Rather, East, whose district encompasses the small towns of Avenal and Kettleman City on the San Joaquin Valley’s west side, is worried about the safety of the water that the 2,700 students in his school district are being given to drink.
But in the San Joaquin Valley and other rural regions of California, residents either rely on private wells or small districts that lack the funds and infrastructure to treat contaminated drinking water.
In 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency cited Arvin Community Services District, which provides drinking water for the city and schools, for exceeding the maximum contaminant level for arsenic.
While the water district looked for new sources of clean water for the community, the school districts worked with the state and local non-profits to find an interim solution—point-of-use filters that can be hooked up to water sources like drinking fountains or sinks to remove contaminants such as arsenic and lead.
Dave Wallis, the technical services program manager at RCAC, says the group has helped install more than 170 filters in the Arvin area since 2015, including in six schools in three local school districts that serve nearly 6,000 students.
But safe water at schools is only part of the issue for kids in Arvin.
Since then, student attendance in Arvin’s schools has gone up, McClean says, and she believes annual physical fitness test results for students have also improved as fewer students have been drinking only sodas and more have begun drinking water on a regular basis.
For years, locals in Avenal have shied away from tap water—even before they knew about unsafe levels of disinfectant byproducts—bemoaning its taste and its rusty appearance, and digging into what little money they had to buy five-gallon jugs of bottled water, according to East.
Although food in Avenal schools is still cooked in the cafeteria with bottled water, over the past year, using grant money provided by a local agricultural produce company—the Wonderful Company—schools have installed point-of-use water fountains.
Despite all the investments in safe water systems, he prefers the taste of bottled water, and he still fears the contaminants in local tap water.