THE FIRST WEEKS of school meant fresh supplies of pens, notebooks and bottled water for children in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood — along with a weary skepticism among parents that high lead levels found in drinking water at two elementary schools will be eradicated anytime soon.
Under California law, every preschool located within an elementary school was required to test lead levels of its drinking water by Jan. 1, 2023. The law applied to 25 preschools in the San Francisco Unified School District. Six reported lead levels above the state’s limit of 5 parts per billion. This caused the district to test every drinking faucet in those elementary schools.
Two of the six elementary schools are in Bayview-Hunters Point: Dr. George Washington Carver and Bret Harte. A third, E.R. Taylor, is just over a mile from the historically Black neighborhood in southeast San Francisco.
SFUSD has made bottled water available to the schools since late spring of 2023, and “any outlet that tested above 5 ppb was taken out of service,” district spokesperson Laura Dudnick said in an email. “The District is currently determining next steps for remediation.”
The other elementary schools in Bayview-Hunters Point, Malcolm X and Charles Drew, tested at below 5 ppb.
Dozens of parents whose children attend Carver and Bret Harte, interviewed throughout this summer, said they aren’t taking chances.
“I give her water and milk in her backpack every day. I do it because of the lead,” Melody Jackson said of her daughter Legacy, who just started kindergarten at Carver, joining seven of her cousins at the school.
Jackson has lived all her life in Bayview-Hunters Point, where longtime residents are accustomed to coexisting with environmental threats. She and other parents mention their children’s asthma in the same breath as they speak about lead in water, certain that the air they breathe is polluted from nearby industries.
Activists and lawyers are still fighting to get a toxic Superfund site, the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, cleaned up to stop potential community exposure to radioactive waste.
In spring 2023, followup testing was done. At Bret Harte, elevated lead levels were found in 17 of 66 drinking faucets, according to SFUSD data. At Carver, 33 elevated levels came from 46 tests. One faucet in a Carver classroom tested at 150 ppb — 30 times the state limit.
Dudnick, the SFUSD spokesperson, said in an email that Carver and E.R. Taylor are among elementary schools scheduled to receive “filtered water access points” in locations such as cafeterias, nurse’s stations, hallways and outdoor play yards.
“A schedule for the installation of filtered water access points at the remaining (school) sites requiring remediation … will be shared in the Fall,” Dudnick said.
The test results were greeted with a familiar feeling of disappointment among many in the Bayview-Hunters Point community. That is if parents knew about them at all, a frustration expressed by several parents who said they had only a vague awareness of why their kids were given bottled water.
‘Out of sight, out of mind’
Valentino Miles, whose grandchildren go to school at Bret Harte, said he has waited more than a year for communication about next steps to fix the lead problems.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done now,” he said.
The school, built in 1953, has a plumbing system that SFUSD described as poor in its facilities master plan.
This wouldn’t be the case in San Francisco’s wealthier, whiter and more politically influential neighborhoods, Miles said, adding, “If this was out in the avenues, something would be done right away. Since it’s Bayview, it’s out of sight, out of mind.”
At Bret Harte, 98.8% of students are children of color and more than 80% are from lower-income families. The demographics are similar for Carver’s student population.
Loretha Bryant, whose granddaughters Sophie and Jalisa go to school at Carver, is skeptical that “they can get the lead out of the water.” A third-generation Bayview-Hunters Point resident, Bryant remembers playing as a child on the Navy shipyard grounds where her grandfather worked.
“They’re still giving them bottled water,” she said while walking Sophie and Jalisa to the bus stop. “I would have thought that they would have fixed it by now.”
Lead exposure comes from many sources beyond drinking water. The California Department of Public Health has developed an index of risk indicators by Census tract. Several tracts in Bayview-Hunters Point are identified as facing six of the eight threats, including being in proximity to a highway, near a railroad moving freight, and with over 25% of its housing built before 1978. Children exposed to elevated levels of lead are at increased risk for learning and behavior problems, delayed growth and development, and hearing and speech issues.
Chinomnso Okorie, a University of California, San Francisco data scientist who grew up in the community, has studied lead levels in hair samples from barber shops across the city. She found the highest concentrations of lead in southeastern San Francisco.
Tracing the impact of lead on a community is difficult to do without sampling blood levels. In San Francisco, all infants in publicly funded programs for low-income children, such as Medi-Cal, are required to have their blood-lead levels tested at 12 months and 24 months old. Parents of infants who are not in publicly funded programs are encouraged to have the tests done if they suspect lead exposure.
In the United States, lead exposure disproportionately impacts children in communities similar to Bayview-Hunters Point, according to Susan Little, a senior advocate at the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. She cited studies showing that “88% of children who test positive for lead poisoning are from low-income households.”
Researchers at Duke University surveyed more than 25,000 fourth graders in North Carolina for a 2022 study examining possible links between lead exposure, racial segregation and performance in school. The study presented causal evidence that Black students are disproportionately affected by lead exposure in racially segregated neighborhoods.
‘I remember crying in the Zoom meeting’
A charter school in Bayview-Hunters Point is seen by many parents as a draw. For Jessica Camilli, KIPP Bayview Elementary, located in an annex at Bret Harte, represented an exciting opportunity for her daughters Skye and Sage.
“My kids are half Black … I wanted them to be around African Americans,” said Camilli, a resident of Bernal Heights, about 7 miles from Bayview-Hunters Point. At KIPP Bayview, 100% of pupils are students of color.
Camilli was also excited by the school’s teaching staff and academic record.
“The principal graduated from UCLA, some of the teachers are from (UC) Berkeley and Stanford … the staff is amazing,” she said.
Skye now attends a KIPP middle school in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, and Camilli enrolled Sage in another elementary school this year for reasons unrelated to the lead findings. She vividly remembers the day she learned that Sage’s first-grade classroom had a lead level of 30 ppb, six times the state limit. “This was on June 2, 2023,” she said. “I remember crying in the Zoom meeting.”
“This should be talked about more because these are little kids, most of them are Black and brown,” she said.
KIPP Northern California said in a statement that when it learned of the test results on May 30, 2023, “We promptly shared the information with staff and families. Since this finding, all drinking water fountains in (KIPP Bayview Elementary’s) main building have been closed, and potable bottled water is provided for students, staff, and visitors. We also set up water stations throughout campus.”
The statement added that KIPP officials expect there to be another round of testing this fall.
On June 30, the state Legislature announced a $10 billion bond issue to pay for repairs and upgrades of public schools across California. It will be on the ballot in November. The bond proposal pledges to make up to $115 million available to “address the remediation of lead in water.”
The bond proposal includes a funding source for lead remediation, defined as “a school district may request a grant for the replacement of a water outlet used for drinking or preparing food if the test results indicate lead levels for that water outlet exceed 15 parts per billion.”
In October 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation to require water utilities that serve public schools to test every school’s drinking water for lead by Jan. 1, 2027 — and then immediately take action to safeguard and fix those out of compliance. Newsom said he opposed the legislation because it would have amounted to an unfunded mandate and created “an entirely new enforcement role for the state water board.”
Assembly Bill 2370, which launched the preschool water lead testing requirement, has been applauded for its good intentions. But critics point to its flaws, notably that schools themselves are responsible for remediation costs.
Greg Pierce, the director of the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab at UCLA, said the bill signed into law by Newsom “was rolled out without proper recognition or funding to support the actual testing, much less fixing or remediation.”
“It’s a win for a legislator, a win for advocacy groups that push it, but it doesn’t have follow-through,” Pierce said.
“This should be talked about more because these are little kids, most of them are Black and brown.”
Jessica Camilli, KIPP Bayview Elementary parent
Along with preschools and elementary schools sharing facilities with preschools, AB 2370 required licensed child-care centers in California to test the lead levels in their drinking water by Jan. 1, 2023. The state Department of Social Services maintains a database, updated monthly, to track compliance.
Merging the number of facilities that reported test results with a database of all licensed child care centers indicates a compliance rate of about 52% statewide and 62% in San Francisco. In Bayview-Hunters Point, nine of 10 child-care centers that did testing had lead levels above 5 ppb.
Critics of AB 2370 often point to a lack of state enforcement and the fact that it can be expensive for large or underfunded child-care centers to do the testing. A state program offers to offset these costs, especially for facilities serving low-income communities.
“Nobody is excluded from getting state-funded testing,” said Susan Little, formerly a senior advocate at the Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit which proposed the legislation that led to mandated lead testing.
Xavier Martinez, Kaylee Kang, Ronny Hu, Eve Lu and Jordan Rynning contributed data reporting to this article.
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