Environmental Protection Agency rules do not mandate testing lead levels in public schools drinking water, a cause for for concerning among many.

By Eesha Pendharkar

Students spilled out into the bright corridor of East Somerville Community School, filling the halls with the sound of hurried footsteps and loud chatter. The muffled sounds of a Taylor Swift song echoed from the gym as three boys rushed to a water fountain between two bathroom entrances. They waited exactly long enough for their plastic bottles to fill to the brim with water and then ran away.

A smaller boy with a huge blue Nike backpack and shiny white Adidas shoes approached the fountain and drank straight from it. After a few gulps he sighed with satisfaction and walked towards his next class. The crowd of students cleared as abruptly as they had appeared, and silence was restored to the middle school corridor.

If this water fountain was visited by four boys within a few minutes, scaling up to include kids in schools all over the country proves that drinking water in schools needs to be checked for contamination.

So, there has to be a regulation in place to make sure that the water does not contain excessive lead, right? Wrong.

The Environmental Protection Agency does not have a law mandating schools to test for lead levels in drinking water.

“Only schools that are considered ‘public water suppliers’ are required under the Federal standards to test their drinking water for the presence of lead,” according to Emily Bender, a public affairs specialist at the EPA, clarifying the matter in an email. “In general, most school districts in the US are served by public water utilities, so the school itself is not required to perform any drinking water testing.”

Though the EPA recommends lead testing, making it optional means that schools can get away with not checking their drinking water for lead, which is known to be most harmful to growing children.

“Children for pretty much all contaminants are more susceptible to adverse health effects,” said Dr. Patricia Janulewicz, who teaches Environmental Health at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “We all should know, not just within the public health field that lead is dangerous.”

Dr. Janulewicz explained that at low levels, lead might cause problems that will not need to be addressed by a doctor, like reduced performance on IQ tests, higher rates of ADHD and trouble with emotional regulation. At higher levels, lead poisoning affects the nervous system and brain function.

The much-needed conversation about lead contamination was thrust into the spotlight after alarmingly high levels were found in drinking water in Flint, Michigan. According to the Washington Post series on the Flint Water Crisis, the water from the Flint River was so corrosive that the amount of lead that leached into the water was described by Virginia Tech researchers to fit the EPA definition of toxic waste.

To understand leaching, imagine brewing a pot of tea. The amount of tea that seeps into the water depends on the temperature and time. To make stronger tea, the pot needs to be kept brewing for longer and at a high enough temperature. Now replace tea with lead and temperature with corrosiveness. Corrosive water will absorb more lead from pipes or fixtures, especially if the time of contact is increased.

The EPA states that the “action level” for lead in drinking water is 15 parts per billion. This means that if more lead than 15 ppb exists in drinking water, the EPA recommends that some steps should be taken (by residences and municipalities) to reduce that level for lead, as amounts lower than 15 ppb can also cause problems. Even though lead is something everyone’s now wary of in water, the focus is not on water in schools.

Since the EPA doesn’t mandate testing, cities and towns across states may get away with not testing the water in their public schools at all. This is mitigated in Massachusetts by the Lead Contamination Control Act (LCAA) to reduce the levels of lead in schools and childcare facilities. In April 2016, the Department of Environmental Protection launched an Assistance program to help schools with testing and analyzing water samples in public schools across the state. The MassDEP database with all the test results did not include any data for a few towns and incomplete results for some others. Somerville was one of the cities with incomplete results, reporting testing results for only two out of the city’s 11 public schools. However, this does not mean Somerville is neglecting testing and talking about lead in school water.

“In response to national and regional concerns over lead in drinking water in 2016, the City of Somerville and the Somerville Public Schools chose to exceed federal requirements,” said Susana Hernandez Morgan, Director of Communication for Somerville schools via email. “Thus Copper and lead testing was conducted in all of our public school buildings in spring 2016. Every drinking water fountain, cafeteria water source, and school nursing station sink at every school in the District was tested.”

As Morgan walked around the empty halls of East Somerville Community school, she explained that the city had applied to the MassDEP Assistance program, but then decided to do its own testing. She added she thought that East Somerville Community school may have appeared in the MassDEP database in addition to the city’s testing.

In Massachusetts, children are not tested for blood lead levels after they’re 4, according to Janulewicz. “If these schools are serving kids K-12 nobody is even aware of their blood lead levels are,” she said. Janulewicz said that a lot of change is brought about by one concerned parent refusing to give up on an issue that affects their child. She pushed her child’s school to do lead testing when they moved to a different building, and emphasized that if parents were kept in the loop, they would make sure the school was protecting their kids.

“Our children are in schools eight plus hours and that is a lot of lead exposure,” Janulewicz said, stressing on the importance of school testing. “These schools need to not only test and make that data available to parents but also then do something about it.”

Somerville’s city website has data from the 2016 tests and they seem to have gone above and beyond what is legally required of them. The city’s schools have taken the right steps when it comes to testing and making the results publicly available, according to Mary Marshall, longtime resident of Somerville who has two children in the public school system.

“They sent a parent email out, they told students, they had a meeting, so they tried to involve us as much as they could,” she said.

Marshall is president of the Somerville High School PTA where her son is a senior, and is involved in the school improvement council. “I’m pretty sure that everyone is feeling comfortable that the school district is doing their job protecting us.”

Marshall said she was sure that everyone including the mayor was concerned about this issue and that they would not have let any faucets with high lead levels be in use. Morgan agreed in her email, saying that the school had shut down two faucets that showed slightly high levels of lead.

However, Ellenor Barish, another Somerville parent, said she didn’t remember receiving any information about testing school water for lead. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; just that I don’t remember receiving any information,” she said.

Dr. Wendy Heiger-Bernays, a professor at BU’s school of public health thinks that it is crucial that information about lead testing is made public. “We need public meetings, we need information to go out via schools (PTAs), Somerville Hospital, clinics, posted on memo boards – whatever works to get messages out to communities,” she said.

Dr. Heiger-Bernays is also on the technical advisory committees for toxicological and environmental health issues at the MassDEP, Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Institute, and the EPA. She says that the law needs to be revised to increase testing at the tap in addition to educating the public.

“I think that the lead and copper rule was written when it was known that there are lead pipes and that the expense of removing them is costly,” she explained. “The rule was written in a way such that extensive sampling is not required, including not testing water in schools.”

Modifying this law may mean that in states like Massachusetts, some cities that may not be testing their water now will be mandated to, and take advantage of the state’s Assistance program. Somerville is taking precautions to protect its school children, but Flint’s water crisis is an example of what can happen if cities are not as proactive.

Mary Marshall was surprised to hear about this exclusion of schools from the federal testing requirements. “That’s terrible, that you may have young children drinking water that’s not safe,” she said. “I’m glad that’s not us.”