Many Schools Have Lead in Their Drinking Water. What the Feds Are Doing

The federal government is investing billions of dollars to crack down on lead in water sources nationwide, including through new requirements for water systems to track lead contamination in schools’ drinking water.

But those efforts alone are unlikely to end pervasive lead contamination in schools.

Government agencies and researchers agree that there’s no safe level of lead exposure for children. Children who ingest the metal can experience a wide range of short- and long-term health problems—everything from poor concentration and headaches to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and developmental delays.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized a new rule on Oct. 8 that requires water systems to remove all of the nation’s lead pipes within a decade. The rule also calls for water systems to take action whenever a water sample contains more than 10 parts per billion of lead, rather than the previous standard of 15 parts per billion.

And it requires water systems to spend the next five years testing water samples from all of the elementary schools and child care centers they serve.

The announcement also comes with funding. Water systems will get $2.6 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to invest in lead pipe removal projects. The agency is also offering $35 million in grants for water systems, nonprofits, and local governments to help remove lead pipes. Applicants who are aiming to address lead exposure in schools and child care facilities will be among those that get priority consideration.

The new rule will eliminate a potent source of lead contamination that affects children and their families at home, at school, and at work. Nationwide, as many as 12.8 million lead pipes are still in service, the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates. Lead pipes contributed to the nationally publicized water crisis in Flint, Mich., where the state recently agreed to pay nearly $10 million to help cover the cost of special education services for children exposed to lead and other toxins at school.

The new rule does not, however, mandate that K-12 schools commission their own lead testing beyond the required tests in the next five years, or that they replace antiquated water fixtures that carry lingering toxins. The only school districts required to conduct their own water testing are the relatively small number nationwide that operate on their own water systems, like wells.

The rule also does not require schools to proactively address lead contamination coming from water fountains, sinks, and pipes in the school buildings themselves.

Lead appears in school drinking water from two main sources: thin service pipes made of lead that transport water from public water supplies to school buildings, and water fixtures themselves, including fountains and faucets, as many older models were made with lead-containing metals.

Most lead service lines are so narrow that installers often didn’t use them to serve large public buildings like schools, said Greg Montgomery, who leads the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s Lead Reduction in School Drinking Water program. When lead crops up at a school that isn’t served by an exterior lead pipe, the fixtures tend to be the culprit.

His agency has been pushing schools to test for lead in water since the state mandated lead testing in 2020. Eighty percent of Montana’s schools have submitted testing data so far.

Of those, roughly three-quarters have identified water in at least one fixture that has lead levels above the state action level of 5 parts per billion, Montgomery said. That’s a stricter threshold than the new federal standard.

So far, though, the effort hasn’t turned up a single lead service line that provides water to schools.

Instead, most of the contamination is coming from fixtures or pipes within school buildings. The highest concentrations of lead tend to be in fixtures that students and staff don’t regularly use, allowing the lead to build up, Montgomery said.

The state requires districts that find high concentrations of lead to replace those fixtures with new ones, which have stronger filters.

That state law is stricter than even the new iteration of the federal rule. The EPA’s updated regulations don’t require most of Montana’s schools to take any action to address the issues they’ve uncovered with contaminated water fixtures.

But there are some exceptions. Roughly 90 of the state’s 590 accredited public and private schools draw water from their own supply, rather than from a municipal provider, Montgomery said. The federal rule does apply to those school districts because they are, in essence, their own water systems. They must test their water for lead in the next five years, and take action anytime they find a sample that exceeds 10 parts per billion of lead.

Even with the newly announced policies, there are no federal requirements for schools to replace water fountains that contain lead. Water suppliers are only required to test middle and high schools when the schools request their services.

States, meanwhile, have wildly different requirements for acceptable lead levels in schools’ drinking water. Michigan last year became the first state in the nation to require school districts to proactively install modern filters on all of their water fixtures.

Several states match Montana’s requirement for schools to take action on lead levels above 5 ppb. Others set the standard higher, at 10 or 15 ppb.

Others still don’t require schools to take action on any level of lead in water, or even to test their water.

“Even a required program, we still have schools that haven’t sampled yet,” Montgomery said. Some district superintendents who are new on the job don’t realize that their predecessor started but hadn’t finished complying with the state’s lead testing mandate, he added.

District administrators are often reluctant to voluntarily test for lead because of the steep cost of remediating known contamination, especially in states that don’t offer funding support to schools.

In Prince George’s County, Md., district leaders have set aside $200,000 a year for lead removal. That’s enough to change out the fixtures in four or five school buildings out of more than 200 in the district, according to local media reports.

Still, some water systems are already beginning to take action on the federal government’s timetable. The Water and Sewage Board of New Orleans announced earlier this month that it will begin a 10-year lead pipe removal effort in the city by focusing first on 300 pipes that serve schools and child care centers.

EPA funding will pay for part of that project.