The truth about lead in our schools

The NYC iSchool, a place filled with creative people and creative classes, where daily you walk through the halls touching the walls with your backpack, hands, and arms. People subliminally touch their hands to their mouth or even just hands to backpack to mouth. 

Professor Gerry Markowitz of John Jay College has said that “People do it all the time and they don’t even notice it.” 

 “Lead is mostly transferred to the body through something called hand to mouth,” said Dr. Elizabeth Gifford. 

From a preliminary EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) approved qualitative 3m lead test, the result was found that in an area swabbed with peeling paint in the iSchool Commons, was that there were at least 2 micrograms of lead in the area swabbed. This means that there is lead in some of the peeling paint at the iSchool. However, this test will not give a quantitative number of our lead levels until our city gets around to checking it, which could be years.  

 But the shocker is that according to Ms. Bailey, the city has never checked the school’s peeling paint. In the 100 plus years that the iSchool’s building has existed, the Department of Education hasn’t checked the school once. Ms. Bailey even said that when doing her training to become a principal, she was never taught what to do if there was a lead problem.

The person who is supposed to deal with this problem are the custodians, but the head custodian for the iSchool and Chelsea is also the head of another building’s custodial staff. With a lead problem, the iSchool would have to pay a lot of money to get the building checked and repainted. 

“There is no systematic approach to examining the buildings,” said Dr. Morri Markowitz, director of the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Treatment Program at Montefiore’s Children’s Hospital in the Bronx. “It’s a problem because we have a lot of old school buildings, but there’s no mandate to systematically examine the structures for lead-based paint. And it’s expensive, so who has an interest not to look?”

Even if there aren’t the funds, the problem is there and it is dangerous. The facts speak for themselves when it comes to lead poisoning. It’s not just the iSchool, every single other middle and high school in the city has not been checked for lead. Hundreds of thousands of kids are unknowingly exposed to potential lead. Since the city thinks that children under six are the most at-risk group, they care about their safety enough to check all their classrooms. What about everyone else? We have a right to safety and there is lead in NYC schools, and it harms all kids – young and old.

Professor Gerry Markowitz said, “This is a disease is preventable and we’ve known this since the 1920s, it’s preventable and it’s a tremendous failure of our society that we haven’t dealt with it.”

The Effects

The iSchool has tested positive in the Commons for lead, but what does this mean?

As far as the risks go the Mayo Clinic found that in small children “Developmental delay, learning difficulties, irritability, loss of appetite, weight loss, sluggishness and fatigue, abdominal pain, vomiting, constipation, hearing loss, seizures, and eating things such as paint chips that aren’t food (pica).” In severe cases, AACAP (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry), found, lead poisoning can even cause death. 

But these effects don’t stop at young kids even in adults the Mayo Clinic finds that effects can be life-changing, with symptoms consisting of “High blood pressure, joint and muscle pain, difficulties with memory or concentration, headache, abdominal pain, mood disorders, reduced sperm count and abnormal sperm, miscarriage, stillbirth or premature birth in pregnant women.” In young adults, our brains are still developing and are still susceptible to physical damage.

According to Dr. Morri Markowitz, in a recent interview, “In young adults over the age of 12 lead poisoning can have early symptoms like constant stomach aches, constipation, and a hard time concentrating in class.” 

Now, this doesn’t mean that if you have these symptoms that you have lead poisoning, it is just early symptoms that show in some children over the age of 12.  

The New York Health Department even says that “Between 25 and 40 micrograms, regular exposure to lead is occurring. There is some evidence of potential physiologic problems (elevated).” But levels below this the “safe” levels are still worth noting. 

Dr. Elizabeth Gifford, a family practitioner, has said, “There are no safe levels of lead in your system.” She put it simply by saying, “The scale for lead is better described as how many of your enzymes are blocked by lead, If you have a level of 5 in your blood then 5% of your enzymes are blocked.” The more that is blocked the worse, and the more problems you will face.

All these symptoms aren’t hypothetical. In fact, according to a study done by the Education Law Center, students that had lead poisoning were permanently damaged “with impairment of reading skills sufficiently extensive to be labeled reading disability (indicated by scores two grades below the expected scores), and deficits in vocabulary, fine motor skills, reaction time, and hand-eye coordination. Furthermore, among 10 children with the highest levels of lead in their blood, five students had reading disabilities and almost half of the students had stopped attending high school before graduating.” 

Only it wasn’t just reading disabilities that came because of lead poisoning, “The addition of lower IQ scores, more needed special education services, and had a significantly higher rate of failure in schools.” 

Children can suffer and become harmed permanently because of lead poisoning, and this is the clearest and the only reason the city should need to remediate all classrooms in NYC.

The Problem

In the entirety of New York City, the number of classrooms with lead levels high enough to cause brain damage is “over 800” according to the Gothamist. But some estimates by the New York Daily News even put the number as high as 900 hundred classrooms. 

In the water department, the New York Daily News found that “A separate inspection revealed that water with unsafe lead levels was flowing through at least one faucet in 80% of the more than 500 buildings tested last school year.” The New York Times found that “In all, there are 142,411 water fixtures spread over the city’s 1,500 schools — drinking fountains, bathrooms faucets and other sinks used for cooking or washing dishes. Of those, 12,457 tested positive for high levels of lead.” These were in the schools with children who were under the six.  

The NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) found that “In New York, testing recently revealed that at least 82 percent of the nearly 5,000 public schools have drinking water lead.” They continue by saying “With lead, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, and you can’t taste it. You don’t know what you’ve got unless you test.” 

However, the real shocker was that the Gothamist found “In several classrooms, dust samples showed lead levels more than 100 times the city’s current safety standard.” 

The DOE just recently released a report that highlighted the work they did over this past summer in the Pre-, Kindergarten, and first-grade classrooms. “In total, custodians and independent inspectors conducted a round of visual inspections in 8,438 rooms across all five boroughs, and successfully remediated 1,860 impacted rooms.” 

It’s not just a simple don’t drink from the leaded water. The lead is in the walls; it’s in the paint and the dust. The NYC Health Department has said that it only takes 25 micrograms of lead in a fully grown adult’s bloodstream for psychological symptoms to show. That’s less than one-tenth of a sugar packet. All it takes to cause physiological damage. 

This was a major scare for parents Letitia Doggett and Andrew Godsberg when it was discovered that at the age of one and two, their two sons tested positive for lead poisoning. For them, it started when their two-year-old son’s blood was tested. The test detected that their son had lead poisoning, and they immediately tested their other son who also had lead poisoning. The kids had gotten lead poisoning from their apartment, which they later discovered had lead paint in it. At first, according to Andrew, “I was scared and then quickly I became angry and scared. Angry that the careless landlords had decided to let an unqualified contractor remediate the old lead paint in the apartment when they renovated it just before we moved in. And scared because there was unquantifiable damage to my children’s’ brains that we might never fully understand or know how serious it was.”

Letitia said, “It was one of the scariest and most distressing experiences of my life. When we found out our kids had lead poisoning, and then when we found out that all of our possessions had also been contaminated and that we had to move out of our new apartment, we were in shock. It was so stressful trying to figure out what we needed to do and how to take care of our two little ones to try to make sure they weren’t in jeopardy and at the same time, try to figure out where to live and moving out, etc, etc. I worried all the time, and just felt so distressed and helpless about how to make sure my kids were ok. I also felt guilty for not even knowing the risks of lead to our kids.” She had no idea what was going to happen. Both parents were most scared of the unknown. Letitia even said, “we had no idea that lead poisoning could lead to cognitive delays and have physiological impacts on our kids’ nervous systems that were irreversible.”

According to Letitia, as a result of the lead poisoning, the doctors believe that “there are mild, yet lasting effects on our kids because one developed mild dyslexia and the other one has muscle tone issues. They can be dealt with, but they are constant reminders of the terrifying time finding out they had been poisoned. And a part of me is always nervous and suspicious about possible health risks for my kids.” 

These are things the family never wants others to experience but sadly with the state of our public schools, their problems are becoming the reality of even more people. No one should have to fear for their child’s life because of a poisoning that is 100 percent preventable.

Prevention 

For younger kids, the Mayo Clinic recommends that the best ways to prevent lead poisoning is to “Wash hands and toys. To help reduce hand-to-mouth transfer of contaminated dust or soil, wash your children’s hands after outdoor play, before eating and at bedtime. Wash their toys regularly. Clean dusty surfaces. Clean your floors with a wet mop and wipe furniture, windowsills and other dusty surfaces with a damp cloth. Remove shoes before entering the house. This will help keep lead-based soil outside. Run cold water. If you have older plumbing containing lead pipes or fittings, run your cold water for at least a minute before using. Don’t use hot tap water to make baby formula or for cooking. Prevent children from playing on soil. Provide them with a sandbox that’s covered when not in use. Plant grass or cover bare soil with mulch. Eat a healthy diet. Regular meals and good nutrition might help lower lead absorption. Children especially need enough calcium, vitamin C and iron in their diets to help keep lead from being absorbed. Keep your home well-maintained. If your home has lead-based paint, check regularly for peeling paint and fix problems promptly. Try not to sand, which generates dust particles that contain lead.”

But for older kids, there aren’t many direct sources for what they should do to prevent lead poisoning.

The most clear way to prevent lead poisoning for older kids and everyone else is to get screened regularly for lead poisoning. Parents.com found that “Never ignoring the problem is the number one priority.” If there’s peeling paint don’t ignore it, test it don’t turn a blind eye to something dangerous to all kids, do something. 

Chalkbeat, a news source who reported on the lead in elementary schools, said, “The very first thing that you should do if your child’s school is on the list of affected New York City schools is asking your child’s pediatrician for a blood test to check their lead levels.” 

Except the thing is is that in NYC the DOE is only testing the “high risk” classrooms in schools, grades Pre- through first grade. In their eyes, these are the schools with children six and under in them. Medical professionals have said that this group of kids are at the highest risk. 

But according to Christopher Werth, a senior health editor for WNYC, and Morri Markowitz, head of the lead department at Montefiore Hospital, both say that anybody can get lead poisoning, and that age six is a very arbitrary number. It should not be a hard cut off kids just a little bit older than six can have the same risks as those a grade below them.

Markowitz continued by saying, “The government stopped collecting data about lead affected groups in the 1990’s, so we don’t have current data on which age group is most affected, so assumptions about a strict cut off for ‘most critical’ age group are bad.”

Professor Gerry Markowitz said that “The public health authorities said we should stop the problem before it became dangerous, but that didn’t happen, this is a disease is preventable and we’ve known this since the 1920’s.”

 Dr. Morri Markowitz said that “Schools continued to use lead paint until 1985.” 

According to Anna Alanbrook, the principal of the Brooklyn New School, one of the many whose buildings tested positive for lead, “It was the parents who brought up that there was peeling paint, they were the ones who made the city start testing.” 

The city wasn’t interested in testing schools for lead paint. It’s evident by the fact that it wasn’t the city who called for the investigation even though it’s been almost 35 years since the city stopped using lead paint.

And even in schools, the city did repaint, but they only did it in small sections and even with classrooms that had lead in them they only re-painted some parts of the classroom, according to Ana Alenbrook, “There was not enough budget to finish re-doing all the classrooms.” Even in schools where the DOE did test there and the school’s budgets can’t afford it. 

The DOE needs to remediate all schools and if they can’t test the “low risk” middle and high schools, Morri Markowitz and Gerry Markowitz both agree that “The school system should not allow the students in classrooms that tested positive for lead.” 

What does this mean for the iSchool? 

Well according to Ms. Bailey, “The iSchool will never be tested for lead by the city.” And yet the DOE is preventing our school from getting tested by a third party. They have a “system” but it does not involve testing our school. 

For now, the iSchool will have to spend our money to repaint the peeling paint whenever a custodian notices it. 

But will that do? The community is in agreement that every school should be tested, so why isn’t it? Something more needs to happen because students’ safety is priority one.