A Durango Head Start preschool will reopen Tuesday after closing this week because some teachers refused to come to work after screenings showed elevated levels of radon.

Tri-County Head Start administration met with staff members of the Roberta Shirley Center, and they plan to be back in the building Monday for training, said Mandy Clark, interim executive director. She made the announcement during a sparsely attended forum Thursday for parents of the center’s 70 students.

“We recognized the hardship that us closing this week has put on our families,” she said.

The initial screening showed radon, a gas, at levels higher than 4 picoCuries per liter, which is the state safety standard. But determinations about the ongoing levels cannot be determined by the initial screening, said Wendy Rice with the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension Office.

More testing is underway this week to more accurately determine the level of gas in the building, and the administration expects to have results next week, she said. The school is also testing for mold, lead and asbestos, although there is no evidence it’s in the building.

Tri-County Head Start will hold another forum to announce the test findings, but she does not expect the school to close again.

The administration is working on alternative child care options for parents if the building must close again, she said. “This has opened up a lot of gaps that are missing in our plan,” she said.

Parents were notified Friday about the radon, but the letter was abrupt and scary, and it did not explain that radon takes decades to cause lung cancer, vice president of the parent committee Alika-Jade Miller said. Miller is a Durango Herald employee.

“It made us all panic on the weekend,” she said.

Many parents have limited options for alternative child care, she said.

Miller took her children to the doctor this week, and the doctor explained that it’s long-term exposure to radon for adverse health consequences to develop. She shared the information on the Roberta Shirley Parent Committee group that she created on Facebook to improve communication.

“It was really great for all of us to be able to talk about things,” she said.

She asked administrators to work on better communication with parents because it has been an ongoing problem.

If the center requires radon mitigation, it will be up to the city of Durango because it owns the building.

However, there is no legal requirement for landlords to mitigate radon, Rice said.

City Manager Ron LeBlanc said Monday the child care center failed to send results of the initial radon sampling.

Those results have been hand delivered, Clark said.

The other six Head Start child care facilities that are part of the Tri-County system have been tested, and initial screenings did not find elevated levels, Clark said.

This was the first year the state required child care centers to test for radon.

mshinn@durangoherald.com