Pennsylvania school districts are failing to protect children from lead exposure in drinking water at schools, an environmental group said, calling on lawmakers to require and fund the installation of filtered water fountains.
IN report published on WednesdayPennEnvironment found that a 2018 Pennsylvania law requiring school districts to test for lead annually is poorly enforced, contains loopholes to avoid testing, makes it tough for the public to access test results and does little to protect children.
“The test-and-fix strategy doesn’t work. It’s clearly a failed strategy to protect children,” PennEnvironment Executive Director David Masur told the Capital-Star on Wednesday, noting that 90% of school districts that tested drinking water in their schools reported the presence of lead.
“We know they’re going to find lead when they test,” Masur said. “We need to address the problem right away, and the cheapest way to do that is to replace old drinking fountains with modern filtered water bottle filling stations and drinking fountains.”
A petite number of school districts have taken steps to eliminate lead from drinking water, such as Philadelphia, where lead was detected in the water at 98% of schools tested, according to a 2022 study. The Philadelphia City Council unanimously passed a law requiring drinking fountains to be replaced with lead-filtered watering stations by the end of this year.
But little action has been taken elsewhere in the state to address the lead problem. Masur said bipartisan legislation to encourage school districts to update drinking water sources to filter lead has been introduced in both houses of the state legislature but has not advanced beyond the education committees in each chamber.
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State House Education Committee Chairman Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh) said providing students with sheltered drinking water is among a broad and diverse range of issues school districts must address.
“There are schools that are virtually unusable because the classrooms are 120 degrees because there is no air conditioning,” Schweyer said, adding that legislation that focuses on a single school site would limit what districts can spend constrained funds on.
For the analysis, PennEnvironment requested records under the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act from the state’s nine largest school districts. It found that all but one had “at some point” failed to comply in some way with the lead-testing requirements in the state’s School Code or used an exemption to circumvent those requirements.
Only the Scranton School District has tested as required and released the results, but even Scranton reported having the number of drinking fountains required by state law. The state building code requires one fountain for every 100 students.
According to the PennEnvironment report, other districts, including Altoona, Bethlehem, Hazleton and York, did not conduct annual testing, while Norristown and West Chester school districts used an exception in the law and instead held a public meeting to “discuss the issue of lead in school facilities,” according to the PennEnvironment report.
The report also said several school districts tested only one or two water sources in each school, which, while meeting technical requirements, is not sufficient to ensure the safety of drinking water.
Masur said the concentration of lead contamination in drinking water depends on many factors, including chemistry, water usage and lead in fixtures. As a result, water tested from a source may show no signs of lead one day and high levels of lead another.
Most school districts did not make lead test results readily available to the public by not posting them on district websites or hiding them in school board meeting minutes, according to PennEnvironment. The report also said test results were not consistently reported to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Senate Bill 986, introduced by state Sen. Devlin Robinson (R-Allegheny), and House Bill 2011, introduced by state Rep. Ronie Green (D-Philadelphia), would require school districts to ensure that all drinking water sources in school buildings are equipped with filters designed to remove lead.
The bill would also require districts to implement water filter maintenance programs and the Department of Education to establish a grant program for the purchase of filters and bottle filling stations or water fountains equipped with filters.
Masur said the bill would create a $30 million fund that would pay out grants over three years.
Schweyer said the lawsuit filed in Commonwealth Court by six economically disadvantaged school districts and the parents of their students showed that school infrastructure is a major source of inequality between the state’s richest and poorest communities.
In the past two years, when Democrats held the majority in the state House, they fought for and won $175 million in up-to-date funding for environmental remediation and repair of school buildings, the first such funding included in the state budget in seven years, he said.
That money could go toward addressing lead in drinking water or lead paint in classrooms, as well as “the billion problems that need to be addressed in schools,” Schweyer said.
Masur said school districts have also received federal funding to provide access to sheltered drinking water, but the PennEnvironment report shows school districts are not taking action.
“The sad reality is that most school districts are not taking advantage of these opportunities, so we feel strongly that we need to require this change because it will encourage school districts to take advantage of this money,” he said, adding that PennEnvironment estimates that installing a watering station with a filter costs about $2,500. “That’s a tiny drop in the bucket to address this issue comprehensively.”
