Massachusetts state officials have no way to know if public schools are testing their water for lead, despite the state allocating $2 million to pay for lead tests in schools three years ago.
There are no federal or state requirements that schools test for lead, so testing is done on a voluntary, school-by-school basis. If a school chooses to test for lead, it is not required to report that test or any findings of contaminated water to the state. If a school does report contaminated water, they are not required report back to the state with any actions they may have taken to fix the problem.
In the past three years, 511 public schools in Massachusetts have reported conducting lead tests and 248 of those detected high levels of lead in their water, according to state data compiled by WGBH News. More than half of the schools that reported contaminated water have not told the state what — if anything — has been done to correct the situation.
That leaves 1,336 public schools that have not told the state if they’ve tested their water, out of the state’s total 1,847 schools. Some schools, WGBH News found, do conduct lead tests but do not report the test or their findings to state officials.
The state’s Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) office offers a search function on their website to see which schools have reported water testing.
The EPA's so-called "action level" — the level at which the state must intervene for public water systems, not the lead level at which the water is unsafe to drink — for lead is 15 parts per billion. However, there is no requirement that action be taken in schools. Health and medical experts say that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe.
In 2016, after high levels of lead were found in the drinking water of Flint, Mich., Massachusetts allocated $2 million to pay for lead tests in school water.
"We saw that we weren't having the compliance rates that we would like to see,” said Martin Suuberg, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. “So we developed a program that not only paid for testing, but also paid for technical help for schools so that they would know how to test themselves. It was also technical help if they identified an issue to learn what to do about it and find the resources, what to do with it."
But many cities and towns didn't take the state up on its offer. In the last three years, only about a quarter of Massachusetts schools have reported to the state that they've tested.
Massachusetts schools have reported more than 3,500 tests with results over the “action level” over the past three years. More than 700 of those excessive lead results were found in drinking water bubblers. Others were in kitchen faucets, classroom faucets, nurses' office sinks, and other water sources in schools.
"Our experience has been that once a school knows about the issue, they are taking short-term actions" to address the situation, Suuberg said.
But the state can't say for sure if the situation has been addressed in most instances, because most schools aren't reporting what they've done.
Some schools report taking action, like replacing fixtures or turning off water to contaminated drinking fountains. But of the 248 schools that reported finding contaminated water, 135 of them did not report back to the state on anything they did to address the situation.
Some Massachusetts districts say they addressed the issue when it was discovered, but just haven't communicated that to the state. During the past few years, Lynn had the highest number of tests above the 15 parts per billion action limit of all the state’s schools, with 188 tests – conducted in drinking bubblers, kitchen sinks, classroom faucets and other outlets – testing at a high level. The state database lists "no remediation action reported" for most of those tests.
But Lynn’s Inspectional Services Department said all fixtures with excessive levels of lead were taken out of service immediately, and many of them have now been replaced.
Boston Public Schools did not report the actions they have taken to the state, but since 2016, the city has turned drinking water back on at 17 schools as the city works to install water fountains that filter out lead. Boston Public Schools said the drinking water in most of the city's 125 schools has been shut off since the 1980s because of lead. Students in nearly 90 schools in Boston are still drinking bottled water.
Neither the state nor the federal government have the authority to require schools to test for lead.
"We are doing the best we can with the regulatory tools we have,” Suuberg said. “I think we've seen some success as a result of the program. And the best news is we can continue to offer help."
In October, the EPA gave Massachusetts a nearly $1 million grant to help fund more lead testing in schools.
"We're going to keep trying to develop these efforts, and I think over the next couple of months we will certainly have the program up and running again,” Suuberg said. “And I think we'll have a better approach to helping some of these communities deal with this problem."
Suuberg said he hopes this new round of testing includes drinking water in daycare facilities, since the youngest children are most susceptible to the effects of lead.
"We started recognizing that there are an awful lot of daycare facilities out there that we really should be trying to help with this program,” he said. “And so, in this round, there is a particular emphasis on it."
In October, the EPA also proposed rewriting the rules around lead pipes, including requiring public water systems to test lead levels at schools more frequently. But environmentalists balked at the proposal for several reasons, including that it fails to make lead limits more stringent.
“Don’t be fooled into thinking that families will be protected by this proposed change," Amy Laura Cahn of the Conservation Law Foundation said in a statement at the time. "We need a health-based standard that recognizes the only safe level of lead for kids is zero. That – and removing lead pipes from our cities and towns – must be the only goal for regulators.”
Rick Reibstein, a professor at Boston University who previously worked both in the Massachusetts Toxic Use Reduction Program and as an enforcement attorney at EPA, said lead in drinking water “is one of the saddest stories about our civilization's inability to cope with an obvious, preventable problem.”
"Studies have shown that the hazards of lead are extremely costly," Reibstein said. "The injuries that we experience, we see in reduced capacity to produce, to learn, to behave. We see increases in crime. We see increases in dropping out of school. And the losses from economic damage are extraordinary and far exceed whatever investment it would take to replace lead leaded items."
A 2012 study by Jessica Reyes of Amherst College showed Massachusetts towns where children have higher lead levels tend to have lower scores on the standardized MCAS test, and schools where students saw decreases in lead exposures in the 1990s saw increases in scores in the 2000s.
And it's not just children who are affected by lead.
"Recent information is showing that it has effects on our heart that are more significant than we ever thought before," Reibstein said. "It may be the second leading cause of death from cardiovascular disease. It causes problems with the brain, it causes problems with our blood, causes problems with organ functioning."
Some argue part of the problem is a system in which no agency is responsible for mandating or carrying out lead testing in schools. The task is simply left to the schools themselves, where there may be little to no expertise in the issue.
"[The] EPA doesn't have authority to test what are considered consumer products, which is what piping and faucets and stuff are," said Harvard Public Health Professor Ronnie Levin, who worked for the EPA for more than 37 years, most recently as a lead housing inspector, risk assessor and senior scientist. "The Consumer Product Safety Commission can't test anything ... that has to do with diet. So, drinking water conceivably is a food issue and so they don't have authority. The Food and Drug Administration has explicitly exempted drinking water from its regulations. So, we have an odd stepchild legislatively, statutorily, for who regulates lead."
And, she said, schools aren't incentivized to voluntarily test themselves.
"The incentives are that if I have a problem, I have to report it. Well, nobody wants to do that," Levin said. "We need to change that. So that collecting data becomes part of what we do, the same as we collect air quality data. We have to have drinking water data."
But just testing for lead isn't enough, Rick Reibstein of BU said.
"In fact, you could skip the test and go right to replacing lead lines, and then test and see if you've done a good job," Reibstein said. "We know that it's not good to have lead service lines and other fixtures that contain lead, and we should just remove them. And then after we do that, let's spend the money to test."
But replacing lead piping and fixtures is expensive. And while the state DEP is offering to pay for testing, school districts could have real concerns about addressing lead that's discovered – beyond simply turning off the water, as Boston has.
"That's an area of very live discussion right now with a number of us that work on lead issues," said DEP Commissioner Suuberg. "Are there programs that we can use to help schools replace fixtures on a smaller scale? I think we're still in the process of working through that. I think in a few weeks we might have something more to say about it. But there are people working on it."
Even with funding, it would take some time to replace all the lead piping out there. And some say there's a quicker way to address the problem.
"We think ultimately what we need to be doing is requiring filters first," said Erik Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Olson said that could be done by state law "requiring that schools install filters to make sure that there is a centralized location or locations in the schools that have safe drinking water. And we can certainly test after that. But until we've got those filter stations in the schools, kids are still going to be exposed to excessive lead in many of them."
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Boston Public Schools shut off drinking water in most of their schools in 2016. The majority have had their water shut off since the 1980s.
