Two years after Philadelphia officials pledged to crack down on lead in drinking water at school buildings, most city charter schools still haven’t tested for the dangerous neurotoxin. The lapse was not caught until now because the city agencies tasked with oversight have failed to enforce Philadelphia’s post-Flint-crisis water quality standards.

The rules are simple: City Council passed legislation in 2017 requiring all Philly public schools to test for lead once every five years and post results online for review. The School District of Philadelphia has complied with this law. But a PlanPhilly/Keystone Crossroads investigation found that 45 out of 64 charter schools required to conduct independent lead tests ignored these requirements.

Several school administrators contacted for this story seemed shocked to hear about the law.

“What lead tests?” asked Edward Poznek, CEO of the Christopher Columbus Charter School. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Lead can have major negative impacts on childhood brain development. When a previous PlanPhilly/Keystone Crossroads report revealed last month that Mastery Charter School officials failed to notify parents about high lead levels detected in an elementary school’s drinking water, parents were livid. Yet, Mastery turned out to be one of the few schools that even bothered to test for lead in their schools’ drinking water.

Administrators at dozens of schools that failed to post lead testing results online were called and emailed for this story. Many ignored requests for comment. Thirteen schools indicated they would immediately initiate lead tests or had conducted tests shortly after being contacted.

However, school officials, like Poznek, have at least one good reason for still being in the dark: The city hasn’t enforced its own rules.

Councilperson Helen Gym, who authored the testing law, said she intended her legislation to be backed up by inspectors from the city’s Department of Licenses & Inspections and the Health Department. Instead, PlanPhilly/Keystone found that neither agency ever took up the work of certifying that city charter schools had tested for lead.

After being contacted by reporters, Karen Guss, a spokesperson for L&I, acknowledged there had “not been an administrative process in place for compiling information from water testing results.”

While Gym said she intended her legislation to set one of the strictest lead standards for school drinking water in the nation, the law designed to protect children simply fell through the cracks.

Guss promises that will change next year.

“In consultation with the Health Department and the School District, L&I will put such a process in place,” she said.

Yet while the underlying legislation makes lead testing a prerequisite for school building occupancy, Guss could not say what penalty schools would face for skipping tests.

“The consequences of not qualifying for a special certificate of inspection will be determined going forward,” she said.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, said the city’s failure to enforce its own rules was “very disappointing” given the lifelong impact lead can have on childhood brain development.

“The risk of lead poisoning is grave and permanent,” Cooper said.

Mike Dunn, a spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney, described the enforcement lapse as unfortunate.

“It’s a tremendously large government charged with enforcing thousands of laws, and this particular legislative mandate was unfortunately not fulfilled,” Dunn said. “Your reporting brought it to our attention, and we’re going to fix it.”

New schools, old buildings

The construction of most traditional public school buildings in Philadelphia largely mirrors the city’s boom years, from the 19th century to the mid-20th century. That building surge coincided with the rising use of lead-based solder or piping, materials now cited as the main source for water-based lead contamination.

Lead solder and piping were effectively banned by a 1986 congressional amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act. But that doesn’t mean the toxin has disappeared from schools built prior to 1986. For districts like Philadelphia, the size of school buildings and pervasiveness of the materials has made lead abatement a costly ongoing project.

Charter schools are not immune. The sector emerged in the late 1990s as a result of state legislation and early operators often raced to secure whatever large buildings were immediately available. New Foundations Charter, in Northeast Philadelphia, converted a former Superfresh grocery store, for example. The nearby Franklin Towne charter schools took over part of a deactivated Army munitions depot. Still others occupied vacant public or Catholic school buildings, while some built entirely new buildings.

On the whole, though, charters still tend to occupy older structures. Property data from L&I shows that the average charter school building was about 60 years old. And, out of the 45 schools that failed to test for lead, 30 were built before the lead ban, with an average age closer to 90 years.