Latest news with #Lead-BasedPaintComplianceProgram
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trowbridge School ordered to close temporarily to address lead hazards, students to relocate
The Milwaukee Health Department has ordered Trowbridge Street School of Great Lakes Studies to temporarily close starting Monday after finding 'unsafe lead dust levels' within the building, a department spokesperson confirmed Thursday night. Students will be relocated to the Wisconsin Conservatory ofLifelong Learning, 1017 N. 12th St., while work to address the lead hazards is underway, according to a letter to staff and families. The school was one of four Milwaukee Public Schools buildings this year where city health officials said students either had been or may have been poisoned by lead. No amount of lead is safe, especially for children. The department has issued orders to address lead hazards at two schools — Golda Meir Lower Campus and Albert E. Kagel Dual Language School — but Trowbridge is the first ordered to close for such work. Results of a lead risk assessment at Trowbridge and a fourth school, Maryland Avenue Montessori, have not yet been released. The Health Department is updating its website with documents from each school, including the assessments and orders. Lead hazards were first identified at Golda Meir in January after a student was poisoned in the building. A 139-page report on the lead risks at Golda Meir noted chipping lead-based paint and lead dust had spread throughout four floors and common areas. Lead-based paint was commonly used until 1978, when it was banned due to safety concerns. The findings raised alarms for health officials about the quality of the district's ongoing maintenance and cleaning practices at buildings where the city's children spend hours every day. Since then, the scale of the problem across MPS buildings has started to come into sharper focus. Milwaukee schools officials last week told members of the city's Common Council that budget cuts and staffing shortages are straining the district's ability to keep up on building maintenance. The Health Department's findings come despite an MPS Lead-Based Paint Compliance Program that requires the district to inspect and correct lead-based paint hazards every year. Parents are encouraged to have their children tested for lead exposure. This story will be updated. Alison Dirr can be reached at adirr@ This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Trowbridge School ordered to close temporarily to address lead hazards
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
4th MPS student possibly lead poisoned at school; report on Golda Meir released
At least two — and potentially as many as four — Milwaukee Public Schools students have been poisoned by lead at school, city health officials said Tuesday. The news that a student may have been lead poisoned at a fourth school, Trowbridge Street School of Great Lakes Studies, comes as the City Health Department released a 139-page report on the lead risks at Golda Meir Lower Campus where the first case was identified. That report noted chipping lead-based paint and lead dust had spread throughout four floors and common areas of Golda Meir, raising alarms for health officials about the quality of the district's ongoing maintenance and cleaning practices at buildings where the city's children spend hours every day. "You don't have to be a lead risk assessor to go in and see that there's deteriorated paint, that there's paint chips on the walls," said Tyler Weber, the department's deputy commissioner for environmental health. No amount of lead is safe, especially for children. The Health Department's findings come despite an MPS Lead-Based Paint Compliance Program that requires the district to inspect and correct lead-based paint hazards every year. A district spokesperson did not respond when asked Monday for the most recent date that Golda Meir and two other schools were last inspected for lead hazards. In a statement, MPS said it is working with the Health Department to remedy the situation and "remains committed to maintaining safe environments for our students and staff." Lead paint- and dust-related hazards appear widespread at Golda Meir, which was built in 1890. Lead was found on the ground floor boy's bathroom, cafeteria, hallway, teacher's lounge, kitchen areas and several rooms on the first, second and third floors, among other areas, the report said. The release of the lead risk assessment comes days after the Health Department sent a letter to the school district warning that dangerous levels of lead contamination had been found in "multiple" MPS buildings, including Golda Meir. MPS must take specific steps to avoid putting children at "serious risk of lead poisoning, developmental delays, and other possible health complications," Health Commissioner Michael Totoraitis' letter said. "The lead degradation that is present in the schools isn't something that happened overnight," Totoraitis said Tuesday. "There's definitely a lot of contributing factors that have led us to this point." More than 150 images included in the report show peeling paint throughout the school building: on doors, walls, trim, stairs, ductwork, cabinets and more. It's not realistic to fully remove lead from a building, meaning continued monitoring of painted surfaces in any building before 1978 is "critical," Weber said. Lead-based paint was commonly used until 1978, when it was banned due to safety concerns. "The concern is that this work wasn't maintained on the front end," Weber said. Samples from dust wipes showed the district was not using the proper cleaning practices to remove lead hazards, Weber said. Weber said the Golda Meir project was likely the biggest lead risk inspection the department has ever conducted. It required about 140 dust wipe samples, the number the city's lab can process in one week. Eight lead risk assessors spent six hours document lead hazards in the school, he said. "It's hard to get this level of lead and dust wipe samples if you have good lead safety practices," Weber said. The average level of lead hazards found on third-floor windowsills was 16 times higher than permitted, the report found. Page 1 of Golda Meir -Consolidated RIsk Assessment Report Copy final Contributed to DocumentCloud by Alison Dirr (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) • View document or read text The Health Department identified lead-based paint hazards in MPS schools as the result of investigations into poisoning of individual children. In the letter last week, the department said it found lead hazards in Golda Meir, Albert E. Kagel Dual Language School, and potentially at Maryland Avenue Montessori. The department's typical protocol is to look for lead hazards at the child's primary and secondary residences before moving to other locations the child frequents. Milwaukee sees more than 1,000 children poisoned by lead each year, Weber said, most of them between the ages of 1 and 3 years old. Even without investigating MPS schools, the Health Department was already at capacity for the number of children whose cases it is able to individually investigate, he said. "There's a really important debate within the Common Council, the Mayor's Office, with the city, about what we can do to get ahead of this," Weber said. "We're just trying to keep up with what we have." Additional lead risk assessments at the other schools will be released as they become available. The Health Department is compiling documents from lead investigations at Milwaukee Public Schools on its website. Under the district's own plan, every year the MPS building engineer must inspect its facilities for deterioration of lead-based paint. Any deteriorating paint must be noted by the engineer and forwarded to the district's paint shop supervisor, who is responsible for implementing "corrective action," according to guidelines for MPS' Lead Exposure Control Program. MPS did not respond when asked for the date of the last inspection of Golda Meir, Kagel or Maryland Avenue. Related to MPS' lead paint plan, Totoraitis said Friday the Health Department is working with MPS and the state to "ensure that any edits, any revisions to that plan are enhanced so that we don't find ourselves in this situation again." The Milwaukee Health Department does not regularly inspect school buildings for lead. The purpose of the district's lead-based paint renovation program is to "maintain paint that contains lead in a manner that will protect the building occupants from exposure to lead-containing dust to abide by all applicable Federal, State, and local regulations with respect to lead-based paint," the document states. Golda Meir is safe for children to occupy — as long as MPS adheres to Health Department orders, Totoraitis said. Weber said although the district has been cleaning, there are still safety concerns identified in the letter last week. That's why parents and staff also received an advisory regarding cleaning practices and additional steps they can take. So far, MPS has been responsive to the Health Department's concerns at the schools the department is monitoring, Weber said. He said the district immediately completed renovation work in the area where the child had been lead poisoned at Golda Meir. The district has told the Health Department that this week a company is conducting a deep cleaning of Golda Meir, Weber said. He did not immediately know what was taking place at Kagel. The Health Department will return to Golda Meir on Friday to conduct followup testing and monitor MPS's progress. The department has also been working with the state Department of Health Services and the Office of the City Attorney to better understand the Health Department's authority to close schools with this hazard, Weber said. Moving forward, "there's a need for MPS to get a grasp on what may or may not be happening in their other schools," Weber said. This story will be updated. Cleo Krejci covers K-12 education and workforce development as a Report For America corps member based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact her at CKrejci@ or follow her on Twitter @_CleoKrejci. For more information about Report for America, visit Alison Dirr can be reached at adirr@ This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Health Department: 4th MPS student possibly lead poisoned at school
