Parents and school staff at the Oakland Unified School District are speaking out after elevated lead levels were found in drinking water at multiple schools in the district.
In one case, a water fountain contained ten times the allowable amount of lead.
A message was sent to families this week, but some of the testing was done months ago. Students and staff drank the water during the summer school period.
Some people, like Stuard Loebl, a sixth-grade teacher at Frink United Academy of Language, worry about the effects of lead consumption, such as learning disabilities, blood disorders and behavioral problems.
“I have it here. This is a report that was released in April,” Loebl said.
He says he is angry and saddened by the results of the environmental tests.
“So students have been drinking leaded water all the time, obviously before the report was published, but also since then. It’s horrible,” Loebl said.
Loebl claims that one water fountain had lead levels of 51 parts per billion. The OUSD maximum acceptable level of lead is only five parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends remediation if levels exceed 15.
“It’s going to be very difficult for them to know exactly what the impact is,” Loebl said of when or how they’ll know if someone has been poisoned by the lead. “Finding that out is going to be potentially a decades-long process, and it’s devastating.”
The water fountains at Frick have been covered to prevent further exposure.
Nate Landry’s daughter is a sixth grader at Edna Brewer Middle School, one of the other schools with elevated lead levels.
“Students, their families and staff should be able to come to school with peace of mind and expect safe drinking water,” Landry said.
He believes the school district may need to reevaluate how the money is spent to best serve students.
“OUSD has committed $60 million in facility bond money to a new central office,” Landry said. “It’s just that we were told that $60 million would be the estimated price tag for remediating the lead contamination in the district.”
A teacher at United for Success Academy says there has been a lead crisis at the school for several years. She says students tested the water and soil during the 2017-18 school year and found elevated lead levels.
The issues with lead levels were raised at McClymond’s High Schoolwhich led to wider testing by the East Bay Municipal Utility District in November 2017. Families were told the situation had been resolved. Then in 2022, another student test found lead in the soil again.
Photos from the United for Success Academy show their water fountains were still uncovered and functioning on Saturday.
Loebl said the district should close all drinking fountains, fix the problem and prevent it from ever happening again.
“We need a very comprehensive plan for future testing that is not just random testing,” Loebl said.
More testing of school drinking water is being conducted across the district, and the number of schools experiencing elevated lead levels could increase.
The Oakland Unified School District released the following statement through district spokesman John Sasaki:
“Over the past several months, our Risk Management team has been aggressively testing school water lines. During that process, they identified a number of outlets with elevated lead levels, most of which fell between our school board-required limit of 5 parts per billion (ppb) and the state and federal limit of 15 ppb. The elevated lines have been taken out of service. Each campus has numerous other lines whose water tested below the school board limit. We also know that students and staff are largely consuming water from our FloWater water dispensers or similar machines, which are located at all schools and are equipped with additional filtration. We are in the process of repairing the elevated outlets – which usually involves simply replacing a filter – and then retesting the outlets before putting them back into service. While we have been very proactive in conducting this testing, we have not been as effective in communicating with everyone involved. We are putting systems in place to ensure that this lack of effective communication no longer occurs.”
