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Legionella bacteria closes St. Louis Public Schools headquarters 8%
By Sarah Fentem57%
6/5/2026, 9:22:31 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Availability Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 9.8% saturation with 34 hits. Analysis detected 383 faulty-reasoning hits from 348 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 24% and a BS Rank of 8% (20,310 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.80% of the article peer group.
St.
Louis Public Schools staff members are working from other locations after environmental testing found legionella bacteria in the water and cooling systems at the district’s downtown headquarters.
Legionella can cause a type of pneumonia called Legionnaires’ disease.
People can become infected by ingesting contaminated water or breathing in contaminated air droplets.
The disease is not usually spread from person to person.
It’s unclear how long the building on North 11th Street will remain closed, district Communications Director Charles Poole said.
More testing will determine the extent of the contamination.
“We’re anticipating we’ll have results of the testing by mid- to late next week, and by that time we’ll be able to determine what our go-forward posture will be,” he said.
Poole said Friday he is not overly concerned about the health risk to people who work in the building.
District officials learned about the bacteria Thursday evening when they received the test results.
On Friday morning, workers wore masks as they picked up work materials from the downtown headquarters.
Workers tested the building’s water systems after a pipe burst there and caused significant damage earlier this spring, Poole said.
“It wasn’t something that was sitting and lingering, it was part of the mitigation,” he said.
“You want to test for obvious things like mold and whatnot, as it turned out during this particular test, during the mitigation process we happened to find this particular issue.”
Next week’s school board meeting is now scheduled to be held at Carr Lane Middle School on North Jefferson Avenue.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, legionella bacteria occur naturally in lakes and rivers.
The bacteria can become dangerous when it invades water systems, where it proliferates in warm, slow-moving water.
Legionnaires’ disease emerged in the mid-20th century.
The infection gets its unique name from some of its first identified patients: dozens of people who became sick after returning from an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976.
Eventually, federal health investigators found the bacteria inside the convention hotel’s cooling system.
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