A toxic mold infestation that began with mushrooms pushing through her daughter's bedroom drywall pushed Aliso Viejo single mother Amanda Spencer and her four children out of their home and into a string of hotel rooms in the months before her UC Irvine graduation, the university's School of Social Ecology reported.
Spencer kept attending classes throughout the displacement, taking exams from coffee shops with strong enough Wi-Fi while shuttling her kids between temporary housing. On June 14, she will deliver the commencement speech at UCI's School of Social Ecology and graduate with a bachelor's degree in criminology, law and society. "I've come too far," Spencer told the school. "This is not going to take us down."
The story is a window into a problem mold illness clinicians and advocacy groups have flagged for years: visible mushrooms or mold pushing through finished surfaces almost always points to a much larger water-damage problem inside the wall cavity, and remediation often requires families to leave the building entirely while the work is done.