Bayshore High: Reboot or Runaround?

On Thursday, a joint meeting between our county commission, school board and health department was held at the convention center in Palmetto to discuss the ongoing efforts of Bayshore High School alumni to find out why an inordinate number of them are sick or dead from rare illnesses. It was an impressive assembly of every local public official possessing the potential means to get answers, but that will matter little unless they decide collectively to take meaningful action.

The assembly began with a presentation by Dr. Jill McKinnon, an epidemiologist and former director of Florida Cancer Data Systems, who remains a consultant with the state health department. Dr. McKinnon explained the state’s impressive statewide cancer registry, which has been collecting data on cancer incidences since 1981. For the next 90 minutes, the elected officials, Dr. Jennifer Bencie (administrator for the Florida Department of Health for Manatee County), Rob Brown (Manatee County Environmental Protection Division Manager) and other staff members went back and forth on an issue they’d each covered many times over the last two years.

For anyone for whom that part of the meeting might have been an introduction to the issue, their conversations and conclusions would have probably seemed reasonable. In summation: the school district has collected some data on the site of the old school and the likewise demolished vo-tech that was adjacent to it and has not found toxic levels of contamination. The county has evaluated a SUPERFUND site about a mile away and has found its toxicity to be, in Mr. Brown’s words, "a small isolated footprint" that wouldn’t have impacted the Bayshore property, and the health department, without being able to evaluate the medical records of those who have gotten sick or passed away from illnesses thought to be related to toxicity at the school, cannot even begin to determine what they’re looking for in terms of a possible cancer cluster from related exposure.

There’s nothing necessarily incorrect with any of those positions, each taken in their own limited capacity. The consensus that seemed to be built among the organizations on Thursday was to focus on the collection of medical records in a central clearing house in order to assess what exactly the incidents amount to, whether there are an elevated number of specific illnesses known to be associated with certain toxic pollutants, and then continue to look at potential sources of those specific materials. Again, nothing in this sounds unreasonable. As Dr. Bencie put it, the approach has been functioning somewhat in reverse, with an emphasis on looking for toxins to assign to the various illnesses, rather than vice versa.

For the dozens of Bayshore alumni and their family members in attendance Thursday, as well as hundreds more who could not attend the 1:30 p.m. meeting, the rub lies in the manner in which this issue has been handled up to this point. From recreated and missing school board minutes and microfiche to curiously myopic site testing, and the obdurate reluctance of anyone to get the word out to potential victims in order to achieve a better understanding of the number of cases that may be related, they have little reason to believe that the meeting was not yet one more dog and pony show designed to wear down their resolve and drag the matter out into perpetuity (for a better understanding of the history of this story, check out this column I wrote about it exactly two years ago this week).

In the time that I’ve covered this story, I’ve become fairly certain of a number of things. First, a shocking number of alumni in a concentrated time frame of about 10 years seem to be suffering from or have died from very rare diseases and disorders. Second, record keeping that would tell us more about the buildings, the drinking water sources, and the reasons for the demolition of relatively new and very expensively-replaced physical plants ranges from shoddy to suspect to nonexistent. Third, no one with the power to learn more about the possible scope and connectivity of these abnormal occurrences has seemed particularly motivated to do so, at least beyond a cursory level.

That said, the work ahead is not simple. Bayshore’s history and the potential causality is particularly complex because we have so many different ailments and possible sources. If there was a single pollutant found to have been in the drinking water and then a documented cluster of a cancer or cancers known to be associated with it, the process of determining causality would be much simpler. Instead, we have a multitude of rare ailments, a nearby SUPERFUND site, unknown drinking water sources, a demolished school once thought to be a "sick building," a number of underground tanks that have already been removed and destroyed, and missing records that could have provided insight.

As noted in this 2016 piece by investigative reporter John Rehill, there are also several records of incomplete chains of communications that send up red flags as to who knew or suspected what and when. Further complicating the matter, most of those who would have direct knowledge of what occurred (including most of those in the aforementioned communications) have long since passed away.

So, where do we go from here if we really do want to find out the answers to all of these questions? To be fair, the public officials at Thursday’s meeting are relatively new to this issue and were not party to the associated actions. Members of both boards, their attorneys, the county administrator and the school district superintendent all came on long after the schools were demolished and the last round of suspect testing had been performed. However, like it or not, they own the issue and have been made well aware of the depth of its seriousness. They’ve heard the gut-wrenching stories, they’ve seen the pictures of those lost. Surely, their instincts tell them that something is askew.

They say they can’t do much without the victims coming forward with their medical records. Fair enough. Cheryl Jozsa, a Bayshore Class of Ô81 grad who has become the de facto leader of the Bruin alums, is asking her fellow Bruins to do just that. Jozsa, whose sister was a 1979 graduate who passed away from a rare leukemia only 20 years later, began noticing a trend of such deaths among alumni and started trying to find out if there was a possible connection to the school they’d all attended. By simply starting a Facebook page dedicated to the issue, she drew out many more similar tragedies, most of whom had no idea that so many Bayshore alumni had fallen ill. To date, Jozsa has passively collected a list of 457 alumni who are either sick or dead from an illness suspected to be related.