The city is planning to test lead levels in the drinking water at all public schools, and has published data on testing from the last 14 years, after revelations about lead contamination in Newark, New Jersey public schools, as well as the ongoing public health disaster from contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.
On Wednesday, the Department of Education launched a searchable database of schools that have been tested since 2002, when the agency first made testing a priority. The search function allows users to look up schools by name and see whether a test has been performed, whether elevated lead levels were found, and what action was taken to address the issue. Where lead contamination was found, the results list the date of the test, and some date back as far as 2004.
Of the 90,000 samples taken at city schools, 1.13 percent showed elevated levels of lead, the Mayor's Office told WNYC. School Chancellor Carmen Fariña indicated in a letter to parents and staff [pdf] that the contamination found so far has been dealt with.
"We want to assure you that New York City’s water is extraordinarily safe," she wrote. "This includes water in the NYC schools."
The testing has only been applied to schools built before 1986, when a federal ban on using lead pipes in construction went into effect. Going forward, the city plans to re-test the schools every five years. Lead poisoning impacts adolescent brain development and exposure can lead to learning disabilities and behavioral disorders.
Earlier this month in Newark, the city shut off water at 30 of the city's 67 schools due to unsafe levels of lead in the drinking water. In subsequent weeks, it came out that school leaders had known about heightened lead concentrations in school water for four years, thanks to Newark's annual testing, but had hidden it from the public. In 2014, a school district administrator wrote a memo instructing custodians to run school taps for two minutes before the beginning of classes "to reduce the risk of possible lead contamination."
Newark is now developing a process for testing and retesting Newark schools to determine the nature of the problems and when they have been fixed. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka estimates that 17,000 children are at risk, and his school superintendent is encouraging parents to utilize free blood testing services for their kids, particularly 330 in two early-childhood programs at affected schools. Governor Chris Christie, back in the state for a stopover amid his Donald Trump self-degradation tour, said that the lead may be present at levels above what federal environmental scientists say is safe, but that they "are nowhere near crisis, dangerous levels."
Christie and his predecessors in the New Jersey Governor's Office have a record of doing little in the way of providing long-term solutions to lead contamination. For instance, when dangerous lead concentrations were found in water at Camden schools in 2002, the state shut off the taps and started shipping in bottled water. Fourteen years later, the schools are still relying on bottled water, to the tune of $75,000 a year.
