Of the twelve school districts in Portage County, at least five have not tested for lead in the schools’ water supplies over the past three years.

KentWired requested lead testing data from every Portage County school district. Schools are not required by state law to test for lead, and schools that use the city’s water supply typically did not.

The cities of Aurora, Ravenna, Rootstown, and Streetsboro have not tested water in the school districts over last three years, along with the James A. Garfield school district in Garrettsville.

A water operator from Streetsboro said in an email they chose not to test the water in the school district because a new high school was built in 2016, the middle school was rebuilt around the same time and the elementary school was also redone with new plumbing and fixtures.

Mogadore Local Schools tested five samples in 2017 and all levels were below 5 ppb.

Field Local Schools in Brimfield Township did not respond to the request, but its data is available online. It shows that in 2018, Field Central Elementary had four fixtures over the action level, including one at 61.6 ppb. The data report indicates that “Central Elementary School is working along with the Ohio EPA to correct this issue. The school has removed the fixtures from service.”

Waterloo tested their fixtures in June of 2018 and found eight fixtures with lead samples in them. Seven of them had >2.0 ppb, while one (the women’s restroom) had a ppb of 14.

Officials from Windham Exempted Village said the village tests the school district’s water, but they did not provide KentWired with any data. Crestwood Local Schools in Mantua also did not respond to the public record request. Both school districts were contacted multiple times by reporters.

At Southeast Local Schools in rural Portage County, testing for lead in water is routine.

“We’ve tested here since I’ve worked at Southeast,” said Henry Michael, the district’s transportation supervisor. “We’ve got records that go back into the 80s.”

Because there are no public water systems near the school, Southeast uses its own water supply, which comes from wells. According to the Ohio EPA’s water quality monitoring plan, Southeast High School is required to test 10 samples every year for a variety of potentially dangerous substances, including lead, arsenic and chlorine. Each plan includes different requirements, depending on the facility it is monitoring. In 2017, Michael said a sample from a custodial sink came back with an alarming number: 180 parts per billion (ppb) of lead. Schools are required to take action if a sample is over 15 ppb. Michael said the sink was tested by accident.

“What you’re supposed to do is let the water sit for so long,” Michael said. “When you don’t run the night before, it just sits there and sits there for a long time.”

One sink was prepped the night before for the test, but another one, where water had built up in the fixture overnight, was tested instead.

Results of a test from another sink in the school clinic showed 15 ppb of lead — right at the action level.

The school was required to replace the fixtures and alert the public immediately. School officials removed the faucet of the custodial sink, disconnecting the service altogether. They replaced the clinic’s sink, along with sinks in a science classroom and restroom that also tested positive.

“We didn’t have one phone call from a concerned parent about our lead when it tested positive,” Michael said. “I think most of that was because we were very transparent. We sent everything out as quick as we could … we (didn’t) try to hide it.”

Because they failed the test in 2017, Southeast was required to test 20 samples in 2018, but none were at the lead action level. This year, the school is back to testing 10 samples.

Kent City Schools tested their fixtures in 2016. Superintendent George Joseph said the district used an outside firm to test the district’s water after he learned about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where dangerous amounts of lead in the water supply went unreported and untreated.

He said no lead was found in the schools’ water, but all the drinking fountains were replaced as a precaution. While Kent could afford the new fountains, Joseph said some districts may not be so fortunate if they can’t get approved for a grant.

“Since we’re public schools, and you know when there’s the water fountain issue, it costs money to replace that water fountain or replace the piping to the water fountain,” he said. ”The smaller school districts can really have a difficult time doing what we did and that is to replace water fountains.”

Over the past two years, the state of Ohio provided grant funding for schools to test for dangerous-but-invisible substances in their water fixtures. The Lead Plumbing Fixture Replacement Assistance Grant Program allowed school districts to apply for reimbursements of up to $15,000 for testing and replacing eligible fixtures in buildings constructed before 1990.

The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission (OFCC), the state agency that guides capital projects, ran the program with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the Ohio Water Development Authority. The program launched in September 2016 and its two phases ended Dec. 31, 2018. Public schools, community schools and chartered non-publics were eligible to apply for the program, which was funded through $12 million in state appropriations.

While schools could request reimbursement for lead-containing fixtures, they could not be repaid for whole-school plumbing assessments or post-testing fees.

The test results were released in a report on OFCC’s website in January that showed 769 fixtures were replaced through the program at a cost of $263,008. That total is in addition to the $315,111 spent on assessing the fixtures.

Slightly more than 9% of the fixtures sampled were over the action level for drinking water of 15 parts per billion of lead.

Southeast Schools did not apply for the grant because the district could pay for the testing on its own.

“It was under $500 for all the fixtures we had to buy, so it wasn’t like it was going to be worth the headache and aggravation of trying to get a grant,”  Michael said. “Grants aren’t always fun.”

Field Local Schools did not apply for the fixture replacement program, but director of operations Tim Fox said the district regularly tests its water through the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. Because it uses its own water supply like Southeast, Field is required by the Ohio EPA to test samples every year. .

“As far as the fixtures themselves, they’ve never told us we needed to replace this one or that one or anything like that,” he said. “Now, we have replaced a bunch on our own, but that was just because the older fixtures in these old buildings did not have the coolers on them. So we’ve gone through and replaced those to give the kids refrigerated-type water.”

Some of Field’s buildings were not eligible for the program because they were built after 1990.

Field High School was originally built in 1961 then remodeled in 2007, and Fox said much of the plumbing was redone during the renovations. Field Middle School was built in 1967.

Consuming lead in drinking water can have serious health effects, according to a release from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) that says lead “can cause damage to the brain and kidneys, and can interfere with the production of red blood cells that carry oxygen to all parts of your body.” These effects are especially harmful to infants, young children and pregnant women. For children, scientists have linked the consumption of lead water to lower IQ rates. Lead is also stored in the bones, and can be released years later, according to the OEPA.

To test for lead and other elements, residents and businesses can send samples to a water testing lab, such as Summit Environmental Tech in Cuyahoga Falls. Located in a plain-looking building in the back corner of an industrial park, the company is the 12th largest laboratory in the country.

“We do things that most labs don’t do,” said Carol Barrick, a quality control manager at Summit Environmental. “We do dioxin analysis. We have two PhDs that work in our dioxin analysis and they’re going (down) to parts per trillion and smaller. We have a radio chemistry department that works with radon samples. We can run all of that.”

Summit Environmental is certified to test samples from 26 states; lead in the samples range across  different values.

Many of the samples over the lead limit occur for the same reason, Barrick said.

“Most of the time it’s old piping,” she said. “The Ohio EPA does have lead and copper testing and those have special handling requirements and reporting requirements for us. If we have a sample that comes in for strictly lead and copper testing and it’s a compliance sample for Ohio EPA, we’re required to report our findings almost immediately. They want those numbers very quickly.”

Summit Environmental has two different ways in which it measures for lead in water. The first is through a flame atomic absorption spectrometer, which is an older technology that is primarily used to measure smaller samples. Most of Summit Environmental’s tests are ran through a Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Electron Spectrometer (ICP). The ICP, which tests for 26 different metals at once, is a 15,000 degree argon plasma that separates the atoms in the sample. The atoms go through two prisms before landing on a detector that measures the elements in the sample.  

“The EPA does a determination of what is most protective of human health,” Barrick said. “I think if you hit 15 ppb it would probably take a bit for that to actually become a problem. They’re just being very protective of human health. They determine where you might start having problems, but they really do hedge on the side of safety.”