Schools across U.S. contend with lead in water

In Portland, Ore., parents are demanding the superintendent's resignation after the state's largest public school district failed to notify them promptly about elevated lead levels detected at taps and fountains.

In New Jersey, Republican Gov. Chris Christie has ordered lead testing at every public school in the state, after dozens of schools in Newark and elsewhere were found to have lead-contaminated water supplies.

In the District of Columbia, which experienced a devastating lead crisis barely a decade ago, officials last week announced plans to spend millions of dollars installing water filters and to more rigorously test the city's public schools and recreation centers, after a handful were found to have unacceptable lead levels.

The ongoing crisis in Flint, Mich., has shined a spotlight on the public-health hazards that lead continues to pose in U.S. drinking water. In particular, it has led to renewed pressure to test for the problem in the nation's schools, where millions of young children, who are the most vulnerable to the harm of lead poisoning, spend their days.

"Unfortunately, you find schools that are failing, and some are failing miserably," said Robert Barrett, the chief operating officer for Aqua Pro-Tech Laboratories, a New Jersey-based environmental testing laboratory. He said the firm is booked through the summer, as schools race to test before students return for the new academic year. "Before Flint, we'd get a call maybe once a month from a school. Now, it's daily," he said.

Public health officials agree that no amount of lead exposure is safe. Even at low levels, lead can cause serious and irreversible damage to the developing brains and nervous systems of young children, leading to lasting behavioral, cognitive and physical problems. In short, it can alter the trajectory of a child's life.

School systems throughout the country have long grappled with lead in water, due in part to aging buildings laden with lead-bearing pipes and fixtures. But even now, the vast majority of the nation's schools are not legally required by states or the federal government to test their water on a regular basis.

Most public school districts, cash-starved and understaffed, don't make it a priority. Years can pass until a calamity such as the one in Flint compels school officials to undertake a new round of testing.

"The pressure usually comes from the outside," said Yanna Lambrinidou, a Virginia Tech engineering professor who has long studied lead contamination in water. "When schools sample, it's more often than not because they have been squeezed into a corner."

After contaminated water in Flint became national news, parents and teachers in some parts of the country pushed for lead testing at their own schools. The results have often turned up reminders that lead problems persist decades after they first surfaced.

"Every parent assumes that someone must have taken care of this problem decades ago," said Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor who helped expose lead crises in Washington and Flint. "They're always shocked to discover that it hasn't been fixed."

Edwards and other experts partly blame a regulatory vacuum that leaves about 90 percent of the nation's schools with no mandatory requirements for testing and limited guidance on how to properly remediate the problem when they do find lead in the water. Only schools that have their own water source, rather than receiving water from a municipal system, must sample regularly for lead and meet certain standards.

In addition, the age of many schools around the country makes it difficult to eliminate the risk of lead in the water without costly investments in replacing lead pipes, faucets and fountains.

Lambrinidou said it is not enough for schools to simply test a tap or fountain once for lead then declare it safe. Lead can appear sporadically in a water system as particles break off or leach into the water -- something researchers call the "Russian roulette" phenomenon.

That situation can be exacerbated in schools, where water can sit stagnant in pipes over weekends and holidays.

"This is exactly the condition that worsens lead-in-water contamination," Lambrinidou said.

A Section on 07/05/2016

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