Milwaukee will temporarily close two more school buildings as the city works to address a lead crisis in its public schools.
The district also announced Monday an updated plan to tackle the flaking and chalking paint in aging buildings that’s suspected to be the cause of elevated blood lead levels in four students this school year.
The new closures affect elementary schools Westside Academy and Brown Street School. Two other elementary schools remain closed: Starms Early Childhood Education Center and LaFollette School. In total, the Milwaukee school district has announced work at nine schools this year to address lead hazards. Students are being relocated while the work is underway.
The city’s school district and health department are in the process of inspecting about 100 buildings that were built before 1978, the year lead was banned from paint. They expect the work to continue through the summer.
Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said the district expected to clean 54 schools built before 1950 ahead of the next school year. An additional 52 schools built between 1950 and 1978 are slated to be cleaned before the end of the calendar year, she said.
“We are asking families to remain vigilant and to please have their children tested for lead exposure,” either through their family doctor or through the pop-up clinics organized by the city, Cassellius said.
There is no safe level of lead. At high levels, lead can cause symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and seizures. At lower levels, lead is a neurotoxin that can affect how a child’s brain grows and functions. Children exposed to high levels of lead may have learning challenges, as well as problems with attention and behavior.
The new lead plan outlines the process the district will follow to assess and remediate its schools. It starts with a visual inspection of each building, and based on that, the building will be classified as low, medium or high risk. Schools at medium and high risk will receive additional testing for lead and could be subject to full or partial closures for abatement. It also says the schools are developing a plan to test adults who might be exposed to lead in schools, such as custodians.
The city has been trying to screen more students for lead in their blood. It had been working with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a testing strategy when the agency’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was cut, leaving the city without federal help.
The CDC also denied the city’s request for EpiAid, a short-term loan of epidemiologists to help guide and staff the response, citing the cuts to the agency’s lead program. Denials of EpiAid requests are rare but have happened in the past if the program doesn’t think it can meet the requestor’s needs, said Dr. Eric Pevzner, chief of the CDC’s epidemiology and laboratory branch and its Epidemic Intelligence Service.
“Obviously, in this case, we no longer had the expertise at CDC to support that request,” he said.
Last week, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Gwen Moore, both Democrats, sent a letter to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., urging him to reinstate the CDC’s lead experts.
“You have the ability to immediately rectify this issue, and we urge you to do so,” they wrote.
The crisis was discovered after a child tested positive for a high level of lead in their blood late last year. An environmental inspection found no significant sources of lead in the child’s home or in relatives’ homes but did find peeling lead paint in a basement bathroom in the child’s school. It also found high levels of lead in the dust around windowsills and floors.
The city of Milwaukee, which has a large share of older homes, has a long history of lead problems. In some areas on its north side, health department data shows, about 1 in 5 children tested positive for elevated blood lead levels between 2018 and 2021.
The current crisis, however, is the first time lead poisoning in kids has been linked to the city’s schools.
One of the most cost-effective ways to control lead exposure from old paint is to keep it sealed it under layers of new paint. The school district had fallen behind in its efforts to do that.
In a report to the state legislature last year, the district disclosed more than $265 million in deferred maintenance for its schools.
On Monday, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, the commissioner of health for the city of Milwaukee, said officials had been notified about three more students in the district who had elevated lead levels. It’s still not clear, however, whether environmental conditions at their schools are the cause.
“As everyone understands, when we do receive a referral or a complaint, we have to discern whether it’s a poisoning from their home or a secondary address affiliated with that family, or if it’s tied to the school, so those investigations can take a lot of time,” Totoraitis said.
He said the health department has considered two types of exposure to kids: acute exposures, in which kids would ingest chips of flaking paint, and chronic exposures, in which kids would ingest or inhale lead in dust over time.
Totoraitis said acute exposures typically show up within two to four weeks of the ingestion. Chronic exposures might take longer to become evident. Because the maintenance lapses that led to the program didn’t happen overnight, he said, it’s unclear how long kids have been exposed to lead in their schools.
“It might be kind of scary, but we have a really good track record of seeing those levels come down if they do test high,” he said.
Typically, babies are tested for lead through finger-prick blood tests in the doctor’s office at 1 or 2 years of age. That same kind of screening doesn’t usually extend to school-age kids, however.
Totoraitis said the city was considering revising its screening recommendations to include older children.
Milwaukee Public Schools and the Milwaukee Department of Health have hosted some school-based clinics to make lead testing more convenient for families. The next lead screening clinic is scheduled for May 7.
The health department had hoped to do more of these with the CDC’s help but says it will continue to do as much as it can with the resources it has.