West Contra Costa Unified will open Richmond's Kennedy High on schedule Tuesday after indoor air tests came back clean, though the welding shop and kitchen — where traces of the solvent PCE turned up — stay closed, with a mobile kitchen filling in.

John F. Kennedy High School in Richmond will open Tuesday morning for the first day of school — an outcome that, two weeks ago, was in real doubt. Testing this summer had found the solvent PCE in five of the six soil samples pulled from the campus, and in early August the West Contra Costa Unified School District closed the school while state scientists worked out whether a chemical in the ground was reaching the air students breathe.

The verdict came at a Thursday-night town hall: it wasn't. According to NBC Bay Area's coverage of the meeting (external source, opens in a new tab), the district said fresh indoor air testing showed the campus safe to reopen, with district spokesperson Liz Sanders telling the outlet there was no concern of immediate or long-term health risk to students or staff. Superintendent Cheryl Cotton delivered the finding to the room herself, as ABC7's J.R. Stone reported (external source, opens in a new tab), framing it as no sign of vapor intrusion and no health threat from the PCE sitting in the soil gas. The calendar holds; school starts on time.

Some background on what had everyone worried. PCE — tetrachloroethylene, the chemical you smell walking past a dry cleaner — is a common industrial degreasing solvent, and its particular hazard is that it can turn to vapor and rise up through soil into the rooms above. Finding it under a school is the sort of result that empties a building until someone measures the air. Here, the air is what cleared it.

The reopening is not a blanket all-clear, though. Two rooms stay shut: the welding shop and the kitchen, the only indoor spots where the district registered detectable PCE. Mandi Bane, of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, told the meeting the scientists who ran the testing traced that reading not to the soil but to consumer products used in those particular rooms — an occupational source rather than vapor rising from the ground. Meals, in the meantime, come off a mobile kitchen.

Not everyone left reassured. As ABC7 recounted, residents pressed on the welding program in particular — the students who log hours in that shop, and the instructor who is in it all day. The district said it had spent more than $100,000 on the testing round, put money toward air purifiers, and would keep monitoring the campus, but it named no dates for the next round of tests.

For at least one incoming ninth grader, Mia Sedano, the news simply meant she felt comfortable going back, she told ABC7. What a passerby will see Tuesday is a full campus — and two rooms, the welding shop and the kitchen, still dark behind it.