“It was fantastic,” says AAPS parent Rebecca Meuninck.
The former Ecology Center deputy director is speaking of the Clean Drinking Water Act that Governor Whitmer signed in October. Better known as the Filter First Act, it requires Michigan’s schools and child care centers to install filtered drinking water stations, regularly test their water for lead and particulates, and develop drinking water management plans. And Cyndi Roper, senior policy advocate of the Natural Resources Defense Council, says it’s based on “what we learned from Ann Arbor.”
Motivated by the Flint water crisis, former AAPS superintendent Jeanice Swift says, “we did our first sampling of the results from our school kitchens and other strategic locations in the district in the spring of 2016.” Ninety-eight percent of the 1,820 locations tested met the FDA’s standard for bottled water, 5 parts per billion of lead or less. The twelve that exceeded it were immediately shut off.
A “hydration station” at Mitchell Elementary. After a dozen sites tested high for lead, AAPS installed nearly 1,500 of the filtered drinking fountains.
That eliminated any immediate danger, but finding a long-term solution proved much harder. Though the schools have no lead pipes, they all have copper pipes with soldered joints, and until 1986, most solder was half lead. A federal law that year mandated the use of lead-free solder in pipes that carry drinking water, but didn’t require the removal of older pipes.
Meuninck first became aware of the problem in 2018. “My son was at Forsythe Middle School, and they did have lead,” says the National Wildlife Association’s current Great Lakes Regional director. “It was horrible! I’ve been working on lead poisoning prevention for decades—and to know that your kid is going to a school where there may be lead in the drinking water!”
Meuninck started talking with U-M women’s and gender studies professor Abby Dumes, and together they “decided to organize.” Thus was born the Filter First coalition, which advocated for filtering all drinking water sources in the schools, not just those that tested high. It eventually grew to forty individuals and groups, including the Ecology Center, Safe Water Engineering, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Michigan Environmental Council.
Former school board president Rebecca Lazarus learned about the issue when she first ran for office in 2018, and joined the coalition. She says the schools then spent “almost two years trying to figure out how to remediate this. There were no true guidelines from any professional organization [or] from EGLE, from the EPA, from the water department.”
“My role was to be that voice for the practical side,” says Lazarus. “I provided [the coalition] with the cost that the district had spent for testing and filters and construction to knock out walls and put in hydration stations.”
“I very much have appreciated the opportunity to work vigorously toward healthy water in the Ann Arbor Public Schools,” says Swift. “And I appreciate the leadership of Rebecca Lazarus.”
“We were able to persuade the Ann Arbor School District to use their sinking fund millages to put in those filtered drinking water stations at a rate of one per 100 students and staff,” Meuninck says. Installation of almost 1,500 stations was completed in 2020, and the schools’ drinking water is now totally lead-free. Another 320 classroom sinks are now labeled “not for drinking water.”
The schools have spent approximately $1.5 million on water testing, hydration stations, and filters since 2016. The general fund paid for testing, and the sinking fund paid for the rest. That’s a fraction of the cost of replacing all lead in the schools’ pipes. Lazarus says the district’s entire $1 billion dollar capital bond “wouldn’t even come close” to paying for that.
“Each building and in many cases each drinking source has its own unique issues,” emails AAPS communications director Andrew Cluley, “hence the decision to install filters everywhere [and] filter all drinking water which aligns with what the new state law is requiring.” Though the schools did replace some pipes, according to Cluley there is no discussion of replacing all of them—and even if they did, the new law would still require filters.
“Ann Arbor was definitely ahead of the state” in addressing lead, says NRDC’s Roper. Michigan has set aside $50 million from the American Rescue Plan for initial implementation but will need $166 million more over the next ten years.
“We’re going to keep working to ensure that additional resources are secured,” says Roper. She thinks they’ll get it. Filter First “had strong bipartisan support in an era of not a lot of bipartisan support for measures.”
“We have been really focused on getting this through in Michigan to show that it could be done, and that it could be done in a bipartisan way,” she continues. “Once you’ve got something like this on the books, it certainly makes it easier for other states. We are definitely working on this in various states around the country.”
—
Calls & Letters, Mar. 2024
Water tests in the schools
Abby Dumes, a member of Filter First, emailed to correct our history of testing water sources in the Ann Arbor Public Schools for lead (“Filter First,” Inside Ann Arbor, February).
“While it’s true that AAPS began testing its water [for lead] in 2016, the testing of 1,820 locations happened in the 2019–2020 cycle after filters had already been installed,” she writes. “During this testing cycle, 34 locations tested above 5 ppb [and] 12 locations tested above 15 ppb. According to AAPS data, 73 locations were tested in 2016–2017, 384 locations were tested in 2017–2018, and 1,426 locations were tested in 2018–2019. Across these testing cycles, there were more locations that tested above 5 ppb and 15 pbb. Testing from 2017 alone revealed that 79% of the district’s buildings had at least one water source above 5 ppb and 39% of buildings had at least one source above 15 ppb, with sources as high as 200 pbb through April 2019 when Phase III of the 2018–2019 testing cycle was completed.”
