Flaws in an Illinois law that required testing schools' water for lead have weakened its ability to protect children.
Students pass a drinking fountain and bottle filling station at Washburne School in Winnetka. The district said it shut down or curbed the use of any fixtures where elevated lead levels were detected, then budgeted millions for remediation.With no state funding and shifting guidance, schools’ actions on lead in water vary widely
When Illinois legislators passed the water testing law, they joined a wave of government officials alarmed by the potential dangers lurking in the pipes of the nation’s aging school buildings. But there was little consensus on what levels of lead were worth spending time and resources to mitigate in order to protect the country’s children.
In Illinois, the 2017 law directed schools to notify parents of results above 5 parts per billion but did not set a level where mitigation was required. This left school administrators to navigate a dizzying labyrinth of guidance that shifted as time went by. The result was a patchwork of responses from Illinois schools, the Tribune found. Some districts spent millions to greatly reduce or eliminate the lead in their school drinking water, while others reported taking little action.A 2017 Illinois law required elementary schools to test each of their drinking water sources for lead and submit the results to the state by the end of 2018.
A separate records request was made to the Chicago Public Schools for all available results beginning in 2016 from its ongoing testing program, which spans multiple years. To help assess the impact of the law, the Tribune also sent school district officials a survey on what steps they took following the testing.
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