Oakland Schools Vow to Step Up Lead Testing, But Teachers Aren’t Convinced

After high lead levels were found in water sources at nearly two dozen Oakland public schools, the district plans to roll out more robust testing on a routine schedule and share the data in a public dashboard.

The plans are set to be presented by Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell at Wednesday’s school board meeting as the district seeks to quell concerns over the safety of drinking water at its campuses. Still, teachers say the situation has affected their classrooms and aren’t convinced that the district’s plans go far enough to ensure water on campus is safe in the future.

During the first week of school, OUSD sent emails notifying families of 22 schools that at least one water source on their campus had heightened lead levels in routine testing over the spring and summer. In one case, the concentration was as high as 900 parts per billion. The Oakland school board’s maximum allowable level is 5 parts per billion, while the state and federal standard is 15 parts per billion.

The testing took place at 49 sites and found a total of 186 needed repairs, according to Johnson-Trammell’s presentation.

As of Aug. 16, 66 have been addressed and are waiting for retesting. The district plans to complete the remediation process within three weeks.

Some teachers and parents criticized what they called a lag in communication after tests were completed, as early as April at certain schools. Stuart Loebl, a sixth-grade teacher at Frick United Academy of Language, where the highest detected lead level was 51 parts per billion, said he doesn’t feel the district’s response has been adequate.

“They let students continue to drink from that fountain for months, both during the rest of the school year and [when] we had 80 students at our site during summer school. To call the problem an issue of communication is very damaging to the trust that I can put in the districts to solve this issue,” Loebl said. “I haven’t seen any kind of explanation as to why that failure happened, in which all these water fountains were not immediately shut down.”

OUSD officials did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but spokesperson John Sasaki told KQED earlier this month that district officials were “aggressive about the testing but were not as efficient at communicating in the ways we should have been. That’s something we are working on as an organization.”

Frick staff found out on Aug. 12, the first day of school, that six fixtures on campus tested over the district limit in April.

Loebl said that made for a hectic start to the school year as everybody was directed to use only the campus’ single FloWater filtered water bottle filling station.

“When 400 people, 370 students plus staff, are trying to use that one FloWater station, it very quickly started to break down and go out of service because the way that these work is they need a certain amount of time for them to filter the water,” he said.

The administration added a second FloWater station last week and brought in Gatorade jugs to supplement the amount of water available. But Loebl teaches on the second floor of the two-story campus, while the FloWater stations are located on the first floor and in the cafeteria — “It’s, the way that students walk, a five to 10-minute round trip to get water,” he said.

Cassandra Lizardi Morales, who teaches sixth grade English at Frick, said it’s been “hit and miss” trying to meet the demand for water in her classroom, especially on hot days.

The district began expedited testing of all campuses more than 50 years old that were not tested earlier this year on Aug. 17. Reports from that testing showed that more than 95% of the fixtures were below OUSD’s permissible lead level and six fixtures were identified for repair, according to the superintendent’s presentation.

Throughout the fall, OUSD plans to conduct testing at its other sites, working from the oldest campuses to the newest and prioritizing early education centers that were not tested recently.

A comprehensive testing schedule will also be announced within 30 days, the presentation says, and OUSD will ask the facilities committee to install more water bottle filling stations on campuses. By January, the district plans to launch a testing dashboard on its website.

But teachers say that the efforts to test and repair fixtures where lead is found might just be “kicking the can down the road.”

“There’s soldering in the lead pipes, and you can do short-term filters, but if you’re not regularly maintaining the filters, the lead will come back into the water,” Loebl said. “There needs to be a long-term plan to replace the pipes so that there is no longer lead seeping into our water.”

Lizardi Morales added that she feels the district will need to rebuild trust in schools’ water sources after their retesting is complete. She said she wouldn’t feel comfortable drinking the water unless lead was not detectable at all.

“They are serving a community of children who are already exposed to lead in the paint of their old homes and soil; they shouldn’t be exasperating the lead poisoning of our children,” Lizardi Morales said. “I’m not even comfortable with the 5 parts per billion… no amount of lead is safe.”