Play Court with lead.jpg

Children frolic on the play court at Alameda Elementary in Northeast Portland. Portland Public Schools ran tests in October 2013 that showed fraying lead paint on the play court ceiling exceeded a federal safety level. They never addressed it, and tests this week showed lead paint still taints the ceiling and floor of the play area. Lead paint is far more dangerous to children than lead in water.

(Betsy Hammond / The Oregonian)

Portland Public Schools knowingly failed to fix lead paint hazards affecting at least two schools, The Oregonian/OregonLive has found, even after tests showed kindergartners were playing on a tainted playground and high school students were trying to learn with paint chips underfoot.

The district's indifference to toxic paint at those schools continued as recently as last month -- after officials knew of, but had yet to disclose, elevated levels of lead in drinking water at two other schools.

Lead is a powerful neurotoxin dangerous to people of any age but particularly so for the young. And one source trumps all others when it comes to harming children: paint.

Parents at Alameda Elementary, where more than 750 children use the playground, never got notified about extensive lead paint hazards, some of which still haven't been addressed.

Peeling lead paint at Cleveland High School 26 Gallery: Peeling lead paint at Cleveland High School

Cleveland High has long curls of lead paint peeling off its auditorium ceiling that drop onto the seats below. One district official insisted the fallen chips should merely be swept away.

Two lead poisoning experts said Cleveland's problem is severe enough that the auditorium should be closed to students right away.

The findings by The Oregonian/OregonLive raise questions about hazards at more than 70 other Portland school buildings built before 1978, when lead paint was banned.

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The district does not conduct comprehensive testing to scientifically determine where dangerous lead dust and debris are present. It also does not share results of spot testing with parents or school employees.

Senior facilities director David Hobbs said he is unsure how the district determines which lead problems to address, and he said there is no system to check how well lead containment projects actually hold up. A key facilities position that would help manage repairs has gone unfilled.

Hobbs, who oversees environmental safety, acknowledged the vast amounts of lead paint in and around district schools. He also said the district hasn't been able to contain it all, given budgetary limits. Less than $200,000 from the district's $580 million budget is earmarked for repairs next year.

He said the district has made significant efforts to repair and paint over trouble spots. Extra money last year meant officials could paint four schools listed as needing repairs.

"We pay attention to it every year," Hobbs said.

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This entrance on the side of Alameda Elementary is used by first-graders to access their classroom right inside this door. This photo shows the condition of yellow and white paint confirmed to contain high levels of lead before a mom prodded the school district to repaint most of the school's exterior in summer 2014. Photo by Virginia La Forte.

Two years ago, a persistent mom forced Oregon's largest school district to acknowledge an abundance of lead-tainted paint outside Northeast Portland's Alameda Elementary.

District safety officials decided to scrape and repaint one handrail and do spot repairs to peeling paint on parts of the building, emails obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive show.

It was only after Virginia La Forte, mom of a second-grader and a preschooler, pressed for more repairs that the district paid a certified firm to cover nearly all the school's wooden exterior with fresh lead-free paint.

Workers had to wear full hazmat suits when repairing and covering ead-based paint at Alameda Elementary. District safety officials allowed children to walk and play on surfaces littered with lead paint chips for more than eight months after tests showed the paint contained lead at five times federal safety levels.

After all, more than 750 children ages 5 to 13 regularly played on the school's lead-laced grounds.

But district safety officials supervised by Chief Operating Officer Tony Magliano excluded a wing of the school, including the school's covered play court, from that project.

That decision came even after the district found paint over and around the play area contained more than a milligram of lead per square centimeter, according to records.

It's a significant threshold. When lead is found at or above that level in federally subsidized housing, for example, officials require extensive repairs. And Oregon Health Authority inspectors had noted that the play court's paint was flaking.

District officials did not address lead on the wing and play court because the paint is on cement structures, and paint on wood was considered a greater "emergency," said project manager Steve Effros.

Magliano, who was personally involved in responding to Alameda's lead problem, is on paid leave. Superintendent Carole Smith faulted him for being unable to provide accurate and timely information about the district's efforts to mitigate lead in drinking water.

Andy Fridley, the district's senior manager for environmental health and safety, also is on leave over his role in the water safety. Fridley reports to Hobbs and holds direct responsibility for protecting students from lead paint.

The Alameda play court, where children play foursquare and wall ball year-round, still appears to be contaminated.

This simple lead swab showed this week that paint chips on the floor of Alameda's play court contain lead. Chemicals in the tester turn pinkish red when they come into contact with lead, as happened here. The test looks informal, but the swabs are reliable enough that contractors are allowed to sand paint freely and let workers breathe the dust if one of these doesn't turn reddish. Portland Public Schools officials knew in October 2013 that paint on the play court contained lead. They never addressed it.

Using an X-ray fluorescence meter this week, Tamara Rubin, founder of Lead Safe America Foundation, detected lead above 2 milligrams per square centimeter on the play court ceiling. The paint was deteriorated and damaged in spots, and chips were scattered on the play court floor. A lead swab test indicated those chips contain lead.

Rubin's meter also revealed lead at more than 25 times the federal trigger for fixes on two metal posts that separate the playground from a parking area.

At Alameda Elementary, these two green posts with badly damaged green paint tested for lead at more than 1.5 times a federal safety level this week. The district never tested them or listed them on its lead containment priority list.

Those posts, partially covered in flaking green paint, were not tested by the district's expert in 2013 and weren't addressed in the repainting project. They are near school gardens where students grow vegetables but have never been listed in the district's lead paint priority list.

The oversights that have left lead on the playground at Alameda could be happening at schools across the district. Hobbs said Friday he did not know whether any school's grounds or interior have been comprehensively scanned with a sophisticated lead monitor like the one Rubin used.

La Forte, the mom who pushed for fixes, said there is no reason to be confident lead paint has been fully covered or removed at other lead-painted schools.

"They have an opportunity to make it right," she said. "At the end of the day, all that matters is that these buildings are cleaned up and that kids are safe."

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As recently as last month, district safety officials decided not to repair the ceiling of Cleveland High's auditorium - even though the district's certified lead testing expert, Herb Wagner, confirmed a "substantial area" of the ceiling was peeling badly. Paint flakes falling down into students and staff members' hair and clothing contain lead, he confirmed.

Theater teacher Tom Beckett, whose students are in the theater during the school day as well as for rehearsals, filed multiple requests for repairs.

In a May email to Fridley and Beckett, facilities manager Daniel Lemay said he had checked with Fridley and explained why the district had no plans to fix the ceiling:

The district doesn't have enough money to deal with all its hazardous lead paint, he wrote, so only surfaces used regularly by children in second grade or younger or that face a playground get treated, he wrote.

What's more, to paint Cleveland's ceiling, the district would have to go to the trouble of erecting scaffolding, he wrote.

"The peeling paint in the auditorium is on the ceiling and is inaccessible," Lemay wrote. "If any peeling paint does fall it can be swept up and disposed of in the trash."

Perry Cabot, Multnomah County's senior program specialist for lead poisoning prevention, said that advice is wrong on many levels.

"Dry sweeping of known lead-based paint debris is not a recommended cleaning strategy," Cabot said. Paint chips must be carefully picked up and placed in double-sealed containers, then the area must be mopped and cleaned, he said.

More fundamentally, the source of the chips and dust -- the peeling ceiling -- should be immediately addressed, he said. Teens and adults are harmed by lead dust and debris, not just toddlers and preschoolers, he said, and lead should be treated as the high-priority, high-risk poison that it is.

"Areas with deteriorating lead-based paints in spaces occupied by children of any age... should be remediated, and in as timely a manner as can be possibly managed," Cabot said. "If there is a rain of stuff coming down off ceilings, those should not be spaces that should continue to be occupied by kids."

Dr. Zane Horowitz, medical director of the Oregon Poison Center at Oregon Health & Science University, agreed: "That needs to be fixed and the students need to be moved until it's fixed."

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This week, health workers screened more than 500 children at two elementary schools. They looked to see whether any children had 5 micrograms per deciliter of lead in their blood, the federal reference level. Two did and were told to seek further testing.

But young children have shown signs of learning disabilities and other problems brought on by lead exposures as low as 2 micrograms, said Tulane University lead expert Howard Mielke. That's why the Centers for Disease Control says no level of lead is safe for young people.

District leaders also have known for years that lead paint is a bigger hazard. After the district's last drinking water scare, in 2001, the district posted information on its web site that remains to this day.

"According to the EPA, lead in water is almost never the sole cause of serious problems," the notice to parents says. "Deteriorating lead-based paint... is by far the most important way young children are exposed to lead."

The district also posted a quote from Dr. Gary Oxman, Multnomah County's since-retired health officer: "If you're worried about your child and lead, your real concern should be whether they are exposed to deteriorating lead paint."

No law requires Oregon school districts to test for lead paint in places where they do not plan to make repairs. Districts must do so only if they plan to undertake repair projects that might disturb lead paint and if that work will take place in an area where children younger than 6 regularly spend time.

Portland school officials claim that they have nevertheless combed the district to find and repair problematic lead paint.

"We inspect regularly and touch them up and paint over it," Magliano, the chief operating officer, assured the school board in 2014 when member Steve Buel asked questions about lead paint in schools. (Video of that starts at 2:55)

The reliability of the district's inspection efforts is unclear.

Workers do visual inspections of paint at nearly every school each year. But lead tests - not human eyeballs - are needed to determine whether lead is present.

The district has an X-ray scanner and does conduct some sophisticated lead testing. Hobbs, the district's senior facilities director, said he is unsure how often or where that scanning happens.

Holes in facilities staffing compound the challenges of responding to paint hazards. Hobbs, who has no technical background in environmental science, has essentially had to do two jobs in the year he's worked for Portland Public Schools.

A position that normally would oversee Fridley and play a role in assigning maintenance staff to carry out repairs has gone vacant for more than a year, Hobbs said. Higher salaries in the private sector have made it difficult for the district to fill the job. Hobbs has taken on much of that role in the meantime.

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A district list of possible hazards from 2014 and 2015 indicates deteriorating lead paint was common in areas frequented by students.

Notes show "many areas" of peeling, flaking lead paint on the back of Boise-Eliot-Humboldt School adjacent to the playground; paint flaking off "large areas" of the sides of two portable classrooms at Grant High; flaking lead paint on the outside of Abernethy Elementary facing the playground; extensive peeling lead paint on the outside of Creston Elementary, including some with lead more than four times the federal action level; large areas of cracking paint on the sides of portable classrooms and in a gym at Vestal K-8 School; and more.

After it received a one-time infusion of money last summer, the district repainted surfaces on the outsides of Skyline, Winterhaven and King K-8 schools, and Llewellyn Elementary.

But after repair projects, the district does not ask its lead inspector to check whether areas where students spend time are lead-free, Hobbs said. They assume contractors take care of existing lead chips, even though that is not a requirement in their contracts, he said.

Those chips can turn into dust and mix with soil, lingering for years. Tiny lead particles in soil are a primary pathway by which children are sickened by lead, said Mielke, the Tulane medical school professor who has studied lead for 40 years.

Hobbs said he's set aside $120,000 of district funds plus $50,000 from the Portland Water Bureau to address hazards in the coming year. He said he is unsure how the district will choose which schools get fixes, but said the district's log of visual inspections will play a big role.

Most of the 600 places listed as having chipped or peeling paint, including in classrooms and kitchens, contain no information about whether that paint contains lead, let alone how much.

Painting over lead paint, as the district did at Alameda, is a sensible, affordable choice, Mielke said.

Still, painting over lead, rather than removing tainted objects or covering lead-painted surfaces behind a new wall or ceiling, is a temporary fix. It must be checked regularly for wear, said Cabot, the Multnomah County lead expert, who teaches contractors how to safely contain lead paint dust and debris.

But Portland Public Schools hasn't dispatched a certified lead tester to check Alameda's paint and doesn't systematically do that at other schools that needed priority lead repairs.

This close-up of the play court ceiling at Alameda Elementary shows that paint is in bad shape, allowing lead debris to fall onto the play court floor. District officials knew in 2013 that the paint contained high lead levels and was in bad shape, but they have chosen not to address it because it's not a significant "emergency."

Already, the new paint at Alameda is peeling in some places. Rubin, the lead activist, found dust and debris on the stoop outside the school's main entry doors that measured more than 1.4 milligrams of lead per square centimeter.

Portland Public Schools leaders, at Magliano's direction, carefully considered whether to notify Alameda parents that of the high lead levels found in October 2013 that were to be addressed in August 2014. La Forte got permission to alert parents that lead was a concern at the school, but needed district officials to share the specific test results.

Their decision? No.

"We've talked about a notification to parents," Magliano wrote to Alameda's principal and the district's maintenance and operations supervisor in April 2014, according to emails obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

There were still seven weeks left in the school year, and he was aware that lead levels more than five times the federal action level had been detected on nearly every part of the Alameda grounds.

"I would like to wait until I have the final report from the EPA on their observations," he wrote. "Once we get that, I will be glad to share it."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was not preparing a report on lead at Alameda. The district already had the most definitive possible results in hand: lead tests conducted by the district's own state-certified lead paint inspector.

Alameda's lead problem measured more than five times the the federal safety level in at least six places. Hot spots included the school's front door, the building's east side, its west side, buildings in the school courtyard and handrails designed for small hands to use when walking from the school to the playground and back.

District officials never notified Alameda parents or teachers of those findings.

-- Betsy Hammond