Today's "Talk out of School" on the toxic levels of testing and lead in NYC schools

On today’s Talk Out of School on WBAI radio, we spoke with NYC Council Member and Chair of the Education Committee Mark Treyger, about yesterday's oversight hearing on “Breaking the test culture” in our NYC schools, the highlights of which I described on the blog. 

We discussed the success of the the 38 schools that belong to the NY Performance Standards Consortium, that use projects and performance-based assessments instead of  Regents exams that most NYC high school students are required to pass to graduate. The Council Member referred to these schools to as the “best kept secret in our education system”. Meanwhile, the overemphasis on standardized testing in our public schools encourages rote learning and memoritzation rather than develop deep knowledge and critical thinking. We also talked about DOE’s proposal to implement yet another set of standardized tests in our schools and create yet another data system called Edustat.  I followed up by asked him what the powers of the Council were to prevent the implementation of these likely damaging and/or wasteful programs might be given mayoral control.

Christopher Werth

In the second half of the show we were joined by Christoper Werth, senior editor at WNYC’s narrative unit, who explained thow his visit to his young daughter’s elementary classroom led to a groundbreaking investigation of lead contamination, followed by a new round of testing by DOE.  

We also discussed how the risks posed by lead in school water compare to lead in peeling paint and dust, and described how the model bill proposed by NRDC would mandate filtration systems on all drinking water outlets in schools and lower the action level requiring remediation. The possible correlation between the phasing out of lead paint and the national  drop in crime rates was another topic we touched on in our discussion. 

Click here to download or livestream the full episode. More information on these issues are linked to below.

• NYC Public School Parents on NYC Council hearings on Breaking the school testing culture.
• Christopher Werth's reporting on crumbling lead paint in schools
• NYC Public School Parents on high levels of lead in water still found in schools in third round of DOE testing.
• DOE inspection results for peeling lead paint in classrooms
• DOE inspection results for lead found in school water  
• NRDC FAQ for parents on lead in school water: what should you do?
• NRDC Model State Legislation: “Get the Lead Out of School Drinking Water Act” Summary of Provisions

 

High levels of lead in water still at many NYC schools; check to see if your child's school is on the list!

In all the news about peeling lead paint in schools, there has been little attention given to the fact that there were more than 500 NYC public schools and/or preK centers in which lead was found in the water above the “action” level of 15 parts per billion. 

The DOE spreadsheet showing the lead test results of water outlets in 534 schools is posted on this page.  DOE says that “One third of all schools were tested in this round, with the remainder of schools scheduled to be tested in 2019 and 2020.”  Of those 534 schools, more than 80% had at least one outlet with elevated levels of lead.  The detailed DOE spreadsheet is here. 

We created a new spreadsheet, adding tabs for fixtures found to have lead above the action level of 15 ppb sorted by district and by concentration (with outlets found to have the highest levels at the top).  The new spreadsheet is here.

Some of the schools with the highest levels are listed below, showing outlets with lead at 54 to 873 times the action level, with the most alarming results from a cold water faucet in the 4^th floor boys bathroom in Prospect HS.  This outlet emitted water with lead at an incredible 13,100 parts per billion.  In that same school as well, a hallway fountain (or “bubbler”) on the 3rd floor was found to emit water at 3,070 parts per billion. 

But there are schools in every borough showing extremely high levels of lead. The districts with the highest counts include District 31 on Staten Island with 171 elevated outlets, District 28 in Queens with 167 outlets; and District 17 and District 22 in Brooklyn with 151 and 140 outlets respectively.  You can check the spreadsheet for your child’s school and classroom.

Remember that these outlets either did not show elevated levels of lead last time or have been remediated at least once.  Someone really ought to ask DOE officials why there are still so many outlets releasing water at such high levels if they took corrective action on all affected outlets already, and what if anything they plan to do differently at this point to ensure that their methods of testing and/or addressing the problem are more effective.

NRDC has a model state bill that would require remediation through water filtration, which as far as I know, DOE has not done.  Their model bill would also significantly lower the action to 1 part per billion.  As NRDC water expert Joan Matthews pointed out to City and State, and as research shows, “There is no safe level of lead in drinking water for kids.”  

The model bill is posted on the NRDC website here.  Illinois has ordered that parents be notified if their children’s schools report levels of lead in water about 5 ppb; and D.C. has lowered the action level for lead to 5 ppb and requires filtration systems in all schools.  Vermont has lowered the action level for remediation to 4 ppb for all schools and child care providers.

In the meantime, NYC parents should probably send their children to school every day with a bottle of water every day, and get their blood checked for lead annually.

Please add your comments below if your child's school is affected; if the DOE or your principal has informed you of this fact, and what if anything they've advised you to do.

Peeling lead paint found in 938 classrooms; and lead-laden water in 500 schools

Update: 9/4/19: The DOE went back and found elevated levels of lead  in twice as many spaces, including 1800 classrooms for preK, Kindergarten and 1st grade students as well as some common areas, and says all these spaces have now been "remediated".  Check out the DOE press release and the latest by reporter Christopher Werth here.

Update: The current state action level for lead in water of  15 parts per billion – the threshold at which remediation must occur – is not a standard based on health or safety, as any amount of lead in water or blood can have negative effects.  Environmental advocacy organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Healthy Schools Network are advocating for NY to lower its action level to 1ppb before public schools begin testing their for lead by 2020.  More on this here.  
The model bill is posted on the NRDC website here.   The bill also requires specific remediation efforts including filtration systems on any affected water outlets. NRDC also posts a detailed explanation of the problems with the current system of testing for lead in water in NYC schools, and how the model NYS bill follows the law adopted by the District of Columbia.

The DOE found peeling lead paint at 486 schools built before 1985, including over 938 classrooms serving kids in 3-K, Pre-K, Kindergarten and first grade. More on this at Gothamist [with a WNYC radio sound file],  Chalkbeat and NY Post.

The ramped up inspection is a result of investigative reporting by Christopher Werth of WNYC , who wrote in Gothamist earlier this summer how he had found lead paint in classrooms  here and here; and a letter sent by members of Congress to the DOE as a result of his reporting.

Here is the DOE spreadsheet of the schools inspected and the results.

The DOE says they plan to remediate all these classrooms before Sept., by covering the peeling paint with a “certified primer” and painted over twice.

Yet it doesn’t appear that DOE also checked for lead dust on the floors, which can also be quite toxic, especially for young kids who sit on the rug for “circle time”, as pointed out by Werth in the WNYC interview and earlier Gothamist articles.  And they haven’t checked any classrooms for kids over six, or common areas.

The Chalkbeat article also has a searchable list of the 500 schools that still have water outlets that were found to have lead levels still above the “action level” of 15 parts per billion, though the DOE claims to have “remediated” all but 15 of these outlets once again.

Which brings up the question, if they had remediated them last year, as they claimed, how effective is the process by which they address this?

The DOE should immediately inform parents at all schools with classrooms that tested positive for lead.  The more research is done about lead and its effects, the more scientists realize that even children with tiny amounts of detectable lead in their blood are more likely to have academic and behavior problems.  See my earlier blog post about this, as well as these two scientific studies.

All parents should also probably have their kids tested for lead, especially if their schools are on the list but even if not.  Too often children go without lead testing, as reported by Reuters. 

One good thing is that there is new research showing that medical treatment to remove lead from blood can be effective, according to a paper published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and discussed in Chalkbeat here.

In the fall, you can also contact the DOE to report peeling paint in in your child’s school through the Paint Reporting survey .  For more information, check out the DOE webpage here.

The latest on lead in school water: what are the results for your school and what should parents do?

Update 9/16/18:  Today's NY Times has a letter from Claire Barnett of the Healthy Schools Network and Joan Leary Matthews of NRDC, urging the governor and state Legislature to lower the action level for lead, as there's no safe amount of lead in water that children drink.  

Sue Edelman also has an update, detailing in the NY Post how a new fountain/bubbler bought with funds raised by students at the International  High School in Prospect Heights is already releasing lead above the action level, raising suspicions that lead may be in the pipes.  According to the mandated reports the DOE has made to the state, no pipes were replaced in any of the NYC public schools.

This week, several media outlets reported on the new results from lead tests in NYC school water in the New York Times,  Chalkbeat, and the Daily News.  

The new data shows that 25% of schools still have at least one fixture with water above the “action” level of 15 parts per billion that requires remediation, compared to over 80% of schools before the latest round of remediation efforts began in last year.  The release of this data came after the DOE had refused to provide the updated retesting results for two weeks, and only after an article exposing the delay was published in the NY Post on Sunday. 

A spreadsheet showing the new results for every schools sorted by district is posted here.  There are now 391 schools with 1165 outlets that released lead above the legal limit, compared to 10,633 outlets before.

To recap:  In response to the Flint water crisis, the NY Legislature passed a new law in 2016 that required all public schools to test their water every five years using the “first draw” of water, rather than flushing the pipes before testing, which lessens the amount of lead in the sample.  Any outlet with water above 15 parts per billion (ppb) would from now on require fixing until the samples fell below that level.

Still to this day, the DOE officials claim to reporters that they previously they used a “practice [that] was developed in a partnership with the federal Environmental Protection Agency” even though EPA guidelines for over a decade have said that the first draw should be tested for lead om schools, rather than after the pipes were flushed.  See 3Ts for Reducing Lead in Drinking Water in Schools, dated Oct. 2006:

Before the Flint crisis erupted, many schools hadn’t been tested for over ten years.  Moreover, the DOE was only testing buildings built before 1986, even though newer ones also had this problem, and were using the flushing method instead of the first draw, which more accurately measures how much lead is in the water that students drink at the beginning of the school day. 

Yet DOE went through a new round of testing in the spring of 2016 by using the flushing method, and had found 1,341 elevated samples in 510 schools, with fewer elevated samples on the second draw.

After the new state law passed in June 2016, the deadline for testing all water outlets with the new, more accurate method was September 30, 2016 for elementary schools.  Middle and high schools were supposed to have completed testing by October 31, 2016.

In July 2016, the city sent out conflicting messages.  First, DOE officials said that “At every location where elevated levels persisted after a second test…it turned off the source of the water and then started making repairs or replacing the fixtures. “  A Mayoral spokesperson claimed that in the case of “any elevated sample, relevant fixtures and piping are replaced to the wall, and retested out of an extreme abundance of caution.”

Yet while most districts started testing their school water over the summer of 2016 using the first draw method, the DOE refused to do this until after the NY Times called them out on it on September 1, 2016, in a story that revealed that they were still flushing the pipes beforehand  (though the Times story and most news articles since still fail to mention the new state law.)

Even then, the DOE said they would “continue doing pre-stagnation flushing when it was necessary to collect samples on Monday mornings or over school holidays."  If and when the DOE abandoned this practice which ran counter to the law and EPA guidelines is unclear.

In any case, NYC officials didn't begin retesting schools according to the mandated method until late November 2016.  According to the new state law, schools were also supposed to post the results of all lead testing and any remediation plans on their website no more than six weeks after the school received the lab reports.  Yet as Sue Edelman reported, last week many school websites lacked these reports.

Not until April 17, 2017 ,  six months after the deadline, did DOE release results from testing school water by the required method.  Then they found 10,633 elevated samples in 1,278 or 83% of all public schools. See the DOE older spreadsheet posted here. 

Now, after remediation, there are still 391 schools with elevated levels, with fewer fixtures – or 1,165  -- still releasing water above the action levels.  According to the DOE, additional unspecified efforts will be made to lower these levels or remove the outlets permanently. 

But perhaps the most surprising finding is that there are now 42 schools where the most recent round of testing found more outlets with lead above the legal limits than before. According to the NY Times a DOE spokesperson explained this ”because the schools had added new fixtures.”  But from examining reports on the school portals, the real reason appears to be that more fixtures were tested in the second round than in the first. 

Originally, only drinking fountains and fixtures like kitchen sinks where the water would be used for cooking were tested.  Subsequently, they apparently tested all “operational outlets”, including sinks in bathrooms and locker rooms etc.

According to the letter on its DOE school portal, Baruch IS 104 in Manhattan had only three out of 68 outlets that originally tested above the action level on Jan. 14, 2017.  Now 25 of 90 outlets are elevated. ( I have posted Baruch’s lab report here; but you can find it on the DOE school portal for every school under “data and reports” and then “facilities.”)  The highest amounts of lead at Baruch seem to be in water from sinks in the boys locker room.

A similar letter on the Truman HS DOE portal shows that the school originally had 11 of 276 outlets above the action limit, but now 27 have tested above 15 ppb, out of 333 outlets.   Long Island City HS originally had 13 outlets testing above the action level out of 190, while now there are 26 out of 200 fixtures.

For the names of schools where the new results find more contaminated outlets than before,  see the last tab on spreadsheet here. 

In June 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics released  new guidelines that schools should limit the amount of lead in their water to no more than 1 part per billion, as opposed to the 15 parts per billion mandated in NY state law. Why? Because as AAP stated, ”There is no identified threshold or safe level of lead in blood…No Amount of Lead Exposure is Safe for Children.”  

Indeed, research has shown that children with blood levels even less than 5 micrograms per deciliter suffer from lower IQs , worse test scores, and higher rates of inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity.  
 
Here is a post I wrote earlier, citing evidence that there is no safe threshold of lead in water-- given that any detectable blood levels of lead in children are correlated with worst outcomes.  

This includes a study by researchers at Yale and Brown called "Lead Exposure and Racial Disparities in Test Scores," showing that preschool children with very low levels of lead in their blood are likely to have lower test scores in subsequent grades in math and ELA.

According to the GAO, as of September 2017, seven states and DC require regular testing of lead in school water, with Maryland calling for re- testing every three years.    In NY, Sen. Michael Gianaris has proposed a bill that would require re-testing every three years in New York, instead of the current five.  DC law now requires annual testing in their public schools, as Dr. Marc Edwards, who exposed the Flint water tragedy, recommends.   

As to the action levels of lead, Illinois requires that any school outlet that has any detectable level of lead in the water must be fixed;  and DC schools must remediate outlets with lead levels above 5 ppb.

Given this research, if I still had children in the public schools, I would send them to school with water bottles every day and urge them to drink from these sources rather than any school fixture.