Asbestos was discovered at the school in November, after workers began sanding the exterior of two buildings to prepare them for painting. The campus was closed after teachers and parents expressed alarm, causing students to miss five school days. Following extensive testing and cleaning inside and out, King Intermediate was given a clean bill of health, officials said.

"It's probably the cleanest school in Hawai'i," said Clayton Fujie, deputy school superintendent with the state Department of Education.

While the crisis has been averted for now, the King Intermediate incident is a reminder of the potential health hazard at nearly all of Hawai'i's schools, public or private, most of which were built before 1989, when the EPA banned most products with asbestos.

Hawai'i's schools are required by state and federal law to keep on top of the asbestos problem, and they generally do a pretty good job, said Tom Lileikis, senior environmental health specialist with the state Department of Health. He estimated school compliance at 95 percent, with many of the noncompliance problems merely having to do with paperwork issues.

Under the law, each school is required to maintain an asbestos management plan and to inspect facilities every three years while conducting surveillance checks of known or suspected asbestos-containing building material every six months.

The schools also are required to annually notify parent, teacher and employee organizations about the availability of the school's asbestos management plan as well as any asbestos abatement actions taken or planned, and to provide custodial staff with asbestos-awareness training.

Congress approved the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act in 1986, targeting schools in part because they are high-traffic areas where materials containing asbestos can easily be stirred up. Because they are busy places, more repairs are likely, which increases the risk.

According to the EPA, the dangerous part is when asbestos fibers become airborne. The fibers increase the risk of contracting lung diseases such as asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma.

There is no cure for mesothelioma, the most common asbestos-related disease, and treatments extend life expectancy by only months. Because it can take decades before symptoms appear, most people exposed to asbestos fibers may never know they are terminally ill until it's too late.

Although there has been debate about what level of asbestos exposure should be permitted around children, most health experts contend only exposure to high concentrations of asbestos fibers over an extended amount of time will cause problems. That hasn't stopped the asbestos debate — or the flow of lawsuits costing billions of dollars nationally.

One thing Hawai'i has going for it is its geology. Asbestos is a naturally occurring substance in many areas of the Mainland, but not here.

East of Sacramento, Calif., in El Dorado Hills, school officials have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars testing for asbestos and replacing soil, paving and landscaping. Students at Oak Ridge High School are being urged to undergo asbestos screening.

Elsewhere, the U.S. Geological Survey is expected to release new maps showing naturally occurring asbestos across the West and elsewhere, including a huge band running along the eastern coast, from Maine to Alabama, under or near several major cities.

In Hawai'i, tons of asbestos was shipped here in building materials prior to the 1980s, and most structures from that time have asbestos-based materials appearing in everything from popcorn ceilings and pipe insulation to floor tiles and construction glues.

Each year the state Department of Education spends millions of dollars removing asbestos as part of repair and construction jobs or when asbestos-containing materials start to crumble.

Glenn Tatsuno, administrator of the department's Safety and Security Services Section, said the King Intermediate incident was a complete surprise to the DOE. Because the asbestos came from the building's exterior — as painters were sanding off the old paint to prepare for a fresh coat — it was not covered under the AHERA federal law. The asbestos source was not documented in the school's asbestos management plan.

However, another federal law does cover work to the exterior. "Unfortunately some of the workers didn't do the proper things," Fujie conceded.

King Intermediate teacher Geraldine Best said she's skeptical the DOE is capable of keeping a handle on the asbestos problem. She said she remains unhappy it took administrators four or five days before they ordered the testing that uncovered the asbestos in November. She vowed to keep the names of the students exposed to the substance in her classroom on file, in case any claims are necessary in the future.

"My concern is for the children," Best said. "Those kinds of conditions shouldn't be allowed."

The state, as the EPA's regulatory arm, has the authority to issue fines, but the Department of Health's Lileikis said that additional asbestos testing at King Intermediate provided doubt as to whether levels had even reached federal thresholds of concern.

In addition, school officials went "above and beyond" the requirements of the law by testing and cleaning throughout the entire school, Lileikis said. He added that no fines would be levied for the incident.