of news articles, state databases, and public records from across the country. From New York to Ohio, there have been many reported cases of illness, predominantly cancer, from both teachers and students who have attended schools next to hazardous waste. These occurrences tend to be in lower-income communities of color, The Intercept found.

No federal agency prohibits new schools being placed on, or next to, dump sites, or requires schools near landfills to conduct cleanups. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency was authorized by Congress to create voluntary school siting guidelines, but these remain discretionary and don’t apply to existing schools.

Florida state law makes it illegal to build a new K-12 school on or adjacent to a known contaminated site unless steps are taken to ensure that children will not be exposed to threatening levels of contaminants. But at Williams Elementary, like other schools in Florida, the contamination surfaced years after it was built.

“It’s this long-standing pattern of the devaluing of people of color, pushing them into less desirable spaces.”

The lack of regulation to address decades-old problems deepens an enduring crisis of environmental racism.

“We see a really strong pattern where white affluent students are facing significantly less risk at school,” said Sara Grineski, a sociology professor at the University of Utah who studies environmental health disparities. “It’s this long-standing pattern of the devaluing of people of color, pushing them into less desirable spaces.”

Second-Class Citizens

Williams Elementary is named after the Black businessman who built it in the 1930s, seeing a need for a school on the east side of Gainesville. A middle school was built across the field in 1955 — a few years before the landfill was placed in the backyard of Williams.

“We were Black and seen as second-class citizens,” said Gussy Butler, aged 95, one of East Gainesville’s oldest residents. “They weren’t concerned; it was a Black area.”

The dump site was 150 feet away from students sitting in classrooms, and the pollution was made worse by the area’s impractical geography. The east side of Gainesville is lower and has more sensitive wetlands than the west, where economic development has generally been focused.

Local media began covering the dire consequences several years after the landfill was built. “The ditch is filled with black, stagnant water pumped from holes dug to hold the garbage,” the Gainesville Sun reported in June 1963. “The area being filled with garbage is wetter than normal so the........

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