Hundreds of thousands of students exposed to lead in NJ schools. Here’s why officials failed to stop it – NorthJersey.com

More than 250,000 New Jersey students — and likely many more in recent years — were at risk of drinking water tainted with dangerous levels of lead at their schools, an investigation by the Trenton bureau of the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey found.

Lead-tainted water was detected in nearly a third of the 673 public school districts and charter schools, from cities like Camden and Newark to the suburbs of Parsippany and Rumson. The contaminated water was found in drinking fountains and in kitchen faucets. Lead was so pervasive that testers found it in ice machines, coffee makers and even a couple of emergency eyewash stations, which federal safety experts warn can easily spread contaminated water into a person’s nose, mouth and skin.

Schools detailed all of that contamination in reports sent to state officials, which were ordered up three years ago, the last time officials confronted fears of lead in the water. The reports were collected, but what they show about the widespread problem of lead in schools was not made public by the state.

The Network obtained the individual reports using state public records laws and then used computer-assisted analysis to provide a detailed look at the depth and breadth of the contamination.

Search our database to see if your child’s school had high lead levels and what, if any, corrective measures were taken.

No amount of lead is safe for children, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children and pregnant women are especially susceptible to lead’s permanent harm, which includes irreversible brain damage and developmental delays.

Lead in school water has been a known problem in New Jersey since at least 2002, when levels well above the federal government’s standard forced Camden schools to shut off the taps and start buying bottled water. 

In the time it took for a student to move from kindergarten through high school, state leaders did little to address a public health hazard, experts and some lawmakers said.

Even the state Schools Development Authority, whose sole mission is to build and support public schools, rejected requests by Camden and Newark for water improvements. A spokesman said the request for help cleaning lead from the school pipes “did not meet the requirements for approval.”

“Lead is odorless, it’s tasteless, it’s invisible. If you turned on the water and the water came out green, it would be something that prompted more immediate action,” said Peter Chen, policy counsel for the Newark-based nonprofit Advocates for Children of New Jersey. “Because it’s this slow problem and it’s baked into the infrastructure, I think that has slowed the responses.”

There were 250,000 students in the schools where dangerous levels of lead were found during 2016 and 2017, the one school year the state required testing. School officials then pledged to take action — from replacing filters to providing bottled water. But those students and many more before them were likely exposed to lead-tainted water.

Lead contamination is not a problem limited to low-income and minority schools like those in Camden and Newark. Less than a quarter of schools identified by the Network’s analysis have mostly low-income and minority students.

Now there’s renewed attention in New Jersey on the dangerous metal that leaches from aging pipes, after the federal Environmental Protection Agency took action in Newark last month when filters at two of three homes failed to remove lead from water. Essex County borrowed $120 million to replace city pipes, and the city distributed bottled water to some residents. On Monday, officials announced that a subsequent round of testing showed that 97 percent of filters, based on testing at about 300 homes, were able to reduce the amount of lead in the water.

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If the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, in 2014 did not remind New Jersey officials of the dangers lurking below ground, Newark set off alarms in 2016 when 30 schools had to shut off their water because of toxic lead levels.

At that time, then-Gov. Chris Christie required schools to test their faucets and drinking fountains for lead. If the results exceeded 15 parts per billion, the level at which the federal government requires corrective action, the districts had to notify the state.

Using those notifications, the Network this month identified about 480 schools, not including those in Newark and Camden that have long-standing problems, that reported dangerous lead levels. Nearly three dozen schools bought bottled water for students for at least some time after the tests.

Lead may be in other schools, too, but the state collects detailed reports only when tests exceed the federal standard of 15 parts per billion. Testing is required in schools once every six years.

Requiring schools in 2016 to conduct tests was perhaps the strongest action taken by state government to that point. But it also did not require the state Department of Education to take action to remove lead, or follow up with schools to ensure they made repairs.

While filters like those used in Newark can reduce lead, the only way to fully remove it from drinking water is to replace the pipes leading to schools and homes, which the state estimates would cost upward of $2 billion.

Even today, political leaders are bedeviled by the infrastructure crisis before them.

Gov. Phil Murphy and lawmakers have said the federal government must intervene to help bear such a large cost. Yet New Jersey has spent that much on other projects in recent years, including widening the New Jersey Turnpike. 

“This is statewide, and I think a nationwide challenge in urban, rural and suburban communities,” Murphy said at a news conference Monday in Newark. “Paterson and Trenton and Camden and other communities are on a rigorous protocol already that gets reviewed regularly by the DEP and the EPA and those communities.” 

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Irreversible dangers of lead

Lead leaches from aging pipes and infrastructure, and it happens not only in schools. A 2016 Asbury Park Press analysis found that four out of five public water systems in New Jersey reported some level of lead in the drinking water they supplied to homes, businesses and schools.

The districts in Parsippany and Rumson told the state they would shut off all water sources with high levels of lead, and posted signs warning students and staff not to drink from sinks and outlets pending permanent fixes. Neither district responded to messages seeking comment.

Even at low levels, lead can lower a child’s IQ and ability to pay attention. At higher levels, lead poisoning can cause kidney damage, low birth weight, stomachaches and nausea. While lead in water is a concern, lead in paint is a more significant threat to children.

More than 3,400 New Jersey children under the age of 6 had elevated blood lead levels high enough that the CDC required monitoring, according to 2017 study, the most recent data available.

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Yet even the available data on the number of children exposed to lead doesn’t capture the pervasiveness of the problem. About a quarter of New Jersey children under the age of 6 were tested for lead in their blood in 2017, according to the CDC. 

In schools where the plumbing far pre-dates a 1986 ban on lead pipes, districts have grappled with the cost of providing students safe drinking water.

Camden schools have supplied bottled water to students since 2002. At an average cost of about $100,000 a year, a spokesman said, bottled water has cost $1.7 million. 

Joshua Sims, 20, went to Camden public schools and remembers the drinking fountains with red signs warning not to drink the water. Sometimes, he said, the district would run out of cups for the bottled water.

“If you wanted water, you were just out of luck,” he said.

It didn’t hit him until he went away to college — he’s studying law at Cornell University — that Camden schools had such significant water troubles. 

“I grew up with that,” Sims said. “I would make a joke: Our water tastes better than their water because we got that lead, we got that seasoning. I didn’t even realize how big a problem it was until I left.”

A ‘frightening’ problem

In 2016, lead was found in about half of Newark’s public schools.

Combined with enduring outcry over Flint, there was no shortage of political maneuvering to project leadership in the face of a growing public health concern.

Murphy, at the time preparing to announce his candidacy to succeed Christie, cut an ad saying the governor had “failed our kids” and urged people to visit a page on his website to “join the fight to protect our kids from lead poisoning.” Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, and other top Democrats warned of a “potential public health crisis” and some lawmakers considered raising a new tax on water to replace aging infrastructure.

Lawmakers also created a drinking water task force, passing some bills that included requiring utilities to improve their infrastructure and issuing a report with policy recommendations in early 2018. But they failed to pass a multibillion-dollar bond bill for widespread upgrades.

“That’s where I think maybe there hasn’t been as much progress as we’d like,” said one of the task force’s co-leaders, Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-Middlesex. “It’s all a matter of prioritization. I personally would like to see us do it. That’s something I would vote for. At this point I’ve been working on the issue for a couple of years, and I do feel that it’s a major problem, and a frightening one.”

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Even in instances where it would seem the state could step in, it didn’t. The Schools Development Authority and the Department of Education denied Camden and Newark money for water system upgrades. The authority has borrowed nearly $12 billion in the past decade to build new schools and provide grants for safety improvements in the state’s poorest districts.

The denials were “not a judgment on the importance of a particular matter, but a determination that the district, or the condition itself, did not meet the requirements for approval that are set in law,” Department of Education spokesman Michael Yaple said. 

David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which advocates for public school funding, aired his grievances with the state to the task force.

“Both the SDA and [Department of Education] have been very unresponsive to our repeated requests that they work, collaboratively, with Newark and other districts,” he said to the task force. “The agencies seem to have taken the position that it is acceptable for districts that have schools like this to remain on bottled water indefinitely.”

The schools authority, which more recently has been troubled and gutted after a patronage scandal, is rebuilding Camden High School and recently opened two new schools in Newark.

Small steps forward

State leaders have taken some steps to address the issue, but advocates say the only way to truly solve it is to replace the lead pipes and connections leading to homes and schools.

Doing so statewide is estimated to cost $2 billion. In a state with rising debt and public employee pension costs, that is a nearly impossible figure to fund — but New Jersey has made sizable allocations before.

Over the last decades, the state has spent $1.2 billion to replenish Garden State beaches. It borrowed $2.3 billion to widen a 35-mile stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike.

“It’s fair to say that not enough has been done, that people really haven’t grabbed hold of the issue and said: This is going to be solved on our watch,” said Daniel J. Van Abs, associate professor of practice for water, society and environment in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. “It’s a really, really complicated situation. But the problem that we often have is that folks who are faced with the lead issue, the first thing to do is to try to minimize the perception of its impact.”

Last year, voters approved a bond measure that will funnel $100 million to improve water infrastructure in schools. But the Department of Education has yet to roll out an application process for the funds, saying will “be announced in the near future so necessary water infrastructure improvements can begin.”

State lawmakers are also holding hearings about shortcomings of the 2017 Water Quality Accountability Act, which required public water systems to follow more strict testing and reporting requirements. While the hearings have focused on widespread infrastructure issues, lead in the water has emerged as a particular concern. 

“We’re hearing a lot about it now, but it’s existed for so many years in the state of New Jersey,” Sen. Brian Stack, D-Hudson, said during Thursday’s hearing. “I think we really need to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, to get this job done once and for all. The fact that we’re still talking about lead pipes and lead paint in New Jersey in 2019 is a sad commentary.”

Since Murphy took office in 2018, he has approved $12.3 million in loans for water line repairs in Newark. Trenton is also expected to make repairs, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Even though the state started requiring, and paying for, all schools to test for lead in 2016, the results of those tests are not readily available. The Department of Education’s role has largely been oversight based on reports from districts, not action to help schools remove the threat of lead.

While schools were required to post tests results online, some did not and others tucked them behind a maze of websites. Christie, who led the requirement, said at the time that it was a “smart but also aggressive way of dealing with any concerns any parent across the state might have.”

It did not alleviate the concern of Syreeta Rucker, who graduated from Camden High School in 2004. She has three children in Camden schools where sinks tested in 2017 had high levels of lead, according to the district website.

Rucker said she hadn’t been told of problems of lead in the school district’s water.

“This the first I’m hearing about it,” she told a reporter. “Like Flint?”

Rucker was pessimistic the school district, county or state would step in to fix the problem.

“They don’t care, the people that run it,” she said.

Stacey Barchenger: @sbarchenger; 732-427-0114; sbarchenger@gannettnj.com; Dustin Racioppi: @dracioppi; 609-984-6623; racioppi@northjersey.com

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