Parents and school staff at the Oakland Unified School District are speaking out after elevated lead levels were found in drinking water at several of the district’s schools.

In one case, a drinking fountain had ten times the lead content.

A notification was sent to families this week, but some of the testing took place months ago when students and staff drank the water during summer school classes.

Now some people, like Stuard Loebl, a sixth-grade teacher at Frink United Academy of Language, are worried about the effects of lead ingestion, which include learning disabilities, blood diseases and behavioral problems.

“I have it here. This is a report published in April,” Loebl said.

He said the results of the environmental tests had outraged and deeply saddened him.

“So the students have been drinking leaded water all this time; obviously before the report was published, but also afterward, which is annoying,” Loebl said.

Loebl claims a water dispenser had a lead level of 51 parts per billion. The maximum allowable lead level at OUSD is just five parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends remediation if lead levels exceed 15.

“It’s going to be really difficult for them to determine the exact impact,” Loebl said of when and how they will determine if someone has been poisoned by the lead. “Finding that out is going to be a process that may take decades, and it’s horrible.”

To prevent even stronger sunlight, the fountains in Frick were covered.

Nate Landry’s daughter is a sixth-grader at Edna Brewer Middle School, one of the other schools with elevated lead levels.

“Students, their families and staff should be able to come to school and expect clean drinking water,” Landry said.

He believes the district may need to rethink how it spends money to provide the greatest benefit to students.

“OUSD has committed $60 million in facility bonds for a new headquarters,” Landry said. “As it happens, we were given an estimated cost of $60 million to clean up the lead contamination situation in the district.”

A teacher at United for Success Academy says there has been a lead crisis at the school for several years. She says students tested water and soil during the 2017-18 school year and found elevated lead levels.

These problems with lead levels occurred at McClymond’s High Schoolwhich led to more comprehensive testing by the East Bay Municipal Utility District in November 2017. Families were told the situation was fixed. Then, in 2022, another student test again found lead in the soil.

Photos from United for Success Academy show that their water fountains were still open and functioning on Saturday.

Loebl says the district needs to close all drinking fountains, fix the problem and prevent it from ever happening again.

“We need a very comprehensive testing plan for the future that is not limited to random sampling,” said Loebl.

Increased testing of drinking water is being conducted in schools across the district, and the number of schools affected by elevated lead levels may increase.

The Oakland Unified School District released the following statement through district spokesman John Sasaki:

“Over the past few months, our risk management team has been intensively testing water fixtures in schools. They identified a few outlets that had elevated lead levels, mostly between our Department of Education required limit of 5 parts per billion (ppb) and the state and federal limit of 15 ppb. The elevated fixtures have been taken out of service. There are numerous other fixtures on each campus where the water was below the Department limit. Additionally, we know that students and staff largely consume water from our FloWater water dispensers or similar devices, which are located in all schools and are equipped with additional filters. We are in the process of repairing the elevated outlets – which mostly involves just replacing a filter – and then retesting the outlets before putting them back in service. While we have been very proactive in these tests, we have not been as effective in communicating with all stakeholders. We are putting systems in place to ensure that a lack of effective communication does not occur again.”