A Missouri elementary school will be closed indefinitely and its students will carry on through remote learning after officials discovered usually high levels of radioactive lead in classrooms and the school playground, among other areas, ABC News reports.

Jana Elementary School in Florissant, Missouri, a city of 52,000, was shut down Monday after school officials reviewed a report by Boston Chemical Data Corp. confirmed an earlier report by the Army Corps of Engineers that found ground leakage from the site of an old nuclear weapons facility near Coldwater Creek contaminated large areas where the school was built.  This comes after a 2019 report that showed people who lived near Coldwater Creek from the 1960s to 1990s had a higher-than-expected number of cases of diseases like bone cancer, lung cancer and leukemia.

The creek runs behind the school and it borders hundreds of homes as it meanders through Florissant.  There is no statement about the efforts to help those homeowners or residents who presumably would also be impacted by the radioactive waste seeping from the nuclear weapons site.

During World War II, nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project was stored at Lambert Airfield, now St. Louis Lambert International Airport, located about 8 miles from the school.  The creek was declared a Superfund site in 1989, allowing it to get additional federal funds to clean up the site.

The school was built on the site in the 1970s.  Approximately 80% of the students at the school are Black.  Technicians found levels of radioactive isotope lead-210 at unacceptable levels in the school and on school property, with radiation levels on the school playground 22-times higher than expected.