Paul Jayko, an employee of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, was in charge of investigating unusually high cancer rates at a small-town school campus, River Valley High School and Middle School in Marion, Ohio. During World War II, the school grounds used to be the Marion Engineering Depot, the largest military storage facility of its kind in the country, which was also affiliated with the Manhattan Project. Not surprisingly, Jayko found radioactivity and high levels of toxicity on the campus.

How did the Ohio EPA – the agency responsible for protecting the environment and the public health – respond to Jayko’s good work? They suspended him on trumped-up charges and took him off the investigation.

Nearly three years and three legal decisions later, the United States Department of Labor confirmed last week that Jayko was wronged by Ohio EPA, that he should be reinstated with back pay and the state should also pay his legal fees, which are reported to be in the six-figure range (a decision that an administrative judge had already made).

What is Ohio EPA’s response now? The agency continues to oppose Jayko’s reinstatement as lead investigator at River Valley and is plotting its next legal maneuver to prevent this.

It’s truly unbelievable. A school, where children go to learn, is on the site of a toxic waste dump. Cancer rates are through the roof. This much is known. Yet the campus is still open and the kids are still attending school, while the Ohio EPA fights its own employee for attempting to investigate. Meanwhile, Governor Bob Taft has no comment. The highest authority in Ohio has no comment about his own agency attempting to railroad a state employee.

It gets worse.

This whole story has been unfolding since 1997, when the unusually high cancer rates were discovered. The Columbus Dispatch and the Toledo Blade have been covering this case like a rug. Yet, with the exception of a Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine article a long time ago about some kids with leukemia, few people in Northeast Ohio knew the whole story until the Free Times published "Cancer Valley High" in November. The Plain Dealer has been contented to pick up AP articles that are so out of context, it’s impossible to glean anything meaningful from them.

It’s not as if this isn’t a good story. It has all the elements: kids with cancer, cover-ups, conspiracy-style intrigue and even activists getting shot at. In fact, several national print and TV news magazines have been sniffing around Marion.

What are Northeastern Ohioans to conclude? That the Ohio EPA will not protect our health or our environment. That when the EPA fails to fulfill its obligation – indeed, is grossly negligent – the governor will have nothing to say about it. And that Ohio’s largest – and Cleveland’s only – daily paper won’t report on it.

I guess it’s just another story in the post-Love Canal era, infused with so much of what we already know about the world, it’s not worth getting too worked up about. We’ve been shocked and outraged. We’ve been disillusioned. And now we’ve just gone numb.