A Colorado nonprofit is calling on school leaders statewide to repair or replace hundreds of sinks and drinking fountains, after its recent analysis showed many of those fixtures had high levels of lead in them, when testing was done on them more than a year ago.
Of the 2,201 water fixtures that tested positive for high levels of lead in the 10 largest Colorado school districts in May 2023, 1,417 still had not yet been fixed by May 1, according to a report released last week by CoPIRG, a Colorado nonprofit working to improve public health and safety statewide.
“Kids may be out of school for the summer, but schools have a lot of homework to do to ensure sources of lead-contaminated drinking water are addressed before kids return in the fall,” Kirsten Schatz, an advocate at the CoPIRG Foundation, said in a news release.
“We’re calling on schools to adopt a “Get The Lead Out” policy that eliminates lead from kids’ drinking water and gives all Colorado children a safer and healthier learning environment,” she said.
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Decades ago, lead was commonly used in water service lines and fixtures that people drink from. But Congress banned the heavy metal from being used in water pipes in the late 1980s, after people realized corrosion can cause the chemical to seep into drinking water.
Lead is one of the most common and preventable causes of poisoning in children, and when they’re exposed to low levels of lead, kids can become inattentive, hyperactive and irritable, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
Children with higher levels of lead in their blood can have hearing loss or a hard time learning or reading. In the most severe cases, kids can have permanent brain damage or even die from lead poisoning, according to the child psychiatry organization.
A 2021 study found 72% of Colorado children younger than 6, who were tested, had levels of lead in their blood, well above the national rate of almost 51%.
States have been working over the years, on their own or with the federal government, to keep lead out of drinking water.
Schools that have water fountains or sinks with high levels of lead should swap out fixtures, replace components such as faucets, valves and supply lines, or install filters on all taps that dispense drinking water, the CoPIRG report suggests.
“Some of this aging infrastructure is just a fact of life but we’re at the point where we can do better and fix these things, so kids in schools and Coloradans in our homes can have safe water to drink,” Schatz said in an interview this week.
State law has been pushing testing for lead in water since 2022
In 2022, House Bill 1358 required officials to hire state-certified workers to test fixtures for lead at all public elementary schools, day care facilities and family child care homes on or before May 31, 2023. If state funding becomes available, middle school leaders are required to abide by that same requirement on or before Nov. 30.
Within 30 days of receiving those test results, the schools and child care facilities must publish those findings and any lead remediation plans on their websites, report the results to the Water Quality Control Commission and comply with many other safety requirements listed in the 2022 law.
If a test result shows a drinking water source has lead levels at 5 parts per billion or more, a child care center or school must notify all employees and childrens’ guardians and shut off that drinking water source until it is replaced or remediated, according to House Bill 1358, which allocated millions of dollars from the state’s general fund to help reimburse school districts for the remediation work.
The elementary schools and licensed day care facilities that were required to test for lead under House Bill 1358 teach or take care of almost 600,000 kids across Colorado.
The number of fixtures in the 10 largest school districts that had fixtures with lead levels at 5 parts per billion or more varied across the state, ranging from zero fixtures in one school district to hundreds in others, according to the CoPIRG report, which analyzed statewide data pulled on May 1.
Aurora Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, Cherry Creek Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools were among the 10 largest school districts with the highest percentage of fixtures with lead remediation work reported as still underway, according to the CoPIRG report, which analyzes statewide data it pulled on May 1.
Those school districts still needed to remediate more than 70% of their contaminated fixtures on that date, according to the report.
Adams County School District 12, Poudre School District and the Boulder Valley School District had successfully remediated more than half of the tainted fixtures that required remediation by May 1, according to the report.
Across the 10 largest school districts included in the report, some of the highest amounts of lead were found at a drinking water fountain at Eagleview Elementary School, an Adams 12 school in Thornton.
Test results at that water fountain showed lead levels of 4,500 parts per billion.
A sink at Evergreen Middle School in Jefferson County had lead levels at 2,080 parts per billion, and Holly Hills Elementary School in Cherry Creek showed lead test results of 1,100 parts per billion in a classroom faucet.
Eagleview Elementary replaced the drinking fountain in March 2023, while remediation at Evergreen and Holly Hills remains underway, according to the report.
St. Vrain Valley Schools was the only of the 10 largest school districts that had no drinking fountains or sinks that showed lead levels at 5 parts per billion or more.
CoPIRG leaders plan to eventually release a report that focuses on the number of schools with faucets or drinking water stations that contain any amount of lead.
“This program is all focused around fixing water fountains and faucets that tested at 5 parts per billion or more and we actually think that threshold isn’t good enough,” Schatz said in an interview. “There’s no safe level of lead to expose our kids to, so we think school districts should go above and beyond to prevent lead exposure, by putting filters on every water fixture in the school.
“It sounds like it would be really expensive to put filters on every water fountain and faucet but there’s actually a lot of evidence that this approach is even more cost-effective than testing and only fixing certain fixtures.”
Data in the report doesn’t capture recent work by schools
The CoPIRG report’s data lags behind the progress school districts have made on replacing or remediating sinks and drinking fountains that contain lead, two school district leaders said.
“The report is accurate when it says those are the number of fixtures that needed to be fixed. It’s inaccurate in terms of what the current status is,” said Joni Rix, environmental program manager for Denver Public Schools. “We have done almost all repairs.”
Bottle fillers at eight DPS elementary schools need electrical outlets installed.
“This is an upgrade to the schools that gives them chilled, filtered water versus what they had before, which was warm water that potentially had lead in it — coming from an old porcelain 1950s fountain,” Rix said. “These are supposed to be done by the end of the month.”
When that work is done, Denver Public School leaders will have met all the remediation requirements in its elementary schools, she said.
The school district had lead testing done on fixtures in middle schools last winter and has not made any of those repairs yet, Rix said.
“We’re working on the remediation plans on those. We’ll look to get those fixed by the end of the year,” she said of the middle school fixtures.
“We had about 75 elementary school buildings that needed repairs. We only have 19 middle schools that need repairs,” Rix said.
The remediation process is necessary, because lead exposure is dangerous for children. But the process has been time consuming, bureaucratic and cumbersome, Rix said. “Every fixture takes at least six months to get repaired.”
A shortage of electricians and plumbers made it hard to get the remediation work done in elementary schools on time, Rix said.
Many DPS buildings were constructed during the 1950s and 1960s, which is why it was among the districts that had the highest number of fixtures needing replacement, she said.
The school district needed to replace or remediate 396 fixtures in its elementary schools and early childhood facilities that tested at or above 5 parts per billion, Schatz said.
Denver Public Schools will receive $450,000 from the money allocated through House Bill 1358 to help it make repairs, Rix said.
“It’s helpful the state has this funding available to help us make these corrections now,” she said.
Aurora Public Schools leaders said they have been working hard to remediate the faucets and drinking fountains that contained high lead levels.
“We have more than 3,000 fixtures that were tested, and of those, 195 were flagged for remediation,” Corey Christiansen, a spokesperson for Aurora Public Schools, wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun this week.
“Of the 195 fixtures that were flagged for remediation, we only have 17 that still require action,” he wrote.
The school district’s remediation work has primarily included replacing school faucets and hallway and classroom drinking fountains.
Aurora school district leaders anticipate completing work on all of the fixtures that require remediation by July, Christiansen wrote in the email.
MORE: Parents interested in testing their kids’ blood for lead can visit the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment website or the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site for more information.