The public schools in Flint, Michigan, may now have safe drinking water, but the faucets have been turned off in Detroit since the beginning of the school year.
The water fountains in all 106 schools run by the Detroit Public Schools Community District have been dry since classes began in August.
The superintendent ordered them shut off as a pre-emptive measure, after testing revealed elevated levels of copper and lead in drinking water at some schools.
It’s a pretty frightening scenario for many residents of Detroit — a city just 60 miles southeast of Flint, where residents kept getting sick in 2016, even though officials insisted that the drinking water was just fine.
Now, look at the water here.
They should have known it was going to be a problem with this old infrastructure.” And yet Detroit is far from the only school district to have problems with water quality.
At the beginning of this school year, several Maryland school districts also found lead in their drinking water and turned off their water fountains.
The Detroit Press gives this rundown on school districts around the country dealing with water issues: The nation’s 14th largest school district, Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, is being forced to replace hundreds of fixtures after finding elevated levels of lead earlier this year.
Elevated levels of lead were found in 61 percent of the schools.
As a public school teacher, I’m ashamed that I didn’t know this before — but here’s what really wrong: “No federal law requires testing of drinking water for lead in schools that receive water from public water systems, although these systems are regulated by the EPA,” the Government Accountability Office reported in a 2017 survey.