DINWIDDIE COUNTY, Va. -- The Dinwiddie County School System did not follow state recommendations on how to teach science safely when an accident occurred in a chemistry classroom that injured students and a teacher, according to information obtained through a public records request.
A recommendation that schools have a Chemical Hygiene Plan (CHP) is included in the Virginia Department of Education's Safety in Science Teaching guidance from 2019.
The purpose of a school CHP is to describe all of the precautions that will be taken to protect students and teachers from chemical hazards, according to Dr. Jim Kaufman, the head of the non-profit Laboratory Safety Institute.
He said a CHP is critical to protect student and teacher safety.
"It's not just having a document and a person, it's having a program where people are really buying into it participating in the program," Kaufman said.
But according to a recent public records request filed by WTVR CBS 6, Dinwiddie County School's CHP could not be found, or did not exist on the day of the accident.
That same public records request revealed that there was no designated "Chief Hygiene Officer" at that time, which is required by OSHA, according to state guidance.
"They could be cited not by federal OSHA, but by the state agency that enforces this in Virginia," Kaufman said.
A Division Chemical Hygiene Officer develops a safety program for the division, implements hygiene training, and determines the need for personal protective equipment.
We already know from the Superintendent for Dinwiddie Schools that personal protective gear was not used during the demonstration in question.
"Often if somebody was injured and they were not being protected by best practices, which includes the laboratory standard, there have been numerous lawsuits that have resulted from these kinds of injuries in schools," Kaufman said.
In the Dinwiddie incident, the teacher was doing a demonstration involving methanol.
He placed methanol in a beaker with water and ignited it.
After performing the demonstration once, he added more methanol from a one-gallon container into the same beaker.
That caused a phenomenon known as "flame jetting" to occur which caused a flame to shoot 10 feet across the classroom.
"There is an opportunity for improvement and this will lead to wanting to take steps to do better," Kaufman said.
Since the accident, Dinwiddie Schools said their Chief Operating Officer has now assumed the role of Chief Hygiene Officer.
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