An Illinois law required schools to test water for lead. They found it all over the state.

Most Illinois public school districts that tested sinks and fountains for tiny traces of brain-damaging lead as required by a 2017 state law had to tell parents they found the toxic metal quietly lurking in the children’s drinking water.

According to a Tribune analysis of state data, more than 1,800 of the roughly 2,100 public schools that submitted test results identified some amount of lead in their drinking water. That includes more than 1,350 schools where at least one water sample had lead levels exceeding 5 parts per billion, the threshold where parental notification is required.

But despite the widespread nature of the problem — and the threat lead poses to young brains, even in small amounts — the state’s efforts to curtail lead in school drinking water mostly ended there.

The Illinois Department of Public Health, the state agency tasked with overseeing the law, did not make the statewide testing results public. It did not ensure that all eligible schools had conducted testing and submitted their results. And it offered schools conflicting guidance on what steps they should take after finding elevated lead levels in their drinking water.

“You don’t really realize it could be an issue as an educator,” said Kankakee School District 111 Superintendent Genevra Walters after water testing identified traces of lead at each of the district’s 11 buildings, including six schools with fixtures where water lead levels exceeded 1,000 parts per billion. “We’re focused on education; we’re not necessarily focused on the facilities as much as we should.”

As the public health department stumbled in its oversight efforts, the law itself also posed barriers to finding and eliminating lead in school drinking water statewide:

- Illinois legislators carved out major testing exemptions in the law, including schools serving students in 6th grade and up, as well as those in buildings constructed after 1999. Schools in these categories that voluntarily tested their drinking water sometimes found elevated lead levels, according to testing data obtained by the Tribune.

- Schools were instructed to test their drinking water just once before the end of 2018 by taking two samples from each fixture. Experts who study lead contamination warn that the amount of lead leaching from internal pipes can vary widely based on water temperature, water pressure, frequency of use and other factors. Dozens of schools that conducted more than one round of testing identified lead issues that had not surfaced in earlier sampling, state and district-level data show.

- The law did not require districts to take action to reduce elevated lead levels, and state funding was not available to aid schools that wanted to do so. As a result, district responses to finding lead varied greatly, Tribune reporting revealed. Some districts spent millions on additional testing and plumbing work in efforts to reduce lead in the water, while others took little action.

Though the law required schools that found elevated lead levels to notify parents, many of the test results are not available on districts’ websites. The Tribune obtained the testing data from the state and is publishing it so parents and community members can explore the results.

[ Did your Illinois public school find lead in its water? Look up results here ]

The data shows that no part of the state was immune from lead contamination, as elevated levels turned up in both wealthy and cash-strapped districts and in urban, suburban and rural schools.

The average student at Illinois public schools that sent test results attended class in a building with three fixtures where first-draw samples showed lead levels above 5 parts per billion, according to available state data. The risk did not vary greatly by racial or ethnic group; the average Black public school student attended class at buildings with similar numbers of problematic fixtures as the average white or Latino student, the state data shows.

Some schools found lead levels above 1,000 parts per billion, though elevated levels were usually much lower. Roughly half of the samples with elevated lead registered above 11 parts per billion and the other half between 5.1 and 10.9 parts per billion.

The Tribune also obtained and analyzed data from the Chicago Public Schools’ extensive water testing program, which started before the state law took effect and is still ongoing. Between May 2016 and August 2022, the district tested water at nearly 550 schools, including charters, according to the results. The district’s policy is to repair or shut down fixtures that register at or above 5 ppb of lead; roughly 70% of the schools tested had at least one drinking water source that registered at that level.

Sarah Pritz-Shields is the parent of a 11-year-old student at Blaine Elementary in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, where three fixtures — a sink and two water fountains — showed elevated lead levels last summer. Pritz-Shields said the school informed parents that it had carried out mitigation measures and retested the fixtures before students entered the school building for the year.

Pritz-Shields said she is glad the district has continued to test the school’s drinking water — samples have been collected at Blaine on at least 11 occasions since 2016, according to district data. For her family, the results “reinforced the practice of having our children fill their reusable water bottles before leaving for school for the day,” she said.

While the statewide testing results indicate widespread issues with lead leaching into drinking water across public school facilities in Illinois, a full accounting of the issue remains incomplete.

The Tribune found that results from hundreds of schools appeared to be missing from the state’s records, based on building ages and student population, though omissions in state data on building ages make an exact count difficult. Until the Tribune inquired about those omissions last fall, the Illinois Department of Public Health was unaware that the state might not have all the required lead testing results in its possession.

In other words, four years after testing was supposed to be completed, state officials still do not know whether all of the schools that were required to test their drinking water for lead have complied.

The Department of Public Health said it is now working to gather missing results from schools. The department said it sent letters on April 26 to about 400 schools requesting that they provide copies before June of any completed testing results required under the law. If schools are eligible but have not completed testing, the letter instructs schools to submit results to the state by September.

Thousands of contaminated samples

Public officials have been aware of the problem that lead poses to children for decades. The metal damages developing brains even in very small amounts, and studies show that consuming lead lowers IQ, increases the chance of developing attention deficit disorders and is particularly destructive to young children.

The metal also poses risks for adults, especially pregnant people. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, no amount of lead is safe to be in the human body.

Lead is commonly found in drinking water samples because of pipes, solder and fixtures that contain lead. These can corrode over time, allowing tiny particles of the toxic metal to detach or dissolve into the water.

Before 1986, when the federal government first set limits on the amount of lead that could be used in pipes that come into contact with drinking water, lead pipes and solder were commonly used in internal plumbing.

In addition, some drinking fountains were built with lead-lined tanks, faucets were commonly manufactured with leaded brass, and many municipalities including Chicago required or allowed the use of lead service lines to bring water into homes.

[ With no state funding and shifting guidance, schools’ actions on lead in water vary widely ]

The majority of Illinois’ existing public school buildings were constructed during this era, according to records from the Illinois State Board of Education and Chicago Public Schools.

The federal government tried to address lead in school drinking water in 1988, when a law instructed states to develop testing and mitigation programs to aid schools in identifying and limiting lead in their drinking water. Following a court challenge from parents and a public interest group in Louisiana, an appeals court ruled that the federal government had exceeded its authority under the 10th Amendment. In the end, compliance was limited.

Not until the man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan, grabbed national attention did the Illinois legislature take action on lead in school drinking water. Former Illinois state Sen. Heather Steans sponsored the lead testing bill for schools and day care centers in 2016, which was also around the time that Tribune reporting showed that the Chicago Public Schools had never tested its school water for lead, despite lead problems identified throughout the city.

That year, the Environmental Protection Agency also recommended that the city of Galesburg, in western Illinois, provide bottled water or filters and free testing to some residents after finding consistent problems with elevated water lead levels.

“Obviously Flint triggered everybody, but there had been lead water issues in a town in Illinois,” Steans said last year in an interview. “We also knew that Chicago was one of the places that has the highest number of lead pipes anywhere in the country, so we knew there could well be a lot of lead issues.”

When the water lead testing bill was signed into law by then-Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2017, all public and private schools serving students under sixth grade in buildings constructed before Jan. 2, 2000, were instructed to test each of their drinking water sources for lead. Testing at schools built prior to 1987 was to be completed before the end of 2017, while the rest of the eligible schools had until the end of 2018.

The water samples had to be collected after a period of stagnation, which represents a sort of worst-case scenario for the amount of lead that can leach into the water before a fixture is first used in the morning. Schools were directed to take one sample immediately after turning on the taps, and a second sample after a 30-second flush of the fixture.

If water lead levels in any sample exceeded 5 parts per billion, the law required schools to notify parents promptly in written or electronic form and to include information about where the lead was found. Schools that had recently conducted voluntary testing, such as the Chicago Public Schools, could apply for a waiver to satisfy the testing requirement.

Licensed day care centers were also required to test their drinking water sources but faced different standards set by the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services.

As results poured in, schools statewide had to begin notifying parents of what they found during the testing. They also were supposed to send the test results to the state.

Those results, which the Tribune obtained through a public records request, show that schools found lead levels above 5 parts per billion in thousands of samples from kitchen, bathroom and classroom sinks, as well as more than 1,800 school drinking fountains.

At 48 school buildings, the first-drawn samples from at least one drinking fountain showed lead levels above 100 parts per billion, more than 20 times the threshold state legislators set for notifying parents.

At the time the Kankakee district carried out its testing, all of its school buildings had been constructed decades before regulations went into effect limiting the amount of lead used in plumbing.

The district collected water samples from more than 500 taps at 11 school buildings, including the high school, just before students returned from summer break. Within a month, results would show that samples from a total of 70 drinking fountains and 250 sinks had lead concentrations above 5 ppb, according to the state data.

Several fixtures had some of the highest water lead levels reported anywhere in the state — including a drinking fountain at Twain Elementary that registered a whopping 6,680 parts per billion of lead, a level that would qualify as hazardous waste under EPA standards.

“At that time, there was a lot of panicking and comments,” said Walters, the district superintendent. The district quickly took action by holding a public meeting, turning off problem drinking fountains, labeling sinks as “hand wash only” and installing temporary bottled water stations. Long-term fixes would prove more difficult for the district because legislators did not allocate funding for remediating problems.

“Dealing with the parents, and people that are upset … that’s unfortunately kind of the world that public educators live in,” Walters said. “We don’t want children to be unhealthy; we do want to make sure that we’re providing healthy water, solid education, whatever it is we need to provide.”

While the statewide testing revealed that the issue of lead in school drinking water was widespread, limitations in the testing law mean some lead contamination at public schools almost certainly went undetected.

One-time testing

One Friday in December 2021, water technicians arrived at Beethoven Elementary in Chicago’s Grand Boulevard neighborhood, turned on taps and bottled up 150 samples of water. The exercise had become commonplace throughout the Chicago Public Schools, with environmental specialists rolling in before the first bell with tubs of small plastic containers soon to be filled with children’s drinking water.

The water at Beethoven had been tested before: five years prior, in June 2016. Back then, none of the 34 fountains and sinks that had been tested showed any water lead levels at or above 5 parts per billion, though two fountains came close.

This time, lab results showed 13 fixtures with elevated levels of lead, including three drinking fountains and five newer bottle-filling stations. At one of them, a drinking fountain outside the counselor’s office, a sample showed a lead level roughly 24 times the state’s threshold for parent notification, according to the CPS results.

The differences in Beethoven’s results illustrate a broad problem with the single round of testing required under the state law: If lead isn’t found in one round of tests, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t turn up the next time someone looked.

Chicago’s voluntary, periodic testing program has identified elevated lead levels at more than 400 fixtures that previously showed traces of lead at or below 5 parts per billion, the Tribune found.

[ Read more on how we reported this investigation ]

The variability in water systems can complicate one-time readings, according to Justin Miller-Schulze, an analytical and environmental chemist and associate professor at California State University in Sacramento who has studied lead contamination in water at school buildings.

Factors that can affect lead test results include flow rate, water temperature, internal volume and the fixture components, he said.

“A lot of sampling is really one of the key ways that you can figure out where and what and the extent of the issue and where the issue lies,” Miller-Schulze said. “But, extensive sampling is expensive, and it takes a lot of work, and it takes a fair amount of effort in terms of interpretation.”

Samuel Dorevitch, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has recently studied the phenomenon of intermittent lead release, in which tiny scales of lead — the size of a grain of sand or smaller — can randomly break off of lead-containing pipes, even in water systems that use treated, noncorrosive water. This type of lead contamination, which releases a large amount of lead at once, differs from lead leaching, which is when lead dissolves slowly into the water.

Dorevitch said one-time testing protocols do not account for the possibility of intermittent lead release in older pipes.

“The concern is that people are kind of falsely being reassured that they don’t have a serious problem with lead because the sample that was collected didn’t show high levels,” Dorevitch said. “If they had sampled their water on five days instead of one day, it would be much more likely that they would find this problem.”

The Tribune reviewed other states’ school lead testing programs and found only 12 require periodic water sampling.

The Chicago Public Schools, which described itself in a statement as “a national leader among school districts in our proactive approach to monitoring our schools’ drinking water,” said it plans to test a quarter of its schools each year through 2026.

The district reports it has collected and analyzed almost 100,000 drinking water samples since this phase of the program began in 2018, including many repeat tests.

At Clay Elementary in Hegewisch, parent Maria Amezcua said she sends her son to school with a bottle of water from home because she is worried about the safety of the school’s water.

Children there “don’t like to drink water in the school because the flavor they say is nasty,” said Amezcua, a parent representative on Clay’s Local School Council. “Many students bring the bottles of water in the school, but not everybody.”

Since the district first tested the school in 2016, testing has identified elevated water lead levels at drinking fountains on three occasions, including as recently as August 2022, according to the district’s results.

This school year, Amezcua said, the principal told parents that they could afford to fix only one of the fountains that showed elevated levels of lead. The other, outside the cafeteria, was shut off because of budget constraints. In response, parents successfully pushed for the school to provide jugs of water at lunchtime, she said.

Amezcua said she would like the school to test water fixtures more frequently because of the potential health impacts and the lead issues that have come up in the past.

“It’s not only for Clay; this problem is in many schools,” Amezcua said. “I would like for the system to put a little more attention on this problem because it’s a big problem.”

Clay’s principal declined an interview request. The district, in a response, said it “works diligently to ensure our students and staff have access to clean, safe drinking water throughout the district.”

Missed opportunities

In addition to requiring only a single round of testing, the law also exempted many Illinois schools from the testing requirement. Only schools in buildings constructed before 2000 and those that serve younger students were required to comply with the law.

That meant some schools were exempted from testing even though their piping and fixtures likely did not meet modern standards for lead in plumbing.

Although federal regulations set limits in 1986 on the amount of lead allowed in pipes, they could still contain up to 8% lead and be called “lead free” until 2014. That year, the definition of “lead free” changed to 0.25% of the weighted average of the part of the plumbing material that comes into contact with water.

The results of the Chicago Public Schools’ voluntary testing program, which applies to all school buildings, suggest that the state law’s exemptions likely allowed schools with lead issues to go untested.

According to the CPS data, elevated water lead levels were identified from fixtures at nine district schools that were built after January 2000, including Richardson Middle School, which was constructed in 2015 and 2016.

The statewide testing results also show lead issues at some newer schools that voluntarily tested their water. The Tribune used a public buildings database maintained by the Illinois State Board of Education, state board annual statistical reports and CPS building surveys to determine the age of schools in the IDPH data and found results exceeding the state’s notification threshold for at least 18 schools outside of Chicago that records show were built after January 2000.

Joan Leary Matthews, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she and others fought hard to fix weaknesses in a New York state law that requires public schools to test their drinking water for lead. Following a 2021 amendment to the law, schools are no longer exempt from testing if they were built after 2014 or if they were deemed to have “lead-free” plumbing. The state also now requires water sampling every three years.

“It didn’t make any sense,” Matthews said of the previous exemptions. “Testing is so variable.”

In New York, the testing requirement applies to all types of public schools, but the Illinois law exempts those serving students in grade six and up. Research shows that younger children are at more risk of lead’s damaging effects, but lead poses health risks to everyone. Schools of all grade levels are occupied not just by children but also by many teachers and staff of childbearing age, Matthews noted. Lead exposure during pregnancy can damage the fetus.

According to data obtained from IDPH and the Chicago Public Schools, voluntary testing turned up elevated levels of lead at dozens of public middle and high schools across the state.

In Chicago, four high school buildings each had nine or more fixtures with water lead levels exceeding 15 parts per billion at some point between 2016 and 2022. Outside of the Chicago district, more than 100 high schools and middle schools that submitted results to the state found water lead levels above the parental notification threshold set by state legislators for younger students, according to state data.

[ Toxic traces at the tap: Read the full series here ]

Chicago’s comprehensive testing program also accentuates potential limitations with the state law’s prescribed sampling methods. Under the law, school officials were instructed to collect a minimum of two 250-milliliter samples from each drinking water source, with the second sample following a 30-second flush of the fixture. The Chicago Public Schools, which developed its program in cooperation with the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Chicago Department of Water Management, collects five 250-milliliter samples when testing a fixture.

The results CPS sent to the state show that the collection of thousands of additional water samples from the same taps sometimes revealed elevated water lead levels that may not have been identified if only two samples were taken.

At 75 fixtures in Chicago schools, the two first samples drawn from the fixture registered low or no lead but elevated levels showed up in the third, fourth or fifth sample, according to the data. At the Little Village High School complex, for example, testing in November 2016 at a drinking fountain showed water lead levels below 1 ppb drawn from the first two samples, while the third sample showed lead at 120 ppb. The fourth and fifth samples also showed water lead levels below 1 ppb.

Miller-Schulze and his colleagues Catherine Ishikawa and Jeffery Foran conducted a study in 2019 to measure variability in water lead testing at drinking sources at several university buildings. They found that one or two water samples may not be sufficient to identify fixtures that leach lead.

“Most of the time you’re going to be OK sampling like that,” Ishikawa said of standard sampling methods that collect a first draw and a post-flush sample on the same date, as the Illinois law requires.

“But, you know, if it’s your child that’s drinking from one of the fountains that doesn’t follow that pattern,” she said, it’s important to realize that “it’s not going to catch all of it.”

The state law did not require the Illinois Department of Public Health to make the results of the lead testing public, and the agency has not done so. To date, its main public acknowledgment of the scope of the lead problem came in a December 2020 memo noting that 88% of the public and private schools that submitted results had reported some level of lead was detected.

The memo is linked on the department’s website but has garnered little attention.

The agency recommended in the same memo that schools built between 2000 and 2014 also test their drinking water for lead, based on changes in federal regulations as well as the statewide results. The memo was addressed to the state’s former education superintendent, Carmen Ayala. It is not clear whether the recommendation resulted in additional testing.

Former Tribune reporters Cecilia Reyes and Kinsey Crowley contributed to this story.