NYC To Triple Lead Paint Inspections In Schools

NEW YORK — New York City plans to triple the number of required annual lead paint inspections at certain schools amid concerns about kids being exposed to the dangerous substance.

The change is one of several steps the Department of Education says it is taking to address risks in classrooms serving the city's youngest students after WNYC found alarmingly high levels of lead in some schools.

The DOE will now require custodians to check for deteriorating paint in about 4,500 classrooms built before 1985 before the first day of school, during winter break and at the end of the school year, officials said. The staffers will also log their findings, according to the DOE.

Those classrooms were just inspected at the end of June but previously had to be checked only once a year, though custodians have gone beyond that requirement with regular inspections in their buildings, the DOE said.

The department will also create a new centralized database of inspection results and a new online form for parents to report problems with paint, which will trigger inspections at those locations, DOE officials said.

"We already go above and beyond requirements to keep our schools safe, and out of an abundance of caution, we're taking further proactive steps this summer to enhance our protocols and strengthen communication with families," DOE spokesperson Miranda Barbot said in a statement.

The DOE conducted an additional round of lead inspections in the last week of June as WNYC reported high levels of the substance in paint chips and lead dust at four public schools. One sample from a windowsill where kids kept learning materials contained 1,000 times more lead than the city's safety standard for those surfaces, the station reported.

Children younger than 6 are most vulnerable to lead exposure, which can cause a range of problems including brain damage, slow development and learning issues, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The DOE says it is legally required to check for lead in buildings erected before 1978, when lead paint was outlawed at the federal level. The department says it exceeds that mandate by inspecting classrooms constructed before 1985 that serve kindergartners, 3- and 4-year-olds in pre-kindergarten and children in LYFE Centers, which provide child care for the kids of public school students.

Deterioriated paint gets checked with X-ray fluorescence technology, which gives a reading of how much lead is present in the sample, according to DOE officials. If lead is found in a concentration higher than one milligram per square centimeter, the paint gets covered with a special primer that locks in the substance and two additional coats of paint, the DOE said.

The DOE was not yet able to detail what last month's inspections found, but any needed repainting or remediation will be done by this fall, department officials said.

Those inspections will be logged into the DOE's new database, which will help the department more closely track the condition of paint in the classrooms, DOE officials said. All future inspections will also go into the database, the DOE said. But the department indicated that there are no current plans to make the database public.

City Council Member Mark Treyger, who chairs the chamber's Education Committee, said the efforts to address lead paint raise several questions he plans to ask the DOE at a meeting later this month.

Among them is the question of how the department plans to pay for the additional inspections, as school custodians have been forced to do more work with fewer resources in recent years, Treyger said.

"There is no question that we need to be very proactive in conducting these tests, but we need to make sure that there are resources in place to conduct these remediation efforts that are necessary once they find lead," Treyger, a Brooklyn Democrat, said.

Treyger also asked how the DOE will coordinate with the city Department of Health and Kathryn Garcia, the senior adviser for citywide lead prevention, who is spearheading Mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.

Additionally, information from the new inspection database should be shared with health experts, parents and staff when necessary, Tregyer said.

"This should not be in some sort of secret box," he said. "I don’t mind having a coordinated organized system to keep data in, but this should be made available to the public to make sure that … we’re holding people accountable that they’re undertaking these critical efforts."

The inspections are within custodians’ job descriptions and will be done during their working hours, while certified contractors will handle remediation, Barbot said. The DOE developed the plans “in close consultation” with the Health Department, she said.

This article has been updated to clarify that the DOE says custodians have exceeded the previous legal requirement to check classrooms once a year.