Lead paint peeling from a radiator in a first-grade classroom in Brooklyn; chipping from the plumbing in a boy's bathroom in Queens; falling from the ceiling in a school room in Manhattan.
An investigation by WNYC and Gothamist has found substantial levels of lead contamination from deteriorating paint inside four public elementary schools operated by the New York City Department of Education.
All four buildings had areas of cracked, chipped and peeling paint. Loose paint chips collected and analyzed by a certified lab tested positive for lead. In several classrooms, dust samples showed lead levels more than 100 times the city’s current safety standard.
While just a small sample of the roughly 800 public elementary schools, the findings highlight a gap in the city’s lead poisoning protection laws -- they do not require lead testing or remediation in public schools that are not under renovation. They also come at a moment when Mayor Bill de Blasio — a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination — has pledged to completely eliminate lead exposure in the city by 2029.
An Ongoing Battle
Such pledges aren’t new.
In 2004, the New York City Council passed a sweeping new set of lead regulations known as Local Law One. The stated aim was to eliminate lead poisoning in the five boroughs by 2010. The number of children with elevated lead levels has dropped by more than 90 percent since it was enacted. But today, thousands of children still test positive for elevated levels of lead in their blood every year.
In response, the mayor and the City Council have introduced a raft of new measures, including an effort to screen more children for lead exposure and to test all of the city’s public drinking fountains for lead.
“Today, we make clear that New York City commits to zero lead in our city,” de Blasio announced at a press event in the Bronx in January. “We mean literal eradication.”
Listen to Christopher Werth’s report on WNYC:
Much of the focus is on aging lead paint and the hazardous dust it can create. According to the city’s health department, those are the primary routes of exposure into the bloodstream of a young child, primarily through hand to mouth activity.
And yet, many of the laws that regulate lead paint today largely exclude the school buildings where more than a million children spend a large number of their waking hours.
“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?”
(WNYC / Gothamist)
Risk of Exposure
Over the past six months, WNYC contacted principals and PTA officers at over 30 public elementary schools constructed before 1960 — the year lead-paint use was banned in New York City. We asked them to let us collect paint-chip and dust samples from floors and window sills.
Most schools did not want to participate. But we were able to gain access to four buildings — two in Brooklyn, one in Queens and another in Manhattan. In all four cases, principals and/or PTA officers have been notified of the results so they can act on the information.
WNYC is not naming the schools because in two cases the reporter didn’t have permission to test, and in two others the principals who allowed the reporter in did not have permission to do so. Some principals expressed concern about reprisal from DOE and about their schools being singled out in the reporting for what is potentially a much wider problem.
Our focus was on classrooms from pre-K to the second grade, and in common areas shared by students six-years of age and under who are most at risk. We collected samples in a manner consistent with EPA guidelines, using wipes and plastic test tubes provided by a lab certified by New York state. None of the buildings were undergoing renovation at the time.
Research shows that lead exposure, even at levels below the Centers for Disease Control’s action level, can cause brain damage, learning disabilities, reduced IQ, hyperactivity and other behavioral problems. And it’s this younger age group that spends a lot of classroom time sitting on a rug on the floor, potentially coming into contact with lead dust.
In response to questions, the Mayor’s office said the DOE has a robust system in place to monitor and remediate deteriorating paint. But in all four schools, WNYC found walls, moldings, doors, ceilings and other painted surfaces with visibly cracked and peeling paint, along with paint-chip and lead-dust samples that far exceeded safety limits adopted by the city’s health department. In March, the City Council voted to lower the dust limit for floors from 40 to 10 micrograms per square foot, and to five micrograms by 2021.
In one pre-K classroom in Manhattan, a floor-dust sample tested at 170.8 micrograms. In the same building, kindergarten, first- and second-grade classrooms tested well above 1,000 micrograms. And a windowsill where children kept folders and other learning materials tested at 53,229 micrograms. That’s a thousand times more than the current standard for windowsills, which is 50 micrograms per square foot.
In Brooklyn, an auditorium floor tested at 1,033 micrograms. And a sample taken from the floor of a school library, inches away from a rug used for story time by pre-K students, tested at 3,386 micrograms. Peeling paint from radiators in a classroom and a lunchroom — where cafeteria staff had laid wet oven pads to dry — tested at 18 times the city’s newly-adopted standard for lead content in paint.
Despite the small number of schools tested,Markowitz, the doctor from Montefiore, said the results may point to a widespread problem. “There's enough information here for me to be concerned that there is a serious potential risk of exposure to lead from dust in the schools of New York City,” he said.
City Councilman Mark Treyger, chair of the Education Committee, called on Mayor de Blasio to immediately coordinate a response between DOE, the health department and the mayor’s lead-czar, Katherine Garcia, including a system-wide inspection and remediation of public school buildings.
“This to me is an emergency,” he said. “This is not an issue that you could just simply punt and do a working group on. This is a public health issue.”
(Clarisa Diaz, WNYC/Gothamist. Data analysis by Christopher Werth.)
Gap in the Law
Tory Frye, a mother of two, has been an activist member of her school’s parent association in Washington Heights and is currently an elected member of her local Community Education Council in District 6.
“As a parent, if I’m sending my kid into these settings, I want to know that there’s no chance they’re going to come into contact with 53,229 micrograms of lead,” she said.
“It's incredibly upsetting to think, especially as we begin to enroll younger and younger children into the school system, implementing universal 3-K, universal pre-K. They're very young children at very critical stages that are going to be coming into contact with this, these levels of lead dust, and that's frightening.”
DOE did not respond to questions submitted over several months about its testing protocol. The School Construction Authority has also not responded to a Freedom of Information request filed in January for records on lead tests conducted in public schools.
Under the city’s current health code, DOE is required to visually inspect parts of schools occupied by students six-years of age and under once a year, and to keep records of those inspections. A spokesperson for the mayor said DOE goes above and beyond that mandate by annually testing painted surfaces in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms using portable X-ray fluorescence analyzers, which can detect the lead content of paint.
“We have no way to corroborate the testing methodology or results reported on in this story,” the mayor’s office said late Sunday night. “And as confirmed by the Department of Health, the school setting does not present a principal [sic] risk of lead exposure, and the DOE’s protective protocols help to ensure that schools remain safe.”
(WNYC / Gothamist)
However, conducting XRF tests every year doesn’t necessarily ensure classrooms are safe, said Matthew Chachère, a lawyer with the non-profit Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation who helped write much of Local Law One.
“Once you know a painted surface is lead paint, it doesn’t stop being lead paint,” said Chachère. What matters is the condition of that paint, and DOE has yet to provide detailed information on how cracked and peeling surfaces are remediated.
The agency is also not required to test for lead dust and other lead-paint hazards in the same way it’s required to test drinking fountains and other water outlets. Those tests — conducted in 2017 after the DOE failed to follow EPA guidelines in its initial round of sampling — found that 8% of water outlets in schools were above the New York state standard for lead in water.
In addition, DOE buildings have been left out of many long-standing regulations put in place to reduce children’s exposure.
Since 1997, for example, child care programs — which also enroll 3K- and pre-K-aged children — have not been permitted to have “lead-based paint on any interior surface,” according to Article 47 of the NYC Health Code. And under Local Law One, private landlords who are renting a newly-available unit are required to fully abate lead paint on doorways, windows and other high-impact surfaces, which tend to create significant amounts of lead dust.
Neither of these provisions apply to schools.
“That might be a very significant hole that needs to be addressed,” said Chachère.. “I see no reason to carve schools out of the equation at all. I really think it's something that should be covered.”
Councilmember Treyger says the schools have largely fallen outside the city’s lead protection laws.in part because of resistance from the DOE to CIty Council oversight.
“There's a gap in terms of our ability to legislate over the DOE directly on this issue,” he said. “Quite frankly, they don't like when the City Council has certain power over their policies and regulations and rules. However, I will not accept resistance from DOE on this front.”
(WNYC / Gothamist)
Need for Further Testing
WNYC’s tests were limited. Several principals cited fear of running afoul of DOE policy as a reason for not taking part. The reporter followed EPA guidelines but was not certified to collect lead-dust samples.
In evaluating our methodology, Dr. Markowitz pointed to an unpublished study comparing lead-dust samples collected by certified technicians with those taken by laypeople following the same protocols. In that exercise, roughly 95 percent of the samples were in agreement.
”To me that means that you don't have to be an EPA-certified inspector in order to be able to get a qualitative sense of, is there a risk or is there not a risk, using the current EPA standards,” said Markowitz.
What’s needed now, he said, is a more rigorous study — one that includes more school buildings, and gauges whether students are actually being exposed to lead in those schools. He said the study should be conducted by outside experts
“Do I trust the New York City Department of Education to conduct a fair, objective study in their schools?” he said. “I would say that this is not an agency that has a long-term record of credibility on this particular issue.”
Markowitz suggested starting with the oldest schools in the city’s system, built at a time when lead paint was prevalent, and then test newer schools. Among the four schools tested by WNYC, two schools built around 1900 had much higher lead-dust levels than one built around 1950.
According to a Chancellor’s report from 1993, lead-based paint continued to be used in the city’s public schools up until 1980 — two years after the federal ban of lead paint nationally and two decades after New York City prohibited its use.
An analysis of tax data by WNYC showed that there are more than 500 public elementary schools in the city constructed before 1960 and nearly 700 built before 1980.
A Question of Equity
The burden of elevated lead exposure is not shared equally among the city’s children. In 2016, 82 percent of kids with very high blood-lead levels were black, Latino and Asian. Sixty-two percent were from neighborhoods categorized as high-poverty.
These proportions mirror the demographics of the city’s 1.1 million public-school students, the majority of whom are non-white and from economically disadvantaged households. At the school in Manhattan, where WNYC found classroom lead-dust levels consistently above 1,000 micrograms, over 90 percent of the student body are children of color. Over 80 percent are listed as low-income.
“To me this is an equity issue,” said Frye, who called on Schools Chancellor Richard Caranza to take action. “Carranza is serious about equity. He's demonstrated that in a lot of ways. And I would like to think that maybe he would view this through an equity lens and treat it that way, and say ‘I want our public-school kids to have zero lead exposure.’”
What to do if you’re concerned:
The NYC Department of Health recommends having your child tested for lead exposure at your pediatrician’s office once a year. If you don’t have a doctor, or if your child isn’t insured, call 311. The Health Department can either connect you with a physician or help you make a free appointment at a public hospital.
If you’re concerned about lead-paint hazards in your school, you can also contact your elected officials to ask for the resources to test the schools. You can also let us know by contacting us at [email protected].
Christopher Werth is a senior editor in WNYC’s Narrative Unit. You can follow him on Twitter at @c_werth.
Support for WNYC’s health coverage is provided in part by the New York State Health Foundation, improving the health of all New Yorkers, especially the most vulnerable. Learn more at www.nyshealth.org.
