38,000 CASES OF LEAD IN SCHOOLS
Post reviews alarming DOE data
Safety inspectors discovered dangerous lead paint in city classrooms more than 38,000 times during the past five years — with almost half the findings in rooms that housed highly vulnerable kids in pre-K, The Post has learned. Department of Education statistics also showed 1,335 positive test results for lead paint in kindergarten classrooms and 284 in play areas, as well as hundreds more in vestibules, hallways and corridors. Inspectors found 1,924 violations in kitchens, too, and another 209 in cafeterias, raising the possibility that toxic chips or dust — which can cause brain damage if ingested — had contaminated food. The disturbing data are contained in an internal DOE spreadsheet obtained by The Post under the state Freedom of Information Law ahead of the Sept. 10 reopening of the nation’s largest school system.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, officials are planning to offer “blended” education in which kids will alternate between classroom and remote learning, but 26 percent of parents have already opted for fully virtual instruction.
The spreadsheet details the results of 49,314 tests that confirmed the presence of lead paint in 655 schools across all five boroughs from 2015 through 2019.
More than 75 percent of the tests — 38,164 — involved classrooms, with 19,145 positive results found in those used for instruction and another 19,018 in rooms used for Mayor de Blasio’s signature pre-K program.
A Post analysis of the data indicates that the results cover about 2,700 classrooms with at least one positive lead test each.
Lawyer Matthew Chachere, who helped draft the city’s 2004 lead-paint regulations, said “parents very much need to be concerned” about the presence of lead paint in their kids’ schools — and especially if the kids are younger than 6.
“When the city is finding these kinds of things, parents ought to know,” he said. “Kids need to get tested and find out if they’ve ingested anything.”
Chachere, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation Legal Services, also noted that school overseers are subject to less scrutiny than landlords when it comes to lead paint.
“Enforcement has always fallen through the cracks,” he said.
“That attitude has always been, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll fix it.’ But that hasn’t been the case.”
Manhattan lawyer Reuven Frankel, who specializes in representing victims of lead poisoning, likewise said, “The current system is risky, and the risk is a child’s brain development.”
PS 90 Horace Mann, in Queens, amassed the worst record, with 1,139 positive tests for lead paint, including 892 in classrooms and another 156 in pre-K rooms.
There were also 46 positive tests in bathrooms and another 45 in the school’s kitchen.
The DOE claims on its Web site that it “regularly inspects buildings for peeling paint . . . because peeling leadbased paint can present a risk of lead exposure, especially for children under age six.”
The results at PS 90 Horace Mann don’t include any positive tests during 2018, which isn’t among the years for which findings there are listed.
Other schools that compiled the greatest number of positive test results for lead paint include two in the Mott Haven section of The Bronx: PS 277, with 884, and PS 43 Jonas Bronck, with 797.
PS 86 The Irvington, in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section, had 591 positive test results, and the STAR Academy-PS 63 in Manhattan’s East Village had 535.
The tests were conducted using handheld X-ray fluorescence, or “XRF” devices, which use beams of electromagnetic waves to measure the amount of lead in dried paint.
The DOE apparently challenged some of the test results, leading to laboratory examinations that changed the findings to “negative” in 405 cases, the spreadsheet shows.
Still, far more challenges apparently backfired, with the XRF findings upheld in 599 cases.
The DOE also conducted testing in late 2019 that’s not included in the records it provided to The Post.. The results arrived three business days before the one-year anniversary of the date on which they were requested in August 2019.
The results of the “Winter 2019” testing are contained in a spreadsheet that is posted on the DOE Web site and that purports to offer “the results of the inspections for all classrooms serving students in first grade or under.”
But that document shows that almost all of the 9,485 tests conducted were only visual inspections for deteriorated paint. Only 243 of the inspections turned up chipping paint, which led to a followup XRF test, the DOE clarified late Wednesday.
DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said, “The mayor’s administration has done more than any before to eliminate the dangers of lead in schools.
“We’ve gone above and beyond by testing every single classroom for young students multiple times and even expanded to cafeterias and libraries. We took action to address the 1 percent of the rooms that tested positive and will continue our mission to get that low number even lower,” he said.
The DOE also said that none of the five schools with the highest number of positive tests was found to have “any deteriorated lead-based paint in the Winter 2019 inspection round.”