Recently, a newsletter from District 196 was mailed to most houses in the area. One of my friends noticed that a section inside of it talks about how the elementary schools were tested for lead in their water recently. They looked up the results of the test on the district website and saw a huge list of disconnected water fountains, not in use because of the amount of lead present in them. This led to jokes about people getting sick in the elementary schools when we were younger.

But the existence of this information begs the question, why is there lead in drinking water? Why are there so many disconnected drinking fountains in the elementary schools? Is the school’s water safe to drink?

To summarize the water testing information from the district, it says that schools’ action level of lead is five parts per billion. This means that if there is more than 0.005 milligrams of lead per liter of water in a certain water fixture, something needs to be changed about it. The faucet can be disconnected and never used again, replaced, labeled to not be used for drinking, etc.

The Environmental Protection Agency sets the general action level at 15 parts per billion, but schools have a different standard, recently set in Minnesota as 5 ppb through Minnesota Statute 121A.335. This legislation was passed in 2023, before the water testing for the elementary school water systems and after the high and middle school testing.

The elementary schools were tested this year, in 2024, and the high schools and other district buildings were tested for lead back in 2019. Below is a table displaying the information on the district website about how many water faucets were disconnected from each school and an average of how much lead the disconnected faucets had.

The total number of decommissioned water sources across 15 elementary schools is 185, 1 sink and 184 drinking fountains. That is an average of 12 disconnected water fountains per school. Comparing this to the high school data, an average of one water faucet was removed from each building in 2019.

The reason so few high school water fountains were disconnected is because no disconnected high school faucet had less than 20 ppb of lead. The schools did not have to remove drinking fountains with lower levels of lead than 20 ppb in 2019, because the recent legislation wasn’t enforced before 2023.

Since our high school has not been tested with the new standard of less than 5 ppb of lead in a faucet, it is very possible that a drinking fountain could have any amount of lead in between 0 ppb and 20 ppb.

The Environmental Protection Agency has said that when there is any amount of lead in drinking water, it can harm humans, even in small amounts. This is why the difference between 20 ppb and 5 ppb is significant, because more lead can cause more severe health effects, and even small amounts can be dangerous.

Lead in children’s blood can cause hearing problems, anemia, learning problems, and sometimes seizures or death. Lead in an adult’s blood can cause increased blood pressure, hypertension, worsened kidney function, and reproductive issues.

So why is there lead in the water when it is common knowledge that lead is seriously harmful to humans? When plumbing was first put in the ground, people didn’t know for sure how awful lead was for people. Lead is also a very easy metal to work with, so early plumbing was made with a lot of lead.

Now that everyone knows lead is awful, this lead plumbing should be replaced with other, safer, materials. Replacing plumbing is very expensive though, so a lot of older buildings still have lead components to their plumbing system. When water sits in lead pipes, the lead seeps into the water.

Is there lead in the school’s drinking water? Absolutely. It is not certain how much lead is in each drinking fountain, but it is very difficult to completely get lead out of a water system with lead components, which means that at least some of the drinking water has lead in it.

But Rosemount High School’s water is safe to drink, as many of them are filtered. Most of the drinking fountains in our school are Elkay ezH2O brand. These water fountains “effectively reduce lead from incoming water levels with 150 parts per billion of lead to below Environmental Protection Agency action levels (15 ppb) for up to 3,000 gallons.”

There is lead in our school’s water, and possibly more than there currently is in the elementary schools’ water, but most the lead is filtered out before it is used. Thank you for reading this article!