Students welcome plans to test ‘funny-tasting’ water

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New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a law this month requiring schools to test their drinking water for lead contamination, and some students in the northwest Bronx welcomed the plan to look into what goes into their schools’ water.

“I’m a little skeptical of their water because the taste is funny,” said Chelsea Morrison, a student at World View High School, which shares its building with DeWitt Clinton High School.

“It tastes different from ordinary water. So, to keep more safe, I decided to bring my own water,” she said. “I don’t know what’s in it and I’d rather drink water that I know is clean.”

Gov. Cuomo said New York was the first state in the nation to adopt a law mandating the testing. The state Health Department has issued an emergency mandate for all schools to get their water tested by Oct. 31 and to report the results.

But the measures made a big splash with critics who questioned the city’s Education Department’s handling of a voluntary water-testing program earlier this year.

The department says it has been testing the drinking water since 2002 in school built prior to 1986. Concerns about elevated lead levels in the drinking water in New Jersey schools prompted the Education Department to conduct a new round of water-testing earlier this year and lead to questions regarding the city’s methods.

According to the city, all water outlets in schools that were being tested had been turned on to fun for two hours before water samples were collected, The New York Times reported on Aug. 31. The practice is known as “pre-stagnation flushing” and cleans out most soluble lead and lead particles from pipes, thus reducing registered contamination levels, the report said.

But critics such as the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization, objected to the Education Department’s testing methods.

“That’s not really giving an accurate read of the true levels of lead in the drinking water,” said Jaqi Cohen, a campaign associate at the nonprofit group, told The Press. Her organization supports the law, but “the testing was done incorrectly,” she said. “There are provisions. There are regulations associated with this new law that will prevent that.”

The problem, she said, was not with what goes into the city’s pipes, but the condition of the pipes.

“Generally speaking, New York State and New York City have very clean drinking water,” Ms. Cohen said. “This really doesn’t have anything to do with drinking water at the source. You can have the cleanest drinking water in the country at the source, but once it enters the schools, depending on the level of lead in the pipes… that’s where you really get into trouble and that’s why these regulations are so important.”

The Education Department defended its methods.“No child has ever tested positive for lead poisoning as a result of the water in our schools,” Mayor Bill de Blasio’s spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein said in emailed comments. “Our testing protocols fall well within federal guidelines, and the latest results have made clear that our safeguards are absolutely effective at keeping water in our schools safe.”

Federal guidelines “do not advise against flushing before samples are taken,” she said. But “out of an abundance of caution and in an effort to constantly upgrade our testing protocols to maintain the highest level of water quality, this fall we will conduct tests on days when school is in session whenever possible, eliminating the need for flushing the night before,” she said.

“We have no doubt that our testing is sound and that removing the flushing step from our rigorous protocols won’t affect the results and will only make more efficient a testing process that already exceeds federal guidelines,” Ms. Goldstein said.

During the Education Department’s test earlier this year, no dangerous levels of lead were found at any school in the northwest Bronx. Out of 23 local schools for which data were available, six had been found to have elevated levels of lead after testing began in 2002, but subsequent tests did not yield elevated results at any of those locations. The six schools were the Spuyten Duyvil School (P.S. 24), the Multiple Intelligence School (P.S./M.S. 37), P.S. 207, P.S. 310 Marble Hill, DeWitt Clinton High School and the New Visions Charter School for Advanced Math and Science.

But local students said this fall they still liked the promise of more water-testing.

“[The drinking water] doesn’t seem to go too well for my system,” said Daniel Honeycutt, a DeWitt Clinton student. “So yeah, I’m concerned about that. I hope that they check it. So, it’s all safe.”

The city plans to retest every school every five years, said Ms. Goldstein, the mayor’s office spokeswoman, adding that by the end of the 2016-17 school year, “we will have again retested every school that tested positive for elevated levels.”

“After a source tests positive for elevated levels of lead, we remediate and retest before putting the source back in use,” she said. “Schools that had negative test results will be added on a rolling basis. All testing will be complete within five years and then we will start again.”   

If lead levels exceed 15 parts per billion, the school must stop using that outlet, reduce lead levels and provide an alternative supply of water for drinking and cooking, Gov. Cuomo’s office said in a statement.

“I think schools have been very proactive in light of this legislation before the bill was even signed… in terms of voluntarily testing their water,” said Ms. Cohen.

But, “I would have loved to see this passed and signed before the school year started,” she said.

“We have school children going back to school, potentially drinking water, whether or not it is contaminated, we don’t know.”

School drinking water, lead contamination testing, lead level testing, DOE, Education Department, Lisa Herndon

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