Milwaukee joins the honor roll for safer drinking water at school

On October 8th, President Biden arrived in Milwaukee to announce a new 10-year deadline for water utilities to replace lead service lines – a key provision of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new Lead & Copper Rule Improvements. The choice of Milwaukee was appropriate. After years of advocacy by grassroots advocates, the city – and Wisconsin as a whole – are  making significant progress in replacing lead pipes. Milwaukee is now also a leader when it comes to ensuring safer drinking water at school.

When parents send their kids off to school each day, access to clean drinking water should be a guarantee. Yet, across the country, schools are finding lead in their water. While the EPA’s new rule marks huge progress on service lines made of lead, contamination of schools water usually comes from interior plumbing and fixtures made with sufficient lead to leach into drinking water. National limits on lead in plumbing and fixtures were dramatically lowered only as recently as 2014, and even some fixtures meeting current standards have been shown to leach lead into water.

Lead is highly toxic to children. Even low levels of lead exposure can lead to learning disabilities, including ADHD, as well as antisocial behaviors and depression. Medical researchers estimate that more than 24 million children in America today risk losing IQ points due to low-level lead exposure. In states like Wisconsin, where children’s blood lead levels are already more than double the national average, further lead exposure can be especially harmful. That’s why urgent action is needed to get the lead out wherever our kids go to learn and play each day.

The most comprehensive solution would be to remove all the lead from our schools’ water systems – just as we’ve banned lead in gasoline and paint used in homes, and the new EPA rule will eventually put lead service lines into the dustbin of history. Yet removing every bit of lead-bearing plumbing from all school buildings is probably cost-prohibitive.

So while schools should work to get the lead out where they can, the first step towards safer water is to install filters certified to remove lead on every tap used for drinking, cooking and beverage preparation. Perhaps the single biggest step in this approach is installing lead-filtering water stations, which replace a lead-bearing water source (fountains) while capturing lead coming from plumbing within the school building.

That is exactly what Milwaukee Public Schools has done. After testing revealed lead contamination in school drinking water across the district, Milwaukee installed more than 3200 water stations with lead-removing filters. With that homework completed, Milwaukee now joins the growing honor roll of jurisdictions using a “filter first” approach – including Philadelphia, Portland (OR), Washington, DC and Michigan.

Now it’s time to secure safer drinking water for the rest of Wisconsin’s kids too. 

Governor Evers and Wisconsin legislators now have a tremendous opportunity to advance this clean water solution for students and teachers across the state. A statewide policy should be coupled with the estimated $52 million in funding that schools will need to purchase and install water stations and filters. A healthy future for our kids is worth that investment.

The state should also break the cycle of lead contamination by ensuring that new plumbing and fixtures at schools do not leach lead in the first place.

No parent should have to be concerned about the safety of their child’s drinking water at school. Milwaukee has shown the way. Now let’s get the lead out in every school across Wisconsin.