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Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of articles on how the wireless industry targets schools for wireless infrastructure installation. Part 1 covered the recent surge and why parents are fighting back. Part 2 covered how T-Mobile put nine cell antennas on a private school in San Diego without parents’ knowledge or consent. Part 3 covered how parents defeated a tower proposal by debunking the claim that school kids needed the tower to be safe in an emergency.
A Detroit, Michigan, school district has 29 contracts with telecommunications companies to operate cell towers on school properties — and parents say district leaders have failed to be forthright about what’s happening with the money generated from those deals.
“They have not given us any transparency about where that funding is going,” Aliya Moore, a Detroit mother of two, told The Defender, “The only thing they’re saying is that it goes to feed us for events, and student and parent incentives — so that could be possibly anything.”
Moore’s daughter just finished eighth grade at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy. The school has a cell tower on its roof.
For over a year, Detroit parents like Moore have been expressing concerns about the potential health risks students face by being close to the towers, which emit radiofrequency (RF) radiation.
“I’m shaking because I’m so angry,” parent Karla Mitchell said during a Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) school board meeting on April 18, 2023, Chalkbeat reported. “I find you to be grossly negligent in the installation of cell towers at the Detroit public schools. I wasn’t notified. I just found out (recently), and my son has been sitting in the school for two years.”
Detroit City Council President Mary Sheffield on May 9, 2023, asked the city’s legislative policy division to draft a report answering parents’ questions about the cell towers.
According to the report, 15 towers were installed in 2014-2015 under a contract with Crown Castle, a wireless infrastructure company, for a one-time payment of about $6.8 million to the school district.
The contract runs through 2067 and has a “no termination clause” — meaning the district would likely have to pay back the money if the contract was terminated.
Since then, the district has signed 14 shorter contracts, bringing the total to 29, said the DPSCD superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, Ph.D., in the report.
Only 21 schools have towers under the contracts because two schools have two towers, and “not all campuses with contracts are outfitted with cell phone towers,” Vitti said.
According to the report, “For the towers added after the original 15, each generates about $2,000 per month for each tower. Assuming that there are 23 towers, the additional 8 towers generate roughly $192,000 to DPSCD annually.”
During the school board’s June 11 meeting, Moore reminded school board members that the board’s president in April had promised to provide a presentation at the May meeting about where the cell tower revenue is going.
However, the board did not make a presentation at either the May or June meetings, Moore told The Defender.
The Defender asked Vitti and DPSCD how the revenue from the cell tower deals is being spent. They did not respond by our publication deadline.
Legislators propose bill to keep cell towers away from schools
Some Michigan lawmakers are promoting legislation to prevent telecom companies from installing cell towers on or near schools.
State Rep. James DeSana (R-D29) told The Defender he drafted the bill (House Bill 4499) after speaking with parents in Wyandotte — a community just south of Detroit — who were upset about cell antennas being installed on the community’s elementary school, he said.
“Putting these towers right on schools is a horrible idea,” he said.
DeSana’s bill prohibits 4G and 5G cell towers and antennas from being installed within 1,500 feet of schools.
The bill wouldn’t cancel out contracts already signed for installing towers on school properties. “But if some of these agreements expired, they would be subject to the law, meaning … they would be prohibited from putting a new tower contract in place,” DeSana said.
Reps. Rachelle Smit (R-D43) and Joseph Fox (R-D101) also sponsored the bill, which on May 2, 2023, was referred to the Government Operations Committee.
DeSana said he doubted the bill would get through the current Government Operations Committee because it’s controlled by Democrats who have “a lot of money.”
The committee leaders are “very fearful of people like me because I probably have a very large popular opinion on my side about these cell towers and they have a lot of money and this goes to the whole corruption aspect of our government,” he said.
The telecom industry “donates a lot of money to politicians who then write the laws that favor putting these towers wherever they [the telecom companies] want to put them.”
“There may be some Democrats that might be sympathetic to my cause,” he said, “but they’re in the extreme minority.”
DeSana added that the Republican party’s leadership is “also caught in a conflict with Big Telecom,” so it’s not only Democrats who are swayed by telecom money.
After November’s elections, there’s a possibility that the Government Operations Committee will be run by Republicans who may advance the bill to a vote on the House floor, he said.
The bill’s prohibition on placing cell towers within 1,500 feet of a school building isn’t preempted by federal law — meaning that state legislators can legally pass the bill, according to W. Scott McCollough, lead litigator for Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless cases.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 — the federal law for siting cell towers — includes zoning provisions prohibiting some state and county officials from denying wireless project land use permit applications based on health concerns or where the denial would effectively prohibit the applicant from providing service to the area.
But those provisions don’t apply “when the state or local jurisdiction is not wearing its ‘zoning’ hat,” McCollough told The Defender, “such as when the government entity is acting as a property owner, such as when a public school is leasing space on school grounds for a cell site.”
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Proposed law already making an impact
DeSana said his proposed bill is already making an impact in the state, even though it hasn’t passed.
For example, a school board member from Forest Hills — a town near Grand Rapids — contacted DeSana about the bill when Verizon presented her district with a contract proposal to put a cell tower at Forest Hills Eastern, one of the district’s high schools.
“As soon as she provided the information to her parents, they had immediately 200 to 300 parents up in arms saying, ‘You’re not putting this on our school,’” he said.
More than 600 people have now signed a petition against the tower.
Prompted by the parents, the school board members looked into the rationale behind the bill. “So far, they haven’t signed the contract,” DeSana said.
The board members discovered that extensive scientific studies show RF radiation at levels below federal government limits is linked to multiple negative biological effects.
The Environmental Health Trust, a nonprofit scientific research and education group, told Forest Hills school board members in a letter that low-level RF radiation “can cause cancer, increased oxidative stress, genetic damage, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, memory deficits, behavioral problems, and neurological impacts.”
“Many of these effects could be irreversible with grave consequences for our children’s future,” the group wrote.
“All that the telecom company kept saying,” DeSana said, “was that the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] standards allow this.”
However, the school board members learned that the FCC’s RF radiation exposure standards haven’t been revised since 1996 — despite a successful lawsuit challenging them.
As The Defender previously reported, on Aug. 13, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the FCC failed to consider the non-cancer evidence regarding adverse health effects of wireless technology when it decided that its 1996 radiofrequency emission guidelines protect the public’s health.
The panel majority said the FCC must also:
“(ii) address the impacts of RF radiation on children, the health implications of long-term exposure to RF radiation, the ubiquity of wireless devices, and other technological developments that have occurred since the Commission last updated its guidelines, and
“(iii) address the impacts of RF radiation on the environment.”
Yet nearly three years later, the FCC still has not complied with the court’s order despite an April 2023 petition from CHD threatening further legal action.
