Misleading New York
Whatever the answer may be to the eternal question of what the city’s five borough presidents are good for, promoting panic should be nowhere close to a contender. Yet Ruben Diaz, Eric Adams, Gale Brewer, Melinda Katz and Jimmy Oddo act worse than uselessly as the city Department of Education contends with the serious but manageable challenge of getting the lead out of some public schools’ water.
“We are calling for immediate action, as the health and quality of life of our children and their families are at stake,” chorused the beeps in a letter last month to Chancellor Carmen Fariña, calling on DOE to immediately “provide an alternative water supply to all affected schools, either through the form of bottled water or water coolers.”
They call, too, for children in a couple hundred schools to be offered blood tests and concluded omimously: “The tragedy of Flint, Michigan” — where thousands of kids were poisoned — “should not be repeated here.”
The situation in New York City is simply this: Zero kids have been found with elevated blood levels tied to water in public schools.
DOE in December began testing water flowing out of drinking fountains and sinks in 1,700 school facilities. In the coming month it found that nearly 1 in 10 samples out of 46,654 outlets included lead beyond the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s advised level.
Which doesn’t in itself mean that any children at those schools was harmed, but that further action is necessary. Crews are taping each tainted outlet shut. Kids are getting explanatory notes home in their backpacks. Faucet by tap, plumbers are bringing clean water back online. It takes a while. Our schools are old. We sympathize with concerned parents. Responding to a state mandate to test, the DOE first used a method of analysis that understated the problem by flushing out pipes before getting a reading. That wasn’t fraudulent — many school districts do the same — but it was misleading. With a revised the testing technique, the number of lead-tainted faucets and fountains shot up.
Blood testing, with a finger prick, could shed light on whether any children suffered harm. But trumped up political alarm is not the answer.