WILDER — The discovery of mold in classrooms has delayed the first day of school for kindergarten and first-grade students at the Dothan Brook School.

While the rest of the district returns to school this week, the 70 Dothan Brook students in those two grades will have a few more vacation days before their year starts next Tuesday, Sept. 3.

In a statement school administrators posted to social media on Tuesday evening, they explained that the delay is necessary “because we need time to collaborate with contractors and determine the scope, schedule, and timeline of the work.”

The decision to delay came after returning teachers last week discovered visible mold in their first-floor classrooms at Dothan Brook, which serves students in pre-K through fifth grade. Staff also found mold in one high school classroom.

The district has contracted with Williston, Vt.-based environmental consultant Claypoint Associates to conduct air sample testing and make recommendations for mold remediation. It also has contracted with an industrial hygienist to remove carpeting, rubber flooring and area rugs before cleaning the affected spaces.

The consultant’s recommendations were delivered Tuesday, giving teachers and administrators scant time to plan a way forward.

“I don’t think we could have moved any more quickly in a responsible manner,” Hartford Facilities Director Jonathan Garthwaite said.

The delayed start date at Dothan Brook will allow teachers to set up their classrooms and create a welcoming setting for students, according to school officials.

“I’m not worried that we have a hazard,” Garthwaite said. “It has more to do with the little ones coming to school for the first time.”

For younger students, “the environment is a critical part of t heir experience,” Garthwaite said, and teachers need time to “get the setting right for the kids.”

Meanwhile, some high school science classes will use the library temporarily while their room is cleaned and monitored for air quality.

The impacted classrooms at Dothan Brook, which was built in the early 1990s, were on the first floor, where moisture seeped through the concrete slab flooring and caused mold to form on carpets and floor.

“All concrete breathes, so any building will have moisture intrusion,” Claypoint Associates owner Todd Hobson said Wednesday.

Hobson said that other schools in New England are facing similar issues with mold this year. The unusually humid weather and classrooms that have been closed all summer amount to a “perfect storm” of damaging moisture.

“Dothan (Brook) has not had this problem before and it is not a new school,” which is an indication of how unusually humid this summer has been, he said.

Part of a $21 million facilities bond passed this year by Hartford voters will be used to improve ventilation and air conditioning at Dothan Brook, Garthwaite said, but he thinks that this year’s mold issue is an isolated event.

“The conditions that we had in Vermont this year are extraordinary,” he said by phone on Wednesday.

When the mold issue arose last week, Hartford’s leadership already had its hands full remediating a different form of contamination in the high school and the Hartford Area Career and Technical Center. State testing last April revealed elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly known as PCBs, in a number of spaces.

Entire career preparation programs have been relocated to avoid contaminated rooms, including moving the culinary arts program and its kitchen and restaurant into a building to the Cornerstone Community Center in Hartford Village.

School administrators are still determining whether the missed school days by Dothan Brook students will need to be made up by extending the school year or shortening vacations. Dothan Brook Principal Rick Dustin Eichler hopes not.

“I can’t imagine the state would want to create a disincentive for schools to make safety decisions,” he said Wednesday.

Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.