When Raytown South High School junior Tyler Houts found out he would be starting school remotely because methane gas had been discovered under a parking lot, he was happy to sleep in a little more.
But he quickly discovered the drawbacks.
Tyler, 16, plays two fall sports that often practice alongside each other. He’d focus on his main sport, soccer, and pop over to football practice for 20 minutes at a time when the team needed him most.
That became a lot harder when the football team had to practice at Grandview High School while soccer practiced 20 minutes away at Raytown Central Middle School.
Online learning wasn’t ideal either.
“I’ve always struggled with learning online,” Tyler said. “Some people like it. I prefer more like visual learning and hands-on stuff.”
So Tyler and his mom, Jennell Houts, were happy to hear that students from Raytown South and the nearby Herndon Career Center could return to the classroom starting Sept. 8.
Students had been learning remotely for two and a half weeks after the district discovered methane gas under a parking lot near the two buildings just days before school started Aug. 20.
To determine the cause and potential solutions, the district consulted with natural gas utility Spire, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit that specializes in stopping methane leaks from abandoned oil and gas wells.
After extensive testing, some of which required digging up the parking lot, the Well Done Foundation determined the cause, said Chairman Curtis Shuck.
Some geothermal wells drilled 500 feet into the ground as part of the schools’ heating and cooling system were allowing methane from rock formations deep below the parking lot to migrate to the surface.
The foundation is now working to repair the wells and seal them with cement so the schools can keep using them, but they won’t leak methane.
“If it’s not going to heat your house,” Shuck said, “then it should stay in the formation for future generations.”
The impact on students
While students are back at school, they’ll have natural gas detectors in their buildings. The north parking lot is still off limits until repairs are finished.
Shuck said he hopes the project will be done by mid-October, in part because there’s a seasonal deadline to repave the asphalt parking lot before the weather gets too cool.
Jennell Houts said she’s relieved that students are able to come back to the buildings and sports fields. There were rumors that they might be in virtual education for months.
Though she thinks the district has done a good job communicating with families and pivoting to online learning, the shorter virtual school days aren’t the same as a full day of in-person learning, she said.
“I feel really bad for (teachers) and I appreciate them making the most out of it,” she said. But “the first three weeks of school have been kind of a bust.”
Houts is also looking forward to when the repairs are completed, because she suspects the missing parking spaces are part of the reason she doesn’t see any home games on Tyler’s sports schedules.
“We’re just looking forward to trying to get back to normal,” she said. It’s “kind of hard to have a homecoming when you’re not at home.”
Summer Stewart, whose daughter attends Raytown South for part of the day and Herndon’s culinary program for the rest of the day, said it was déjà vu when the district extended the timeline for virtual learning.
“We’ve been here before, right? And it was years,” she said. “My daughter was at home during COVID for half of sixth grade and all of seventh grade.”
But Stewart said the disruption wasn’t too difficult to manage. The district found a building to do some of the culinary lessons in person twice a week, and other classes took place online.
“It wasn’t ideal,” she said. “But again, safety comes first.”
And both schools “were in constant communication” with families, sharing plans as they became available, Stewart said.
Marissa Cleaver Wamble, the district’s chief communications officer, shared the district’s letters to families with The Beacon and referred questions about technical details of the repairs to the Well Done Foundation.
She said the district is in communication with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education because schools are typically limited to five virtual learning days, to be used during snow days or other emergencies.
DESE had not responded to an email from The Beacon by the time of publication.
Raytown South High School had about 1,100 students during the 2024-25 school year, according to preliminary data from DESE.
According to its website, the Herndon Career Center offers career and technical education to more than 600 students from the Raytown, Lee’s Summit, Independence, Hickman Mills, Grandview and Center school districts. Some programs happen outside of the building, such as at the Kansas City Zoo.
The timeline of events
The Well Done Foundation plugs orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells that are emitting methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide.
That’s a bit different from the situation in Raytown, but it’s given the foundation expertise in measuring and reporting on methane.
So two days after he picked up a “panicked call” from the district on Aug. 15, Shuck took a day trip to the site from the foundation’s offices in Oklahoma.
“It’s a little bit out of the norm,” he said, but “gas is gas, and we’re pretty skilled at finding it and then figuring out ways to … keep it where it should be.”
Shuck said he could tell quickly from the smell that the schools were dealing with “formation gas,” which is naturally generated within the earth’s geologic formations.
That’s distinct from “production gas,” the name for gas that has been cleaned by a company and had a smell intentionally added to it to make gas leaks detectable.
“Now we get a lot of people who will say, ‘Oh, you’re crazy, methane is odorless,’” Shuck said. “While that’s true in a laboratory environment, out in the wild where methane actually lives, nothing could be further from the truth.”
That’s because methane usually comes with other gases that do have a smell.
“Methane often runs, we say, with stinky friends,” Shuck said.
After quickly determining that the problem was real, the foundation moved to pinpoint the source. It began excavating the parking lot on Aug. 21 and ultimately bored more than 200 test holes.
The next step will be actually repairing the wells, which were created 25 years ago using the standards at the time, and bringing them up to modern standards so they don’t continue to leak methane.
A letter from the Raytown school district said 28 wells were inspected but only 11 require repairs. Shuck said the schools’ geothermal well field has about 168 total wells. In a follow-up email, he said the foundation decided which wells to inspect by identifying methane hot spots.
Shuck said his foundation isn’t doing the work for free but that it charges at “nonprofit rates” rather than striving to make as much money as possible. The nonprofit has been charging Raytown schools for time and materials for the initial work but is planning to submit a formal proposal for completing the repairs.
The district does not have an invoice for the work yet, Wamble said.
Safety issues
Shuck said the district was right to be cautious and err on the side of safety.
“Methane in concentrated form can be certainly flammable and potentially explosive. So the danger was real, given the amount of methane,” he said. “Once we were able to get into the well and expose it, then that concentration is diffused or diluted … Now it’s safe to return to school with those continuous monitoring activities.”
Shuck said any methane that escapes is likely to rise vertically from the parking lot, and workers have temporarily plugged some of the wells before permanent repairs are done, in part to avoid nuisance smells.
Detectors have been added to schools, the Raytown Fire Department is standing by and the Missouri Geological Survey — part of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources — has remained in communication about findings and plans, including two different potential ways to approach repairs.
Spire, the local gas company, has also been involved, Shuck said.
“They still have taken a keen interest in our measurement techniques and in the condition of the gas,” he said. “Of course, for them, they’re more concerned just to make sure it’s not their gas.”
Houts, the Raytown South parent, said she had initially expected the issue would be related to Spire, and something the utility company could fix quickly.
“Nobody saw this coming when they first called the gas company,” she said. “But then the gas company was like, ‘No, that’s not us.’ … I feel like the school did a really good job getting people in there who know what they’re doing and know how to fix this kind of issue.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
