A few dozen Oakland students, educators, and community members gathered in front of City Hall this week to call on City Council and school board members to remove lead from school drinking water.
The rally comes about a month after lead-testing results were released by Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) officials. Even though the testing results were ready in April, they weren’t shown to the community until four months later, causing rifts and frustrations for staff, students and the community.
“OUSD sat on this information for months at a time when actually something could have been done — pipes could have been repaired, filters could have been put in,” Oakland teacher Judy Greenspan said during the rally on Monday evening. “Nothing was done except for people to throw up their hands and say, ‘We didn’t know.’”
The results revealed lead levels that are above the state standard of 15 parts per billion, in some cases more than 10 times that amount.
Lead in drinking water isn’t just a school issue, it’s a community issue, Greenspan said, and the City Council should be stepping in to ensure lead-free drinking water for all.
The Get the Lead Out of OUSD coalition, which includes the Oakland teachers union and other community partners, has a list of demands, the first being instating a new threshold of lead levels being 0 ppb. The Oakland school board has a policy that requires any water source that tests more than 5 ppb of lead to be shut down and fixed. However, most experts agree that any level of lead in water is toxic.
Other demands include testing all water sources at Oakland schools immediately and annually, testing all playgrounds, gardens and outdoor areas, facilitating free blood testing for students, teachers and community members, and completing infrastructure repairs.
This story originally appeared in EdSource.
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