MPS lead crisis: Community leaders call for change outside clinic

Yahoo

08-05-2025

The Brief
Milwaukee Public Schools is in the midst of an ongoing lead hazard crisis.
Community leaders called for change outside a North Division screening clinic.
The health department is tasked with tackling the growing lead problem.
MILWAUKEE - Community leaders gathered outside North Division High School on Wednesday afternoon, calling for changes in the city, county, health department and school district amid an ongoing Milwaukee Public Schools lead hazard crisis.
"To advance policies that prioritize prevention of lead in children, whether in the school, the home, the water, the soil which folks are growing food to eat, and shift from a test-and-treat model to primary prevention," said Melody McCurtis, a Metcalfe Park neighborhood resident.
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What they're saying
The Milwaukee Health Department is tasked with tackling the growing lead problem in MPS schools and bringing its facilities back into compliance after several lead closures and likely more to come.
"Based on our investigation, we're prioritizing lead paint and lead dust," said Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis. "They have to return to compliance. That, inherently, is going to be a reactive process."
MHD is looking at school buildings built before 1978, prioritizing elementary schools as the age group most at risk for lead exposure. The scope of the problem is overwhelming.
"We're an old city with a lot of deeply-rooted challenges," said Tyler Weber, Milwaukee's deputy commissioner of environmental health. Those challenges include redlining, disinvestment, old construction and lack of staffing.
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By the numbers
Wednesday's lead screening clinic at North Division had the capacity to test 300 children. If there are positive tests, the challenge is to determine where that possible exposure occurred.
There are tens of thousands of children who live in Milwaukee, with 70,000 MPS students among them. Each year in the city, more than 1,200 kids test positive for lead poisoning with an average age of 3 years old.
But many more children are not getting tested, which means there are likely many more MPS students who have lead poisoning and don't know it.
So far, more than 1,400 children have been tested – including nearly 400 MPS students. Of that, the health department is investigating five potential lead poisonings. It's still unclear if that exposure happened in the home or at school.
What's next
Without additional funding or help from the federal government to hire more staff and expand the scope of the testing to be proactive, MHD said this is the most effective solution right now.
"It is a critical step in better understanding the potential exposure that students might have experienced in the school," said Totoraitis.
The Source
Information in this report is from the Milwaukee Health Department. FOX6 News also spoke to people at Wednesday's clinic at North Division High School.