AREA — The issue of lead in school drinking water has received a lot of attention in recent years. This is because school-age children are among those particularly vulnerable to health and developmental problems after exposure to high levels of lead. With the passage of LD 153 (An Act to Strengthen Testing for Lead in School Drinking Water), the Maine Legislature has mandated that all K-12 schools in Maine test their drinking water for the presence of lead.
That testing happened in February and a letter went out to most families of children in the SAD 44 district in April.
According to Maine CDC: “Drinking water with high levels of lead can affect your child’s health in several ways. We are most concerned about children under the age of 6 years because a young child’s brain is still growing and is more easily harmed by lead. Young children absorb more lead than older children and adults.
“In young children, lead can affect brain development, causing learning disabilities and behavioral problems. For older children and adults, ongoing lead exposure can damage the brain, nervous system, and kidneys, and cause high blood pressure.”
When lead is present in drinking water, the CDC explains, it usually is a result of lead leaching from pipes and plumbing fixtures inside the building or facility and not from the water supply itself.
“The good news,” Superintendent David Murphy wrote to Crescent Park School parents, “is that all of the recently added water bottle stations are fine, and those are the locations students use to hydrate. With the exception of one classroom sink, the remainder of the identified areas are in locations that are used less frequently.”
Levels were higher at Telstar Middle and High School, although the newer water bottle stations there were also fine.
“As the first step in this process,” Murphy wrote, “we have stopped using any of the identified faucets, which are primarily found in some classrooms and we have ‘bagged’ them to prevent use, while we address the next steps that will need to be taken.”
The district has submitted additional, follow-up samples, the results of which may help to determine what those mitigations steps will need to be.
The second set is required for any school that had elevated results in the first test, Murphy explained. “We test water at the Woodstock school regularly because water quality has always been an issue (high iron content and discoloration of the water – not as a result of concerns about lead).
In addition to the testing, there is also a filtration system in the school to help deal with that issue, but we have not used our water fountains there for many years and have supplied bottled water to that facility instead for all drinking purposes. All of the other schools are on town water so we had not typically tested in those places prior to this new legislation.”
Results are not back yet from the 30 second samples that needed to be run.
“When we do get those results for Crescent Park and Woodstock,” Murphy wrote in an email, “we will be contacting an engineering consultant to work with us and to advise us about what next steps need to be taken to resolve any identified areas in the district schools where the lead levels continue to exceed the 15 ppb level. We intend to address and resolve those identified areas as soon as possible.”
All water test results are posted on the SAD44.org website (there is a new button on the homepage) as well as information about the risks of lead in drinking water.
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