As 50,000 students returned to Detroit Public Schools earlier this month, they found themselves without running water.
Read more Blade editorials According to a July report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 43 percent of the country’s school districts had tested for lead in 2017.
Of those districts, 37 percent found “elevated levels” of lead in the water.
Fifty-seven percent of school districts, serving more than 35 million students nationwide, either had not tested for lead in the past two years or did not know if they had tested.
Replacing pipes is an expensive process, however, and budgetary restraints have prevented many schools from rectifying the problem.
But there are cost-effective ways to improve the situation, such as more frequent flushings of a school’s water lines.
This can be an expensive process as well — a statewide test in Indiana cost $4.7 million — but this should be money well spent if it keeps drinking water safe for school children.
State Sen. Art Haywood, D-Montgomery, said he had wanted the testing requirement to be mandatory, but others were concerned about the cost.
“My position is that the cost to our communities and our children of having the lead ingested is a much higher cost than doing testing,” Mr. Haywood told WHYY in Philadelphia.
Precautionary measures like flushing a water line or testing lead levels prevents a situation in which children are denied access to drinking water or, worse, ingest contaminants that could threaten their lives.