The husband of a teacher at Staunton Montessori School sent me what I guess will pass as the unofficial response from the school to our reporting on a mold issue in a school classroom.
“You are absolute trash for printing this article. Fuck you asshole, you’re a shitty journalist, and I hope you think of me every time you stub your toe.”
That was the pithy email sent to me Monday night from Kevin Hall, whose wife, Chrissie, is an elementary teacher at SMS, which currently operates out of a former office building for VEPCO and Dominion Energy in Fishersville, and is moving to the Statler Brothers Complex in the City of Staunton for the 2026-2027 school year.
I’m supposing Kevin Hall, who, per his LinkedIn profile, is a senior systems analyst at McKee Foods, wasn’t happy with us writing about the repeated health issues experienced by students at the school that stemmed from a mold problem after heavy rains last fall flooded a classroom.
ICYMI
I’m the bad guy here, see, for reporting on this.
The issue was reported to me by a parent, who came to me with pages of receipts, detailing months of back-and-forth with the school over the mold problem in the classroom.
As one would do in the reporting trade, I reached out to Staunton Montessori School to get the school’s side of the story, and got this word back from Leanne Gray, the head of the school:
“When concerns about potential mold in a classroom were raised, SMS took those concerns seriously and evaluated the situation promptly using its standard facilities procedures.
“Based on the information available at the time, we did not identify a condition requiring additional remediation. We continue to monitor the area and address maintenance items as they arise, including routine coordination with the property owner.”
The parent who brought this to our attention, Ashley Reist, told us that heavy rain over the weekend of Sept. 30 flooded the upper elementary classroom, with damage including ceiling tiles falling to the floor.
Despite issues with smell arising from the flood damage, the classroom continued to be used, with the remediation effort from the school being the use of four air purifiers and one dehumidifier.
Over the course of the next several months, Reist’s children talked about “an odor in the classroom” that smelled like “rotting cabbage,” and told their mother that when students would ask what the smell was, “the reply they would receive was that it was the mold in the ceiling.”
Reist noted this in an email to Gray on Feb. 20, and said she “asked about the possibility of moving the children out of the room until we could have it tested, to ensure there was not anything that could pose a health risk to our children,” but got no response.
On March 16, Gray sent an update to upper elementary parents detailing ongoing efforts to learn more about the situation in the classroom, and possible health impacts.
The next word from the school came on April 20, which said the administration had spent 30 hours on the investigation, including consulting experts on mold.
The conclusion: “we have found no evidence of a health risk to our students.”
“We now consider this specific inquiry closed so that our leadership team can return their full focus to our students’ daily education and our preparation for our upcoming campus transition,” Gray wrote in the April 20 email.
Reist withdrew her children from the school on April 29, noting in an email to Gray and to fellow parents at SMS the health issues that they had been experiencing, which had abated over the spring break, when they weren’t in school.
That’s where we are with the story, which now has legs because the husband of one of the staffers at the school – the school’s website lists 16 people on the faculty and staff – decided that it needed to have legs.
Pro tip: in the future, maybe don’t hit send on that email.
I did attempt to reach out to Leanne Gray at Staunton Montessori School to ask if she had anything to add to the email that we got from Kevin Hall.
No response.
Note: we can keep writing about this, if the folks at SMS want us to.
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Chris Graham
