Pennsylvania schools must either test for lead in water and report results to the state, or talk about the lead issue at one public meeting annually.
During the state’s budget negotiations this summer, a provision was added requiring schools to test for lead and report it to the state if levels exceeded five parts per billion. A 2018 law required reporting any amount of lead over zero parts per million.
To learn more, The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center, an advocacy group.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: Why the change?
David Masur: I think unfortunately there was some confusion in the legislature and in Harrisburg. Some lobby interests that feel constrained by the reporting requirements and having to share data I think used that as an opportunity to convince legislators that there wasn’t clarity in what the law said and then use that to backslide on what the actual requirement was.
The law as written stated that if a school district tested for lead on any detectable level, they would have to report that and remediate that drinking fountain or drinking outlet. But for years, the Department of Education had misinformed districts about what the actual requirement was, and that created confusion, which I think then became the catalyst for unfortunately sliding it back.
The original proposal was actually to slide it back much further and go all the way to 15 parts per billion, so that if a school district tested and found lead between zero and 15 parts, they wouldn’t have to report or remediate it. We were able to convince legislators in the 11th hour to bring that down to five parts.
Kara Holsopple: Yes, according to reporting from Spotlight PA, the actionable level of lead and water wasn’t communicated properly to the school districts. What happened there?
David Masur: I think that it was just human error. When you get into policy issues, you get into painful acronyms, terminology that doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes you probably need a special degree just to understand one particular policy issue. I think state officials misread what the requirements said, put out the wrong number, and I think, that led to the confusion.
I think the fact that we’re talking about something that we measure, not in parts per million, but parts per billion, just shows how toxic this is.
Now, I think it’s important to note, even though we’re talking about what maybe seems like a small difference, zero to 15, it’s important, number one, obviously on lead, the health professionals are clear. Lead is unsafe at any level, and it’s harmful at very small levels.
I think the fact that we’re talking about something that we measure, not in parts per million, but parts per billion, just shows how toxic this is. Number two, actually, a lot of test results come back between zero and 15 parts per billion. A study that Penn Environment did back in 2022, looking at data from the school district of Philadelphia showed 85% of test samples came back between zero and 10.
So you can imagine if you raise that to 15, probably the vast majority of lead contamination across schools in Pennsylvania would never be reported to parents or health officials, which would create a real problem, I think, if we want to tackle this problem once and for all.
Report calls for tougher lead testing standards for Pa. school districts
Kara Holsopple: How many schools in the Commonwealth were actually reporting lead in the first place?
David Masur: One of the loopholes in the current testing law that passed in 2018, said that if a school district holds a school board meeting and at that meeting during the year says that they are not going to test for lead or talks about the topic of lead, they can basically take an opt out and not do any testing at all.
So what you can imagine that means is we see a very small set of school districts reporting to the Pennsylvania Department of Education each year. And it’s hard to tell if that lack of reporting is because a lot of schools are taking that exemption or even know about it in the first place. If they’re not doing any testing, which of course would be a big problem and violate the law, or if they are doing testing and just not sharing the data without taking the exemption.
Kara Holsopple: So other than testing for lead, I know your organization advocates for filtering for lead in schools instead. What’s the difference?
David Masur: Right now, the process has been what we would call “test and tell.” School districts test for lead, and they tell you if they find it. It was really all about the idea of right-to-know. The federal Safe Drinking Water Act is mostly silent on school buildings. So for a long time, there was no information.
We have thousands of data points across Pennsylvania from school districts telling us there’s a lot of lead contamination in schools, whether they are urban, rural, or suburban…So we really need to pivot towards prevention.
The first step was to set out that requirement that school districts do the testing, share the results, because sunshine is the greatest disinfectant. Once you have that information and know the scale and the scope of the problem, then you know how you can tackle it and to what extent you need to implement solutions.
So we’ve been doing that for many, many years. We’re getting, again, sort of pieces of data, but certainly enough data points – we have thousands of data points across Pennsylvania from school districts telling us there’s a lot of lead contamination in schools, whether they are urban, rural, or suburban.
When you get to that point, I think it’s important that we stop collecting data solely for the purpose of data when it comes to lead in drinking water, because we acknowledge there’s a problem and the data shows that. So we really need to pivot towards prevention.
What are the best ways to prevent kids from drinking water contaminated with lead? The idea is pretty simple. Basically, you just rip out the old drinking fountains and you replace them with a lead filtering water bottle filling station. That technology has been proven very successful. It’s also probably the most cost-effective.
One thing I think that there’s a misconception about is that the lead in school drinking water is from a lead service line, like at our home, but actually almost no schools are connected to lead service lines. It is lead in soldering, lead in gauges, valves, screens, and even drinking fountain components themselves were allowed to have very high levels of lead in them.
You can imagine the cost of trying to ferret out where that lead is and pay for ripping all that infrastructure out of the building is exorbitant. So just more cost effective and faster, and the technology works, to just take out that drinking fountain itself and make sure whatever is coming out of that discharge, that pipe is going to be clean.
Pa. schools get nearly $1 million to tackle lead contamination in drinking water
Kara Holsopple: There have been bills in both the state House and Senate that would require lead filtration in schools and establish funds for districts to do that. Where are those bills now?
David Masur: Unfortunately, those bipartisan bills haven’t seen action in either the House or Senate in Harrisburg. I find that pretty disappointing. I think certainly ever since the Flint, Michigan disaster with drinking water, the public has been hyper-aware.
It’s sort of disappointing that we haven’t seen action from either chamber on something that I believe is very populist and broadly supported.
Obviously there’s a lot of data out there that lead poses a whole set of risks for children. Learning challenges, lower IQs, hearing disabilities, bad behavior, the list goes on and on. It’s sort of disappointing that we haven’t seen action from either chamber on something that I believe is very populist and broadly supported.
Certainly there’s no one running for office as we get into election season who says, “Well, no, actually I think our kids should have more lead contamination in their water.” Nobody says that because one thing we can all agree to in a hyper-polarized world is we should protect kids from that kind of contamination.
In an email the Pennsylvania Department of Education said:
“Act 39 of 2018 encouraged schools to test for lead against the U.S. EPA’s “Maximum Contaminant Level Goal or milligrams per liter as set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s National Primary Drinking Water Regulation.” According to the U.S. EPA National Primary Drinking Water Regulation, the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) and the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) are different values – zero and 10ppb, respectively. Furthermore, the EPA states that the MCLG is a “non-enforceable health goal” – and current laboratory instruments are not sensitive enough to determine if lead levels are actually zero.
Act 20 of 2026 (this year’s School Code) clarifies the discrepancy included in Act 39 of 2018 and clearly establishes a reporting level of 5 ppb, which is aligned to measurable industry standards like the maximum allowable amount of lead in bottled water, as regulated by the FDA and the national industry standard for lead-filtering water fountains – and is well below the U.S. EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for lead….
We believe this change is practical and will incentivize schools to test their drinking water to then identify problems for remediation.”
