SEPARATE BUT TOXIC: THE HOUSTON ENVIRONMENTAL MAGNET SCHOOL THAT'S AN ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE

Dave Mann | March 23, 2007 | Features

Climb into Juan Parras’ rickety Jeep Cherokee, and he’ll show you around the neighborhood. He calls it his “toxic tour.” Parras lives in Houston’s East End, the poorer, predominantly minority side of town that borders the Houston Ship Channel. A former union rep, he now heads an environmental nonprofit in the East End called Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS) that wants the roughly 30 refineries and chemical plants in the East End to reduce their emissions. Clad in a green vest and cap, Parras steers the Jeep through a maze of back streets and overpasses to the environmental hot spots that worry him the most: two federal Superfund sites—one with chemicals still leaking from barrels; the bayous flooded with trash; an elementary school three blocks from the steaming Valero Energy Corp. refinery the kids call “the cloud maker”; and of course, the acrid-smelling Ship Channel, where supertankers sidle next to refineries and factories. “All the things nobody wants in their neighborhood, we got here,” Parras says as we drive past a house bracketed on three sides by freight rail lines. The tour’s final stop is the site that angers him most of all—Cesar Chavez High School.

Opened in 2000, Chavez is one of Houston’s newest and biggest high schools, a state-of-the-art building the community desperately needed for nearly 3,000 kids. Parras was all in favor of a new school. But he’s troubled by where the school district built it. Chavez sits within a quarter-mile of three large petrochemical plants

Parras parks the Jeep and leads the way on to the school grounds. He walks around the football field and climbs to the top of the metal bleachers for a prime view of the closest plant, owned by Texas Petrochemicals Inc. “Pretty darn close, huh?” he says with a nod. Indeed, it’s almost shocking to see the plant’s flame tower loom directly over the school, separated by a sliver of woods and a narrow bayou. From the baseball field, you could probably reach the plant’s fence line with a long home run. To Parras, it’s no coincidence that the student body is almost entirely Latino and black. This, he says, is environmental racism at its most extreme. (read full story here)