Classroom Gas Leak Dismissed for More Than a Year, Say Rallying Felton Workers

Dozens of workers and labor organizers rallied outside Felton Institute’s Family Development Center in San Francisco today to demand the nonprofit listen to health and safety concerns raised by workers following a gas leak inside one of the nonprofit’s classrooms.

Felton staff say they complained for more than a year about a foul smell inside the classroom for children — ages 18 to 36 months — before officials finally discovered and fixed the gas leak in May.

Felton has sites across the Bay Area and provides a range of services, including comprehensive early care and education programs.

During the rally, a contingent of workers, some of whom are represented by SEIU Local 1021, chanted, “Sí se puede!” and “Stand up, fight back!”

Holding a megaphone, Margarita Garcia, a teacher with Felton, told the crowd that staff deserve to be heard.

“We work hard for our kids,” she said. “We want Felton to listen to us, take us into consideration.”

After rallying, the group went inside the building to present a petition to Felton management, calling for the nonprofit to immediately investigate concerns, keep a public log of reported incidents, and immediately email staff, clients and parents when health and safety issues are reported.

Workers have also filed a complaint with the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, alleging Felton failed to use engineering controls to prevent harmful exposures to gas in the room, exposing employees to health hazards. Felton, however, has disputed the characterization of how the nonprofit responded to the gas leak.

In an email sent to Felton staff, clients and families and shared with KQED, Felton’s president and CEO, Al Gilbert, wrote that the nonprofit had immediately contacted PG&E and the San Francisco Unified School District after reports of the odor. They said that the smell was inspected multiple times, but that it was not until this May that the school district identified a leak.

“It seems that SEIU 1021 feels that making inflammatory, unfounded allegations about the health and safety of those who work at and visit Felton Institute will provide them with leverage in our negotiations. That is deeply troubling,” Gilbert wrote. “We strongly believe that SEIU 1021 making these outrageous allegations against Felton Institute undermines the good work we perform for our clients.”

A spokesperson with San Francisco Unified wrote that the district worked to resolve the issue last school year, and that the issue was resolved with Felton several months ago.

Tamar Sarkissian, a spokesperson for PG&E, said in a statement that PG&E gas service representatives responded to each call at the site and conducted thorough investigations.

“Our gas experts consistently received reads showing no gas present,” Sarkissian wrote. “However, we did advise the customer to work with a licensed contractor, their own maintenance department or schedule an additional PG&E inspection to further investigate their houseline, which is not PG&E property and is the customer’s responsibility to maintain. PG&E was not contacted by the customer with this request.”

Several records of work orders with SFUSD also provide a window into the history of efforts to address the gas leak.

“I was told by some children staff members that they smell gas in the playground area near a storage hut,” reads a request from December 2021.

Another from February last year reads, “Staff and family say there is ongoing smell coming from the heater in classroom 132. The smell is now causing headaches to staff members in childcare. Pls come out asap.”

Ana Pedroza had worked in that classroom — which is called the Butterflies room — for years and said she first reported the smell to a supervisor in 2021 after returning from COVID-19 lockdowns. Pedroza, an infant and toddler head teacher, said the odor worsened toward the end of last year.

“I had a parent who came in and she almost vomited because the smell was so bad,” Pedroza said.

Children started getting sick, and parents began to complain, she said.

“For several months we have been bringing this to everyone’s attention,” Pedroza wrote in an October email to a supervisor that was shared with KQED. “We open the doors to ventilate our classroom, but most of the time we end up having headaches at the end of the day because of the smell.”

Pedroza, who had been pregnant at the time, said she felt like vomiting when she walked into the classroom.

“Other teachers were feeling the same symptoms as me, they felt like nausea, they felt like vomiting, they felt headaches at the end of the day,” Pedroza remembered.  “And I’m like, ‘Well, we’re not all pregnant here.’”

She said she decided to leave Felton in part because she’s tired of not feeling heard or valued. Her last day was on July 31.

On top of the gas concerns, workers also want to see more comprehensive active shooter response training, better communication from management when incidents do occur and working phones and speaker systems in all Felton workspaces.

Those demands come in response to an incident in May where — according to a memo sent out by Felton management to families — police attempted to apprehend suspects in a van parked near Felton’s Solmar Learning Center in the Mission.

Jacqueline Murdocca, a preschool speech therapist at Felton’s early care and education sites, said she wished Felton had communicated more effectively with staff because so many people were worried for their safety that day.

She said some parents were unable to drop their kids off at the site because police had blocked off the street, but without clear communication from management, staff inside remained worried.

“I played with the kids as if nothing was happening, terrified,” Murdocca said.

In the statement sent by Gilbert, the Felton Institute CEO, he wrote that the people apprehended by police were not targeting their facilities, and that the program supervisor immediately informed each classroom to stay indoors and prepare for lockdown. He noted that as family members picked up their kids that day, the supervisor informed them of the incident and what the center had done to keep the children safe.

These latest concerns from workers come years after staff at Felton first launched an attempt to unionize the entire workforce. The nonprofit currently has eight unfair labor practice allegations against it with the National Labor Relations Board, including claims of retaliation against workers. Felton has denied those claims.

The roughly 10% of workers who are members of SEIU 1021 are in the process of bargaining for a new contract and say years of short staffing, low pay and bullying from management have led to high turnover. Meanwhile, some workers have pushed for years to unionize.

Murdocca is not a member of the union and says she’s speaking up now despite the risks to her employment. She said recent communication from management, including details about how they responded to the gas leak, is an improvement in transparency workers have been asking for.

“I think change is already happening,” she said. “However, I’m just left wondering why my team, the members on my team, my colleagues at other sites, why aren’t we able to form a union to help us advocate for this? What’s taking so long?”