Children drinking from water fountains at the nation’s schools – especially in aging facilities with lead pipes and fixtures – might be unwittingly exposing themselves to high levels of lead, which is known to cause brain damage and developmental problems, including impulsive behavior, poor language skills and trouble remembering new information.
Under federal law, the vast majority of schools don’t have to test the water flowing out of their taps and drinking fountains, and many states and districts also do not mandate water testing at schools. Even when districts do test their water, they don’t always tell parents about the problems they find.
This is not a hypothetical issue, or a new one. Acute lead contamination has been found in school water in many cities during the past 15 years, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore and the District of Columbia.
But the problem of undetected lead in school water is receiving new attention in the aftermath of the crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a switch in drinking water sources left children exposed to high levels of lead for months, both at home and at school.
“Right now there is a yawning gap in our lead-testing protocols,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement last week when he introduced legislation that would provide $100 million in grants to help schools test drinking water for lead. “It’s disturbing that Flint may have been just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to toxic lead in our kids’ drinking water.”
Schumer was motivated in part by the discovery of lead contamination in schools in Ithaca, New York, where officials began providing bottled water to students last month after finding high lead levels in two buildings, including one classroom sink with lead levels of 5,000 parts per billion – hundreds of times higher than the level at which the federal government requires action.
Ithaca’s findings spurred officials in nearby Binghamton to re-examine test results from 2013. They found more than 50 taps with elevated lead in their public schools, including seven taps used for drinking water. And last week, elevated lead levels prompted New Jersey officials to shut off water fountains at nearly half the schools in Newark Public Schools, the state’s largest school system.
Virginia Tech engineering professor Marc Edwards, who played a key role in bringing to light the crisis in Flint, said he believes the vast majority of the nation’s schools are not testing the water flowing out of their taps.
“I’m really much more concerned about the schools you do not hear anything about, and that have not tested, than I am about schools that have tested,” Edwards said.
The Government Accountability Office found in 2006 that “few schools and child care facilities have tested their water for lead.”
“In addition, no focal point exists at either the national or state level to collect and analyze test results,” the GAO wrote. “Thus, the pervasiveness of lead contamination in the drinking water at schools and child care facilities – and the need for more concerted action – is unclear.”
Schools that provide their own water via wells must test their own water every three years under federal law. That’s how the problem in Ithaca was uncovered, but parents weren’t told about the elevated lead until February, six months after the tests were conducted.
“I flipped out,” said Melissa Hoffman, the mother of a kindergartner and a fourth-grader at Caroline Elementary, where classrooms were found to have taps dispensing water with high lead levels. “I just assumed it would be safe.”
Schools like Hoffman’s, where testing is required, account for just 8 to 11 percent of all schools.
The rest of the nation’s schools – about 90 percent – get their tap water from municipal sources that must be tested for lead under federal law. The testing happens at the water-treatment plant, before the water courses through miles of plumbing and fixtures.
If those pipes and fixtures contain lead – and they often do, as lead-based pipes weren’t outlawed until 1986 – then water can become contaminated on the journey to the tap. If the water isn’t tested regularly as it comes out of the tap, there is no way to know if it is truly safe.
Edwards said that the water in a school is often more likely to be contaminated than the water in a home because schools close for long periods, leaving water sitting in the pipes. The stagnant water creates chemical and bacterial conditions that can intensify the lead problem, he said.
He said he’d like to see more schools testing their taps because it’s the right thing to do in order to protect vulnerable children, and he said he wishes the Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were more aggressive about pushing schools to initiate voluntary testing programs.
But even testing is no guarantee of safety, he emphasized: Lead solder in the plumbing can break off into the water, contaminating water so acutely that it measures at hazardous waste levels. But that occurs randomly and is difficult to capture in standard testing protocols.
“You’ll have these taps that I call Russian roulette taps. This is your worst nightmare,” Edwards said. “We’ve seen schools where drinking a single glass of water has the same lead exposure as eating five to 10 lead paint chips.”
At schools built before 1986, Edwards said he would advise concerned parents to advocate for installing lead filters on water fountains and taps that children use to fill water bottles. Such filters are effective at protecting water quality, Edwards said, and offer more peace of mind than testing ever could.
Schools built between 1986 and 2014 are not entirely in the clear, carrying at least some risk of lead contamination in water because until 2014, brass fixtures were allowed to contain some lead. For schools from this time period, Edwards advises parents to advocate for a regular testing program to ensure that the water is safe.
