About 22 hours before D.C. Public Schools welcomed children back to the classroom, the principal at Janney Elementary School in Tenleytown sent an email to parents notifying them that the school's artificial turf field would be replaced "due to safety concerns around student injury."
After children played on the field all spring and summer, officials attached the sign to the field's fence on Aug. 19. Contact sports would be prohibited until the turf was replaced, the notice said, explaining that the field had failed a hardness test.
Neither the letter to parents nor the sign, however, detailed that more than four months had passed since the field first failed the safety test. It didn't explain why the field wasn't replaced before it crossed a critical safety threshold. Nor did the Department of General Services tell the community that ten other fields at local schools and parks had received dangerously out-of-compliance scores during a recent round of testing.
The test failures come as many of the city's fields are reaching the end of their lifespans, and as a larger debate in D.C. about the safety of crumb rubber and other artificial turf materials is brewing.
And amidst all that, city officials seem to be caught unaware that the maker of three-quarters of the city's artificial turf fields, including Janney's, has been named in more than a dozen fraud lawsuits in the United States and Canada...
http://dcist.com/2017/09/turf_30.php
It seems that the intellectuals of the Potomac valley were preoccupied with surf and turf.
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