In the city of Detroit, public school students are facing a heat wave, and they are finding the water fountains near their classrooms are not working.
QUINN KLINEFELTER, BYLINE: At the Detroit School of Arts, student Dayana Williams is ready to start classwork.
She’s brought her notebook, her backpack, and she’s made a special point to bring her own bottled water.
There’s a new water cooler with bottled water down the hallway, but Williams says, after hearing reports that lead and copper was found in school bathrooms and water fountains, she’s taking no chances.
So I’m just going to have to deal with it.
KLINEFELTER: Officials say students can wash their hands with water the in school buildings, just not drink it.
Detroit Public Schools superintendent Nikolai Vitti says higher-than-normal amounts of lead and copper were found in the water at 34 of 50 of its schools, so Vitti ordered all the school buildings tested – more than a hundred of them – then turned off the drinking water while engineers try to figure out if the contamination is coming from old pipes or rusty faucets.
NIKOLAI VITTI: The solution is not a whack-a-mole effect of, well, let’s take out that water fountain or that sink.
KLINEFELTER: Detroiter Patricia Taylor says she has eight grandchildren in the public school system, and she says she’s been supplying them all with bottled water for years because she just doesn’t trust the pipes in aging Detroit school buildings.
For NPR News, I’m Quinn Klinefelter in Detroit.