More than 2,400 Ontario schools and daycares exceeded the current federal guideline for lead in drinking water in the past two years, a Toronto Star/Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found.

The startling figure marks a 275-per-cent jump from two years ago due to more frequent testing and a tougher federal lead limit that reveal a dramatically larger problem than previously known.

Across the province, 9 per cent of all lead tests in schools and daycares exceeded the national lead guideline of 5 parts per billion (ppb) during the 2016/17 and 2017/18 school years, according to the Star’s analysis of provincial test result data. In all, 29 per cent of schools and daycares had at least one exceedance.

Some were dramatic. Twenty three schools and daycares across Ontario reported samples higher than 1,000 ppb — a level experts say can immediately impact blood lead levels in a child and risk harm to cognitive development.

The data are available on a provincial website but a lack of warnings to students, parents and teachers has kept the problem hidden.

“As a student, I think I should be told,” says 19-year-old Sarah Rana, who graduated last year from White Oaks Secondary School, an Oakville high school with about 1,900 students in two buildings dating back to the 1960s.

Lead fixtures, including taps and water fountains, were historically used in school plumbing and many remain in place today as the main culprits of elevated lead levels in drinking water.

With lead exceedances dating back to 2016, White Oaks’ south campus showed 22 water samples over 5 ppb last year. On the school’s north campus, there were another 26 with one sample that tested as high as 140 ppb — 28 times the federal guideline.

“I’m shocked,” said Rana. “I don’t even know what to think about that...How is this going to affect me in the long term?”

In March, Health Canada cut the federal lead guideline in half — to 5 ppb from 10 ppb — to reflect the neurotoxin’s health risks. Ontario has for now kept its benchmark at 10 ppb while it reviews Ottawa’s new guideline.

Children, especially younger children, are particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of lead because their bodies absorb the toxin more than adults. Lead in paint, the environment or drinking water can impact a child’s cognitive development, IQ levels and overall health.

There is no safe level of lead, according to the World Health Organization.

“Lead doesn’t really confine itself to one organ,” said Dr. Pascal Lavoie, pediatrician and researcher at the B.C. Children’s Hospital and B.C. Women’s Hospital. “It’s a metal that binds to any tissues in the body. It’s in the brain, it’s in the heart, it’s in the bowel, it’s in the cardiovascular system...The effects are permanent and non-reversible.”

A 2013 Health Canada risk management strategy predicted an economic benefit of more than $9 billion a year “if the exposure of Canadian children to lead could be eliminated.” It factored the number of children exposed each year and the impact on intellectual development and lifetime earnings.

Ontario is the only province that requires all schools and daycare centres to test for lead at the tap and post the results online. Lead testing in schools across the country can be spotty and obtaining results often requires filing time-consuming and often expensive freedom of information requests, the investigation found.

Reporters’ requests for test results routinely took months and came with fees totalling thousands of dollars. In each provincial dataset that was provided, at least one result surpassed Health Canada’s current guideline.

In Alberta, documents obtained for the first time through a freedom of information request detail lead test results in 150 daycares in 2017 that found 18 with dangerous lead levels reaching as high as 35.5 ppb — seven times the federal safety guideline. The report notes Health Canada has documented “neurodevelopmental effects” from lead levels as low as 1 to 2 ppb and calls for “public health interventions.” While Alberta does not require lead testing in schools, the Calgary Catholic School District found a quarter of the 86 schools it tested since 2017 exceeded the federal guideline. And in 2016, testing in 42 schools in one of the province’s largest school boards near Edmonton turned up 22 with lead levels that exceed the current federal guideline.

In Nova Scotia, lead test results in schools are not posted publicly and there is no central database of lead results from the province’s schools and daycares. But data obtained through a freedom of information request reveals a patchwork of testing across the province. Lead results from schools and daycares on well water show sometimes dramatic exceedances that repeat for years. The overwhelming majority of test results from one Pictou County elementary school — 111 of 119 — exceeded the federal guideline dating back to 2010, with readings reaching as high as 65 ppb in its tap water. The school has been on a bottled water advisory since 2012. Tests from a dozen more mostly rural schools and daycares show lead exceedances that reach beyond five times the federal guideline. None of the results were publicly posted.

A study published in June by Quebec’s public health institute found that in a small number of schools, lead levels at the tap were high enough to impact IQ levels by 1 to 3 points on average — and up to 7 points — at the most affected schools. But the true scope of the problem remains unclear, the study concludes, due to a “scarcity” of data in Quebec which has historically not required lead testing in schools and daycares. Following publication of this investigation’s findings about Quebec schools and daycares in July as well as subsequent coverage in La Presse, the province’s education ministry told school boards across the province last month that it hoped they would test all taps within the next few months. The government has also said it plans to increase testing at daycares, but it hasn’t formally introduced any new regulations for either the schools or the daycares.

Since British Columbia brought in new rules in 2016 requiring schools to test for lead in drinking water, more than 600 schools have reported at least one water sample that failed to meet the national lead standard. In all, more than 7,500 tests exceeded the federal guideline. While schools must communicate results to students, staff and parents, there is no mandatory public posting. And while B.C. daycares are required to provide “safe drinking water,” they aren’t required to test for lead. “While water sampling is one of the methods available, they can also choose to flush their pipes, use bottle water or add filters,” reads a ministry of health statement.

In response to an access-to-information request, Newfoundland and Labrador disclosed results from tap water sampling done in schools in 2001 and 2002. With the exception of one water fountain tested in 2017, the province has not sampled water more recently.

On July 1, 2017, Ontario’s Safe Drinking Water Act changed to require that lead tests be conducted by schools and daycares at any fountain or tap that is used for drinking water and/or preparing food. The number of tests increased to 87,219 in 2017/18 from 15,374 in 2016/17.

“You start looking for it, you’re going to find very, very high lead in many classrooms, where some of our most vulnerable age groups are present, and drinking a lot of water,” said Marc Edwards, a civil engineer and lead expert from Virginia Tech who helped set up lead testing protocols in Ontario.

“And there’s nothing that you can do to undo harm in the past. The only thing you can do is to try to reduce that risk in the future.”

Ontario schools are grappling with a backlog of repairs, totalling almost $16 billion. Removing plumbing can seem like a pipe dream, likely to fall off the priorities list.

On Thursday, the Toronto District School Board released data showing a $3.5-billion repairs backlog, a figure expected to hit $5.2 billion by 2023.

In all, the two years of data show nearly 9,500 lead exceedances of the federal guideline in Ontario schools and daycares.

In a written statement to the Star, Ministry of Education officials said the “vast majority” of public and private schools and child care centres have had “no problems with lead” in their drinking water and that when exceedances do occur, school boards and private school and daycare owners must take “immediate corrective action.”

For the 2019/20 school year, the ministry has marked $1.4 billion for “renewal funding” to maintain “safe, accessible and healthy learning environments,” reads the statement.

But school board officials say the province has not been dealing with the added costs of removing lead.

“There hasn’t really been much discussion from the Ministry of Education to us about how to respond to this,” said Maia Puccetti, superintendent of facility services for the Halton District School Board where the Star found 304 exceedances in the past two years — one of the highest totals among school boards in the province.

“In Canada, it doesn’t seem that we’ve made it a very big issue and that comes down to the fact that we have a laissez-faire attitude toward our water in general...We’ve not done a very good job of maintaining our infrastructure and we’re paying the price now.”

Jennifer Sarna, a superintendent with the York Catholic District School Board, said it remains unclear how school boards are going to deal with the inevitable spike in exceedances with the lowering of the federal lead guideline.

“I can clearly see by looking at the test results...we’re going to be strapped to manage,” said Sarna, whose board logged 112 exceedances of the federal guideline in the past two years. “I don’t know if there is a plan...It was only after digging into it after you reached out to me that I learned about it. Otherwise, I would have been blissfully unaware.”

The Ministry of Education said that while it allocates funding to school boards, those boards are responsible for deciding how the funds are spent, “as they are in the best position to determine their renewal priorities and local needs.”

Ian Gaudet, controller of facility services for the Waterloo Region District School Board, said replacing all of the board’s lead plumbing is simply too expensive.

“In some cases, it’s underground, it’s in walls and so would be very destructive and very costly.”

And it’s often difficult to know whether lead is coming from pipes, plumbing fixtures, water fountains or the solder used to join pipes.

“We have purchased new bottle filling stations which have exceeded. And so, we work with our vendors to make sure that our products … don’t use lead solder in the joints,” Gaudet said. (Several school board officials across Ontario told the Star they have discovered lead leaching from new fixtures and fountains marketed as being “lead free.”)

Test sampling, lab analysis, staff time and replacement of fixtures and piping have cost the Waterloo board about $250,000 this past year, Gaudet said.

Lead problems in new fixtures are widespread, says Michele Grenier, executive director for Ontario Water Works, a not-for-profit involved in drinking water research and policy development.

“Lead-free brass wasn’t actually lead-free until 2014,” she said. Before then, “lead-free” brass contained up to 8 per cent lead. In 2014, federal building codes ordered a standard of less than one per cent.

Public Schools

The highest number of lead exceedances was measured in taxpayer-funded schools –– 8,556 out of 79,191 tests –– an 11 per cent exceedance rate of the federal guideline. More than 2,000 public schools have logged at least one lead exceedance over the national guideline during the 2016-2018 period, some with dozens of repeated exceedances.

Schools in the Peel District School Board logged the most exceedances with 773. Dufferin Peel Catholic District School Board, with 550, and Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, with 501, round out the top three.

Overall, there are 26 school boards with more than 100 exceedances and 43 with more than 50.

Here is a sampling of public schools across the province:

Timmins High and Vocational School, Timmins, District School Board Ontario North East.

This high school had the most lead exceedances of any school with 67. That is 56 per cent of all tests. One test found 497 ppb in 2017, nearly 100 times the national guideline.

Lesleigh Dye, director of education for the district board, said the board “follows the current (testing) measures that our medical officer of health has recommended,” including reporting lead problems to the province.

Brother Andre Catholic High School, Markham, York Catholic District School Board

The highest single test recorded came from a sample at this high school and measured at 6,710 ppb, more than 1,300 times above the federal guideline. In the U.S., the EPA considers lead to be hazardous waste if concentrations exceed 5,000 ppb.

Such dramatically high lead level samples are most likely due to a “chunk of lead” in the tap, said Edwards, who was among the first to blow the whistle on the serious lead issue in Flint, Michigan in late 2015.

“You have to take these high results seriously,” he said.

The classroom sink, where the high lead level was found, was capped and closed after staff attempted — unsuccessfully — to resolve the problem by flushing and replacing the accessible pipes, said Sarna, a superintendent with the York Catholic board.

“At that school...the preliminary steps that usually produce a resolution were not working. There was no feasible financial way to address the issue,” said Sarna.

“We have a number of options and we’ll go through whichever one is feasible from a financial perspective and we will do what we can to resolve the issue. So in an ideal world, sure, we’ll change the pipes. But that’s not always possible.”

Algonquin Avenue Public School, Thunder Bay, Lakehead District School Board

This school for junior kindergarten to Grade 8 has 325 students. Last year, it had 50 exceedances. In all, the school had a 38-per-cent exceedance rate over the two years.

“There are more (exceedance) numbers, but it’s making us better. It’s more information and more transparency,” said Kyle Ulvang, health and safety officer for the district board. “I think knowing the numbers is better. Before, we didn’t know true numbers.”

Western Technical Commercial School, Toronto, Toronto District School Board

This school, in the High Park area, which shares the building with the Ursula Franklin Academy and the alternative The Student School, had 16 national guideline lead exceedances last year, one reaching as high as 510 ppb.

“We did have exceedances and we ended up replacing the fixtures,” said Steve Shaw, the TDSB’s executive officer of facilities and planning. “There’s no doubt the change in regulation to test every source of drinking water over five years has had a financial impact on the board.”

Water sampling analysis last year cost the TDSB $280,000.

Flushing, the typical response to lead exceedances, comes with its own costs, said Shaw.

“We’re taking a pretty precious commodity — drinking water — and flushing it down the drain every day,” he said. “There’s a finite amount of money and if you’re pouring it down the drain, it seems like a waste. But you can’t put a price on safety. We spend whatever we need to spend to make sure it’s safe.”

St. Vincent Elementary School, Thunder Bay, Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board

This school, which opened in 1969, had 13 exceedances in 2016/2017 and 21 in 2017/2018. It serves 145 students from kindergarten to Grade 6.

While the school has five drinking water fountains, the exceedances were mainly found in the school’s sinks, school board officials told the Star.

“It’s usually a lead washer in a faucet or lead soldering,” said Paul Mignault, the board’s plant field officer. “I don’t think we’ve ever run into lead piping in any of the buildings. We’ve always done our due diligence and replaced faucets…or there was the odd time where we would replace a small section of piping where there could have been lead soldering on those joints.”

Pino Tassone, the board’s director of education, said staff are committed to addressing the issue.

“We obviously need all we need to do around flushing and measuring,” he said. “We can never put a price on health and safety. Number one is the quality of water has to be there.”

Private Schools

Ontario private schools had a five per cent exceedance rate, with 273 tests above the national standard. More than 100 private schools in all had at least one lead exceedance over the past two years. Some private schools have also shown chronic lead issues.

One of the highest number of exceedances was registered at Ridley College in St. Catharines — 22 exceedances in 128 tests.

The school, which has an annual tuition ranging from $17,000 for kindergarten students up to $33,000 a year for high school students to $68,000 for international students, saw a jump from four exceedances in 2016/2017 to 18 exceedances the next year. They ranged from 5 ppb to 147 ppb.

“Ridley College...has been purposefully addressing the areas of need on our campus,” the school wrote in a statement. “We will continue to partner with and report to the Ministry of the Environment and the local Medical Officer of Health to ensure the cleanest, safest and most reliable drinking water possible.”

Westboro Academy in Ottawa, a private kindergarten to Grade 8 school with an annual tuition of about $14,000 a year, saw only one exceedance in the 2016/2017 school year, but had nine last year.

School officials declined requests for comment from the Star.

Heritage Academy of Learning Excellence in Ottawa, a not-for-profit school specializing in dyslexia and ADD for students in Grades 1 to 12, had 10 exceedances out of 18 tests in the past two years.

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The school’s director, Cheryl Ward, directed the Star’s questions to the Ottawa Catholic School Board, which owns the building.

Gerry Sancartier, the board’s property and operations officer, said the exceedances happened at two fixtures in the school which were addressed through flushing, installing a lead filter and replacing one of the fixtures at a cost of $500.

Daycares

There were 646 lead exceedances measured in daycare centres over the two years, an overall exceedance rate of 3.5 per cent. In all, 281 Ontario daycares had at least one lead exceedance in that period, including dozens of daycares that had a string of repeat exceedances.

“The child in the daycare is...like a sponge to lead,” said Michele Prevost, a civil engineering professor at Polytechnique Montreal and a leading international expert on lead in drinking water. “So, that child that is exposed to a high concentration...is going to be exposed to an acute dose of lead which will actually impact his blood lead levels significantly to the point of causing an acute exposure and impacts on his health.”

The Rainbow Centre in Atikokan, Ont., west of Thunder Bay, had 62 exceedances out of 114 tests. Fifty-four per cent of tests were above the national guideline.

“Lead is very dangerous for children,” said Kristi Langner, executive director of the non-profit daycare which is licensed for 64 spots ranging from infants up to 12-year-olds. “So I said, how can we fix this, how can we get this done? I want to do what’s best for them.”

The daycare provided bottled water during the process of testing and re-testing.

“We have 11 sinks in the child care area. They each had to be tested and they each had to have two compliant tests. So if something came back non-compliant we had to have more work done. And then we had to do those sinks again.”

Langer said it cost over $12,000 to address the problem over a year and a half.

“We’re now 100 per cent compliant.”

The centre still flushes pipes every morning because of the age of the building and concerns that the lead could be in the municipal source, she says.

The Kinsmen Children’s Centre in Waterloo logged a 72-per-cent exceedance rate and last year had 43 exceedances of the national guideline.

“All fixtures were flushed and re-sampled results came back within standards. We continue to flush our fixtures regularly,” wrote Bethany Rowland, a spokesperson for the Region of Waterloo.

Central Park YMCA Child Care Centre in Brampton showed lead exceedances in six of the eight tests over the past two years, provincial data shows — a 75 per cent failure rate.

Following the test results, the centre moved to bottled water and installed a water filtration system, wrote Chris Meyer, a spokesperson for the YMCA, in an email response.

“We take the safety of children seriously. Healthy child development is at the core of what we do every day at our approximately 300 child care locations across the Greater Toronto Area.”

The Kanata Montessori School (north campus) in Ottawa exceeded the national standard 14 times last year, the data show.

“We lease our building from the City of Ottawa,” said principal Jonathan Robinson. “We were not aware of high lead content as the city tests the water and we were told that it was not guaranteed to be safe for drinking so we ship in water for drinking.”

Testing and Transparency

The province requires schools with exceedances to flush the main water line for five minutes and fixtures for 10 seconds every day.

But while experts agree flushing reduces lead levels temporarily, it is not a reliable solution, said Prévost.

A study published last year in Water Research, co-authored by Prévost, found that 30 minutes after flushing, lead levels return to roughly half those following eight-hour stagnation, bringing into question Ontario’s solution to elevated lead in drinking water.

“Flushing will help a little bit,” Prevost said in an interview. “But flushing will not solve the issue. The concentrations will creep up again.”

A 2016 study Prévost co-published tested lead levels in 8,530 elementary schools, daycares and large buildings in four provinces, concluding that while overall lead levels were low, some daycares and elementary schools showed lead releases that were “likely to cause elevated (blood level levels) in young children.” The highest exceedances could trigger, “rare but acute risk,” it reads.

Public health initiatives promoting drinking water over other beverages, including the most recent Canada Food Guide, means reducing lead exposure in daycares and schools is “critical,” it concludes, adding that the standard policy of addressing the issue through flushing “should be re-examined.”

Yanna Lambrinidou, a leading U.S. researcher on lead in water at Virginia Tech, agrees.

“The notion that a morning flush is an adequate remedial measure is worrisome. It is not backed by science,” she said.

Schools are more likely to have lead issues due to long breaks in which students and staff members are not in the building using the plumbing or taps, causing water to stagnate in pipes, absorbing more lead.

“Overnight and weekends and breaks; all of these things increase the lead content in the water,” said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician and public health advocate at the Hurley Medical Centre in Michigan, who helped expose the Flint water crisis.

Hanna-Attisha was not surprised about the number of schools and daycares in Ontario with lead exceedances.

“The greatest irony is that you go to school to learn and to fill your brain with awesomeness. Yet, here you are potentially being exposed to something that can really do the exact opposite in terms of development,” she said. “Children exposed to lead will have higher rates of heart disease, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, early dementia, gout, anemia. I mean the list goes on of what childhood exposure to lead can cause later in life.”

Lead also poses a significant risk to pregnant women, as the metal is easily transferred to the fetus. It has also been linked to an elevated risk of stillbirth.

Christina, a teacher at a Halton region high school, whose name has been changed to protect her job, discovered that she had been unknowingly consuming leaded tap water throughout her pregnancy in 2018 when her union notified staff that lead had been found in the school’s drinking water.

“They never told us that there was a danger with the water,” she said. “The general impression that I was given … (was) if there was a problem and it was not safe, we would be notified.”

Provincial data show samples from her school with over 20 times the lead levels considered acceptable by Health Canada.

“Does it worry me to see those numbers? For sure. Did I have those numbers when I was told that there might have been a problem? No. But the numbers are available...why didn’t I see them?”

“I am asking the education sector to check relevant policies so parents and guardians are informed in a timely manner of any lead exceedance detected in their school or childcare centre,” then education minister Mitzie Hunter wrote to school boards in October 2017.

Hunter also asked parents be notified in a timely manner.

But many students and parents say they have remained in the dark.

Rana, who studied at Oakville’s White Oaks Secondary School until graduating last year, learned of her school’s lead problem from a Facebook post.

She said she started to avoid the school’s drinking fountains at all costs, often going all day without drinking water. She was upset that neither she nor her parents received a notice from the school board about high lead results.

“If there had been (warnings sent to parents), the whole school would have been talking about it. No one knew. No one was talking about it.”

Maia Puccetti, superintendent of facility services for the Halton board, said White Oaks’ high lead readings — including one at 140 ppb — were taken during construction at the school last summer when water wasn’t being routinely used.

But test results in both 2016 and 2017 also detail lead exceedances at the school.

Puccetti said exceedances should be communicated to parents and students through email messages from the school.

“If that is something we need to look at in terms of communication...maybe we just need to make them more aware in some way. School boards are doing the best we can to manage the situation ...I recognize it is a big concern.”

The Toronto District School Board does not post lead testing results online. Parents are able to see the results at each school, according to the TDSB.

“We’re committed to openness and transparency,” said the TDSB’s Steve Shaw. “It’s our intention in the fall to have all of those results posted on individual school websites.”

Tainted Water, a year-long investigation by more than 120 journalists from nine universities and 10 media organizations, found hundreds of thousands of Canadians are consuming tap water laced with high levels of lead leaching from aging and deteriorating infrastructure. Read the stories at thestar.com/taintedwater

Correction: Nov. 6, 2019 — This article was edited from a previous version to correct that St. Vincent elementary school is in Thunder Bay, not the Halton Catholic School Board. The original information arose after a confirmation that was based on a misunderstanding.

Investigative reporters, Ryerson School of Journalism: Declan Keogh, Victoria Shariati, Ben Cohen, Charles Buckley

Investigative Reporting Fellows, Institute for Investigative Journalism: Alannah Page (Mount Royal University); Lyndsay Armstrong (University of King’s College); Dylanna Fisher (MacEwan University); Declan Keogh (Ryerson University)

Investigative reporters, MacEwan University: Shaela Dansereau, Raysa Marcondes

Toronto Star: Data Analysis: Andrew Bailey

Institute for Investigative Journalism, Concordia University: Series producer: Patti Sonntag; Research coordinator: Michael Wrobel

Concordia University, Department of Journalism

MacEwan University

Ryerson University, School of Journalism

University of King’s College, School of Journalism

See the full list of “Tainted Water” series credits here: concordia.ca/watercredits.

Investigative Reporters: Declan Keogh, Victoria Shariati, Ben Cohen, Charles Buckley, Ryerson School of Journalism

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