Tacoma School District will test for lead at all schools
Tacoma School District officials will test every school's water quality. That's after results from last May showed unacceptable levels of lead in six Tacoma schools.
District officials say they're investigating why no one took action to fix the problems.
The school district is also going through water quality reports from the past four years. Spokesperson Elle Warmuth says they will alert parents if other schools had high lead results. She says the district is still researching the results from May 2015, and will also conduct new tests at all elementary, middle and high schools.
The schools identified with high lead are Reed, Mann, Whittier, DeLong, and Manitou Park elementary schools and the Madison Complex (which houses early learning). Those sites will use bottled water until the problem is resolved.
Some faucets at Reed pumped out water that had lead 115 times above the federal limit. At the same schools, some water results were below the federal limit or had no lead at all.
The discovery comes after high levels of lead were detected in four Tacoma homes last week.
Besides Tacoma, the cities of Seattle, Kent and Everett are also taking a closer look at water quality.
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Paige Browning
Newscaster
Paige hosts midday newscasts and monitors news of significance to the Puget Sound region. She hopped over Washington’s mountains to join KUOW, after hosting news and reporting at Spokane Public Radio since 2011. She began her start in radio while a journalism student at University of Montana, by sharing stories with KUFM. Paige was raised in the mountains and rivers around Spokane. In her spare time she cheers on the Mariners in the summer, and hopes for snow in the winter.
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