When we send our children off to school, we’d like to believe they’ll be well taken care of there. Three conscientious teachers in Oregon take that responsibility so seriously, they risked their careers to protect the children.

It started on a June afternoon when a light ballast ignited in Sue Lewallen’s classroom, spewing a black tarry substance onto desks and spreading an acrid stink throughout a wing of the school. Lewallen had seen it happen before at the school, but this time she found herself getting nauseous, losing focus and suffering headaches.

Though told that it was “just tar,” she scooped up a sample and faced down her principal, telling him she was getting it tested. When the mess wasn't cleaned up for days, she sent her sample to a lab, which reported not “tar” but PCBs, at a level far beyond safety levels.

Teachers Tina Dierkes and Marcia Clark joined Lewallen in her determination to get the dangerous light fixures out of the building, and the school cleaned of PCBs. Dierkes had lost her hearing in one ear and suffered vertigo attacks after a chemical spill at another school in the same district. She called the EPA, blowing the whistle on the school district’s administration. Clark invited a reporter to an in-school hearing on the PCB issue so that people outside the school would get the word that there was a serious problem.

When Dierkes challenged the school’s plan to hold summer school in the contaminated building, the school superintendent repeatedly ordered her to sit down. She kept talking. When the EPA responded to her call with an on-site inspection, they found high levels of PCBs in the carpets and on other surfaces throughout the school.

Making a surprise visit at a nearby school, the EPA inspectors found that the offending lights had already been removed —but were being stacked on the playground. College students hired to do the removal had been given no protective clothing or breathing masks.