Estimated read time: 13-14 minutes
The following story was reported by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with KSL.com.
MONTICELLO — Retirement isn't shaping up to be quite how LaMarr Walker pictured it.
Activities he still planned on enjoying for years to come — running, hunting with his kids or operating two side businesses — are no longer a given.
Instead, Walker wakes up each morning with what feels like a weight on his chest.
"It's hard to breathe, and I gotta cough up a lot of phlegm just to get so I can breathe in the morning," he said, describing the symptoms of a recently diagnosed lung disease.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of the diagnosis, however, is the sense that it might have been preventable.
At 53, Walker's decadeslong career teaching agriculture and shop at Monticello High School came to an early end on the advice of his doctor. The sawdust, metal shavings and other irritants that often permeated the air in Walker's shop and adjacent classroom could cause a lung disease to flare up, according to the doctor.
The doctor's advice came after decades of asking the San Juan School District to install an adequate ventilation system in the shop building, Walker said. Utah State School Board records also show the school district was made aware of the facility's insufficient ventilation at least a decade before Walker's diagnosis.
"It was kind of like, really? I've done this, and I gave them 25 years, and now I'm gonna not be able to enjoy my retirement," Walker said with a sigh.
"They could pay to redo the gym floor, they could pay for new wrestling mats, they could pay for busing. But they couldn't pay to put a ventilation (system) in my shop that might've meant I could've lived better for the rest of my life — yeah, that bothers me," he said.
The district did not answer questions regarding Walker's allegations or the shop at Monticello High, but it did issue a statement:
"As a district, every decision we make as a district is to create a thriving learning environment to help our students and staff succeed," the statement reads. "Our maintenance team works tirelessly to ensure the school facilities are well-maintained, safe and conducive to learning. We actively address any reported issues in a timely manner to minimize disruptions to the learning environment."
Living with the diagnosis
Walker was officially diagnosed with moderate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, shortly after his retirement in spring 2022.
COPD is a chronic lung disease with symptoms — including shortness of breath, mucus-filled coughs and sleeping trouble — that get progressively worse over time. According to the American Lung Association, smoking is the leading cause for COPD, but other risk factors include exposure to air pollutants, occupational exposures and lack of access to health care. Those living in poverty and rural areas are also more likely to develop COPD.
Walker, who said he never smoked, went to the doctor after experiencing difficulty breathing while still working at Monticello High.
"Patient should avoid exposure to fine particulates (sawdust, metal shavings) or other things that may flare lung disease," reads a doctor's report from a September 2021 visit. "He should, however, get out of environmental exposures that flared up so he will probably have to leave his job in the shop behind."
Walker said when he showed administrators a doctor's note about his condition, he said he was given two options: Stick it out and retire at the end of the school year or take about 30 out of about 150 sick days he had built up before being placed on long-term disability and let go.
"I had to retire so I'd have my pension so we could live," Walker said. "They didn't even care is what I'm saying. I don't know why they'd give me that many sick days if I can't use them with even a doctor's note."
The diagnosis has been especially hard on Walker's wife, Valerie Walker, who worries her husband is at higher risk for death if he catches COVID, pneumonia or other respiratory infections.
"I guess anybody can die at any time — that's what I keep telling myself. I'm like, you know, he could die by getting hit by a truck or whatever," she said. "But it's just the fact that we know this is his diagnosis that's really caused us to revisit a lot of things and have to get our lives in order just in case."
Valerie Walker said her insurance company denied a claim for Walker's testing and treatment because it believed it was a worker's comp issue.
"That's another frustrating part of this is just the debt that it's going to incur," she said. "I think people sometimes think that people are just money hungry, but what it comes down to is we didn't cause this. He shouldn't have COPD. Had they done their due diligence and had they taken care of this years ago, I don't think he would have these issues."
The couple subsequently put in a claim for workers comp with the Utah Labor Commission, but that, too, was denied. The denial, which the Walkers shared with the Utah Investigative Journalism Project, lists the reason for the denial as "other" rather than a noncompensable accident. But it also states the denial is "pending receipt of concurrent employment information and possible independent medical evaluation."
Walker owns both a slaughterhouse and lawn mowing business, but he doesn't believe either of those jobs could have exposed him to the type of contamination that can lead to COPD.
Five months after the initial workers comp denial, the Walkers are still waiting on a final decision from the Labor Commission. In the meantime, however, Walker is on the last of the inhalers his doctor gave him to hold him over.
"I guess we've got to make a decision if I just stop, or if we pay for it out of our pocket, or if we get a lawyer, or whatever happens. We just don't know where we're going," Walker said. "It helps me breathe a little bit once I get it in my system, but the problem is my insurance won't cover most of the things that they would like to do."
'Not set up appropriately for a classroom'
The Monticello shop and ag building consists of a shop with a garage door, which is connected with a door to Walker's former classroom and office.
The building is about 20 feet away from the school and, unlike the only other outer building on campus, is not connected to the school with a breezeway. It's an isolated building in both a literal and figurative sense.
"If it was smoky, no one else knew it but us out there. No one came out there. If it was raining and they were supposed to come see me, they would reschedule for another day," Walker said. "They couldn't care less. The kids joked, they said, 'Mr. Walker, if you died and we just were quiet, we could probably go three days before anybody would know you were dead in here,' and I said, 'You're probably right.'"
Jason Reeve, who was a student of Walker's during the late '90s and early 2000s, said he thought the school's administration treated Walker's classes as "a dumping ground for kids that had behavioral problems and had issues in other classrooms."
"He had students that were well known by administration that were just in there all day long because that's a place that they could be and that he could handle them in there and they could do something productive," Reeve said.
Reeve and another Monticello alum agreed with Walker that the classroom was hot, hazy and often covered in dust due to a lack of ventilation and air conditioning.
"(The classroom ceiling) was like gray when it was supposed to be white just from all the smoke and welding stuff coming in," Walker said, adding that temperatures in the building could get into the 90s.
His attempts to open the classroom and shop doors to get cool air circulating on those hot days meant the breeze would blow fumes and dust into the classroom.
Reeve said Walker reported the issues to the district numerous times while he was a student. Although he remembers district employees visiting the facility, he said nothing ever changed.
"The fans that they used were way, way, way underpowered, if they even worked. The exhaust system that they had didn't even do anything in that classroom," Reeve said. "I can't believe the district got away with that for years and years and years."
Jennifer Acox, who began attending the school in the late '80s, said many of those issues predated Walker's time. Not much had changed, she said, by the time her kids attended the school in the 2000s and 2010s.
"It was not set up appropriately for a classroom. …The floor tiles were always gross and nasty with soot. It was not the cleanest environment," she said.
State School Board records obtained by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project also highlight the program's need for an improved ventilation system. Evaluations of the school's career and technical education program, which includes welding and shop, rated the facilities as needing major improvement in 2010 and 2015.
Such evaluations are conducted every four to six years. The 2010 and 2015 evaluations are the earliest the State School Board had on record, and it has since moved away from issuing evaluation reports for individual schools.
However, reports from the early 2000s that Walker shared with the journalism project also cite ventilation concerns. A State School Board official confirmed the reports are formatted like others from that time period but said they could not comment on the reports' authenticity.
The April 2010 evaluation described the welding shop as dirty, cluttered and suggested multiple improvements and repairs with what appears to be a deadline of that fall.
"The ventilation system in the shop is inadequate. It needs to be replaced or upgraded," the evaluation reads. "The ventilation in the welding booth area is also inadequate."
Five years later, the same state evaluator observed some improvements, describing the shop as clean with working equipment. But he again highlighted the ventilation and suggested purchasing a portable cooler and fume extractor.
"The classroom is very hot at the beginning and the end of the school year," the evaluation states. "Ventilation in the welding booths is adequate but the ventilation for welding projects in the main shop is not adequate."
'They just said they didn't have the money'
Walker said he brought up the ventilation issues with the district multiple times each year during his 25 years at Monticello High School. The response, he said, was always the same.
"They just said they didn't have the money," Walker said. "We just did whatever we had to do to get a job, you know, and make money. They didn't care."
Reeve, who worked as an ag teacher in Hyrum, Cache County, questions why funding for Walker's program was so hard to come by.
"There weren't even supplies to learn what you could do. Then I became a teacher and I was like, 'Huh, there's all kinds of money out here. This should not be an issue at all,'" he said.
Documents show the school overhauled the shop ventilation system in 2021. The project included heaters, an exhaust fan, rooftop unit and louver for the shop building as well as other HVAC improvements for the school's main building, according to a document provided by the district. A district spokesperson said the shop portion of the project cost around $98,000, and an invoice obtained through a records request shows the school district was charged a total of $459,000 for the last two phases of an HVAC project in 2021.
The project came at a time when the district had recently constructed new elementary school buildings and was looking at how to prioritize safety remodels at older schools in the district and a new Blanding Elementary School over the next dozen years, according to the San Juan Record.
According to the state's transparency website, the district has contracted with Redd Mechanical, the same HVAC company that did Monticello High's system, each year during the past decade. The district's payments to Redd Mechanical during that time total over $3 million. A district spokesperson said Redd Mechanical has provided equipment replacements and performed HVAC-related services across many of the schools in the district, including significant upgrades at Monticello High School and Albert R. Lyman Middle School in the past few years.
Lingering concerns
A district spokesperson said the organization for the HVAC project began as early as fall 2019 and that it was approved as part of the district's 2020-21 and 2021-22 budgets. The shop improvements were part of the project from the beginning, the district said.
Walker, however, said construction on the shop began after he delivered a letter from his doctor to school officials around September 2021. He added construction on the shop wrapped up around March 2022 shortly before he retired at the end of the school year.
That gave Walker about two months to experience the new and improved HVAC. He still has concerns about that system, which he said doesn't really clean the air but blows it out and takes the heat with it.
"It's still not up to par, but it's doing better than what it was," he said. "In the wintertime, all the warm air goes out, and kids are gonna whine that it's cold. So how often are they going to turn it on?"
Walker hopes speaking up about his experience will incite changes that improve things for teachers and students still in the district.
"I think they ought to put a ventilation in and make it better for the kids and the teachers," he continued. "I really wonder what it's done for the kids that have been there. Because some kids were in there in the seventh grade to the 12th grade. They were breathing the same stuff for five years. And what did it do to the kids?"
Regardless of any potential health impacts, at least some of those kids benefitted from Walker's classes.
"I'm grateful for him. LaMarr is one of the few teachers that believed in me and told me that I could accomplish stuff," Reeve said. "LaMarr was very creative in the projects that he did. … He just found ways around it, you know, so that we could have part of the experience that we were supposed to have."
Acox said that although Walker was strict, he worked hard to make sure kids left with skills and lessons that would prepare them for the real world. She eventually became friends with Walker and his wife after seeing how he taught her children.
"LaMarr was the only one that would get along with my kids, like he knew how to handle them, he knew how to take care of them. … He really took my kids under his wing," she said. "He has a spot in his heart that he just takes care of people — and people haven't taken care of him very well; they just don't care."
