Image Lead contamination has been an ongoing crisis in New York City’s public housing, and the Education Department said on Tuesday that it continues to be an issue in schools as well.
About 25 percent of the city’s 1,500 schools now have at least one water fixture with elevated lead levels, down from 83 percent of schools last year.
The remaining 435 water sources, which were used for cooking or drinking, have been turned off, Miranda Barbot, an Education Department spokeswoman, said.
The first stage of testing was completed in 2017.
The de Blasio administration has been criticized in the last few months for its handling of lead paint in its deteriorating public housing.
Though the city had previously said 19 children in public housing had tested positive for elevated levels of lead, the city’s Department of Health said that 820 children younger than 6 living in Nycha housing had elevated levels of lead.
Earlier this year, federal prosecutors found that “accountability often does not exist” at the beleaguered housing authority.
At some of the schools in the city’s report, more fixtures were found to be contaminated in the latest round of testing.
There are 27 fixtures with elevated lead levels at Harry S. Truman High School in the Baychester section of the Bronx, but only 11 water sources were found to have high levels of lead when they were first tested in early 2017.
At I.S 104 in Manhattan, 25 water sources tested above the lead threshold in the latest round of testing, but just three water sources had elevated lead when the school was tested in January 2017.