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It’s quiet in the back yard of Irvington Community Elementary School, which sits along the Pennsy Trail on the east side of Indianapolis.
Inside, students are writing in notebooks — a break from screens in an effort to limit technology instruction. Yet hundreds of feet away, a digital infrastructure company hopes to build a controversial data center that the close-knit Irvington community is now fighting in court.
The charter school is in the crosshairs of a data center battle being fought in neighborhoods across the country. In Irvington, residents have voiced concern over the potential noise from the maximum 31 generators that the DC Blox company is proposing for its two-building, $2 billion data center. They’re also worried about construction kicking up potential contaminants from the property, once home to a Ford Motor Company car manufacturing plant.
School leaders have echoed these concerns and worry about the impact on students. The proposed facility also comes at an already challenging time for one of the city’s oldest charter schools, risking student enrollment as public schools statewide grapple with a decline in students and increasingly tight budgets.
While families may be deterred from enrolling their children hundreds of feet from a data center, school leaders are focused on keeping the roughly 300 elementary students safe. The school is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last month to stop the data center.
DC Blox did not respond to requests for comment.
“The fears about it from the general public are a given,” said charter network CEO Rachel Maldonado, of the proposed data center’s proximity to the school. “We don’t have enough research. And that’s, I think, the biggest issue.”
Commitments aren’t enough to quell concerns from school
The site at 305 Fintail Drive — which the lawsuit states is 850 feet from the school — is now classified as a brownfield, a designation given to many former industrial sites that could contain hazardous substances.
Activities on the former Ford site included coal storage, hazardous waste storage, wastewater treatment, and wastewater sludge burning, and some contaminants remain in the soil and groundwater, according to documents filed with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM). The school opened next door about a decade before Ford ceased operations.
The data center won approval from the Metropolitan Development Commission just before the city enacted a moratorium on new data center applications through 2027, as the city crafts zoning regulations for these facilities. That leaves the DC Blox site as one of three that could continue as approved.The company plans to complete construction on the first building within two years.
DC Blox must test for or mitigate any contaminants in the air through a vapor mitigation system. The site must also include a two-foot soil and vegetative barrier in areas not occupied by buildings, parking lots, or sidewalks.
The company has listed a set of binding commitments, in accordance with state law — including the requirement to share generator testing schedules with the school. A sound study must show that sound levels at the edge of the data center campus do not exceed 65 decibels, which is roughly the level of a normal conversation or a business office.
Across the country, thousands of schools are less than a mile from an existing or future data center, according to an analysis reported by the 74 Million. Yet research on the effects on students is limited.
“We have kids that have asthma, and we have kids that have health conditions,” Maldonado said of the potential for soil contaminants to enter the school’s ventilation system. “We don’t know what the impacts of that would be yet.”
Past construction on the former Ford site was already enough to kick up dust toward the elementary school, documents show. In 2022, the principal reported that concrete demolition placed a dust film on staff cars, according to an incident report filed with IDEM.
School leaders visited a DC Blox center in Atlanta earlier this year, but that did not quell concerns.
Maldonado could hear the hum of the generator kick on from 700 feet away, she said, and the construction noise was loud enough to “potentially prohibit a conducive learning environment.”
“We’re only getting a snapshot,” Maldonado said. “And we’re getting the snapshot that they want us to see.”
Data center makes financial struggles even harder
As community members launch fundraising efforts for the legal battle against the data center, Irvington Community Schools faces a financial challenge of its own.
The network, which consists of three schools at locations throughout Irvington, ended with a $2.85 million deficit last school year due to declining enrollment, Maldonado said at a board meeting last month.
This year, the network also struggles to meet its projected enrollment of 817.
In response, the network has launched a three-pronged sustainability plan, including cutting programs like prekindergarten and their staffs, and seeking alternative sources of funding like grants.
But the backdrop of a data center could make increasing enrollment even harder.
“I don’t know that the data center is hindering,” Maldonado said of DC Blox’s impact on enrollment. “But long term, it’s not helping.”
Principal Katie Welch has heard concerns from parents and staff about dust and noise.
“They have questions,” she said. “How will this impact learning? Will it impact my students’ health? They just want some answers.”
Amelia Pak-Harvey covers schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.
