Drinking water to be shut off at all Detroit public schools

[Lowell]

That just breaks my heart for those kids and teachers. Like the Detroit Public school system doesn't have enough challenges already? And right at the start of the year? It's just not fair.

Read'em and weep from Crains:

• Latest round of testing for lead and copper prompted superintendent to shut off water
• Total of 34 schools now using water coolers and bottles; rest of 106 schools will be shut off "immediately"
• Tests in 2016 returned higher-than-accepted levels of the metals, which can cause damage long-term

Detroit Public Schools Community District will shut off drinking water at all of its 106 schools after the most recent round of testing found 16 out of 24 schools had elevated levels of lead and/or copper, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in an email to staff Tuesday afternoon.

Vitti turned off drinking water at the 16 schools over the weekend, bringing the total number of schools now using water coolers and bottles to 34. The rest will be shut off "immediately," DPSCD spokeswoman Chrystal Wilson told Crain's on Wednesday morning.

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/education/drinking-water-be-shut-all-detroit-public-schools

[hybridy]

absolutely FUBAR. i send my children to school with their own water jugs, cause apparently we can't cut into academic time to go out and get a drink from the drinking fountain. strange times. wheres out fearless sec of education? on her yacht?

[Richard]

Sec of education has nothing to do with school plumbing,that is a district thing.

I did not read the link but last year when this came up there was something about because the system sees little use in the summer the levels are higher until the system gets flushed out.

They did not all of the sudden have a problem.

Lots of aging schools across the country,I wonder what the levels are country wide.

Times have changed though,we used to roll balls of mercury around,now they find a broken one and they cordon off an entire city block.

[Towne Cluber]

A former top DPS and current long-time and high profile Detroit "civic leader" once privately told me that if kids [[and adults) in Detroit don't like how it is, then they should move out of the city or state. This person went on to say, "that college isn't for everyone and that I got mine".

[Meddle]

cause apparently we can't cut into academic time to go out and get a drink from the drinking fountain.

In all my years at Stratford, Cerveny and SMR, I can't remember ever getting up during class to go get a drink from any of the fountains. Yes, we did get drinks between classes sometimes. Our big concern was getting bumped by somebody passing by and chipping a tooth.

[hybridy]

In all my years at Stratford, Cerveny and SMR, I can't remember ever getting up during class to go get a drink from any of the fountains. Yes, we did get drinks between classes sometimes. Our big concern was getting bumped by somebody passing by and chipping a tooth.

this is so idiotic it could only come via dps. did you not have quiet reading time after a lesson? did you not have quiet work time after a lesson? did you not have to use a restroom? did you not have phys education? this is the time to get a drink of water. using a drinking fountain between classes was never the right time. [[bangs head on wall of abandoned dps school)

[Shai_Hulud]

Not surprising, when I was in elementary in the 90's most of the fountains were non-functional or turned off. At Cass, they were all off.

Anyway, that's going to be rather expensive for a broke school district.

this is so idiotic it could only come via dps. did you not have quiet reading time after a lesson? did you not have quiet work time after a lesson? did you not have to use a restroom? did you not have phys education? this is the time to get a drink of water. using a drinking fountain between classes was never the right time. [[bangs head on wall of abandoned dps school)

Yeah, it does not work that way. Too many clowns in DPS for students to leave the room without permission, or at all. To many students for the teacher to individually give students permission. So students do what they can get away with and teachers enforce what they can.

I got sent to the principal's office at Cass over this exact issue.

It's May and 90 degrees and there are no fountains to speak of. School does not want to deal with the mess of water bottles so it's forbidden. I was told to trash mine or explain to the principal why I didn't need to follow the rules.

In the office, I'm told we shouldn't have water in class and get it between. I ask exactly how that works considering there are exactly five minutes between classes, the building has seven floors, no elevators, students have one locker - somewhere - and classes randomly strewn throughout 800,000 square feet.

Oddly enough, I got questioned about what other schools I might like to attend. Never got an answer, and my hatred for pissant dictators grew.

[Richard]

this is so idiotic it could only come via dps. did you not have quiet reading time after a lesson? did you not have quiet work time after a lesson? did you not have to use a restroom? did you not have phys education? this is the time to get a drink of water. using a drinking fountain between classes was never the right time. [[bangs head on wall of abandoned dps school)

I would say it is more of a generational thing verses DPS,I did not go to DPS and we would have never even thought about disrupting the class to ask to get a drink of water,that is what you did between classes.

Unless you ready to pee your pants then you could ask for a hall pass and receive one after a chastising about why you did not go in between classes.

Quiet time must be like when we had nap time in kindergarten.

Maybe that is why schools got so screwed up,to much catering to the individual and they should have never ditched the paddles with the holes drilled in them.

Not sure how people survived 200 years in classrooms without water bottles.

One would think that the cheaper solution would be to put a filtration system in or even a fridge size filter on the fountain like the new ones have,but then the bottle water companies and landfills would proably lose profit.

[Cincinnati_Kid]

Most of the schools are close to a hundred years old. The pipes the water travels in, as well as the infrastructure in general, across the nation is crumbling. This is what happens when things are neglected, until a problem arises.

[Meddle]

Not sure how people survived 200 years in classrooms without water bottles.

Or backpacks. We carried our books loose.

[hybridy]

Maybe that is why schools got so screwed up,to much catering to the individual and they should have never ditched the paddles with the holes drilled in them.

so do you have predetermined times to get coffee/water and go poo at work? do you not do these things when you're body tells you so? respect is only earned and never given? the ever- backward mantra of SE MI.

[hybridy]

Or backpacks. We carried our books loose.

i don't know how i'd ever survive without pay phones, land lines, fax machines, cable tv and smoking in bars

did you also walk to and from school uphill both ways in a blizzard? perhaps your lunch was a pasty in a metal pail and the bathroom was a pit toilet out back.

[Bham1982]

Bunch of grumpy old men in this thread. "These kids today..."

[Zacha341]

^^^ I ain't grumpy, old, or a man ---- but I do recall trudging to grade school in the snow up to knees, but there was less traffic on the roads.

And schools were truly in the neighborhood close by relatively. Now school is across town! You've got more drivers school hours etc. So in a way I get that schools close more often due to inclement weather.

I'm still not feeling third graders with mobile phones. Just another classroom distraction and a great deal of responsibility not to loose the device for a child that young.

[Meddle]

did you also walk to and from school uphill both ways in a blizzard? perhaps your lunch was a pasty in a metal pail

Yes, in fact I did. No hills of course in the city, but hot, cold, rain, snow, we most certainly did walk both ways. In my case it was about 3/4 of a mile. The entry way at Stratford had a place for kids to drop their snowboots and coats.

Lunch was carried in a paper bag though, no high falutin' metal boxes.

[hybridy]

Bunch of grumpy old men in this thread. "These kids today..."

this thread be like

[Honky Tonk]

Naw, It's more like this....

[O3H]

Time to PAY UP for all those years of kicking the can down the road.......

[Honky Tonk]

Why don't they install the new filtered drinking fountains? It's like buying bottled water, same type of filtration system. The only issue is finding reliable people to change filters when it's time.

[JBMcB]

Why don't they install the new filtered drinking fountains? It's like buying bottled water, same type of filtration system. The only issue is finding reliable people to change filters when it's time.

They had problems with lead in some of the GM factories. Their solution was to run the bubblers all of the time, which wouldn't let the lead accumulate in the pipes. That got the levels down below EPA safety levels.

The long term solution, of course, is to replace the pipes. Just running the fountains all the time works great in the short term, and unless you have a garden hose end on the thing, doesn't waste a ton of water.

[EastsideAl]

I did not read the link but last year when this came up there was something about because the system sees little use in the summer the levels are higher until the system gets flushed out.

One of my memories of going to school in already-old DPS school buildings [[built 1910 and 1887[[!)) was that the water would run brownish and taste bad for the first few days of school in the fall. The Sloan valves on the toilets would often 'pop' loudly when they were first flushed, and the first new toilet bowl full of water would be opaque. The excuse from custodial staff was always that the pipes hadn't been used for a few months and we just needed to wait a couple of days for them to be flushed out [[while we were using the water).

Just because I experienced that though does not mean that I believe that that's the way it should still be done today. Or that those kids today will somehow go all 'soft' for lack of lead ingestion. They also cut up asbestos ceiling tiles in our hallways, with dust flying everywhere and coating the outside of our lockers. I don't think that should be done anymore either.

But back then in the wintertime it sure really did seem like uphill both ways, even here on the flat as a pool table east side.

[Jimaz]

Flint 2.0.

The Great Lakes contains 21% of the world's surface fresh water and we still have these problems?

[Dumpling]

https://books.google.com/books/about...page&q&f=false

This book includes information from a corrosion control study
done by DWSD in the '90's. Table 3.5 in that section of the
book shows before-during-after lead levels for that study.

To highlight a few particulars gleaned from that study:

The corrosion control agent at that time was phosphoric acid.

"The test area [[for the study) was bounded by the Detroit
River on the south, Alter Avenue on the east, Warren Avenue
on the north, and St. Jean Avenue on the west, and it
included the city of Grosse Pointe Park."

[Dumpling]

From Table 3.5, there were 174 "before phosphate addition"
samples; 229 "after 3 milligrams per liter phosphate addition"
samples; and 267 "after 1 milligram per liter phosphate addition"
samples.

[[For comparison: For Lead and Copper Rule testing in Detroit,
54 samples in the entire city were tested in 2008; 54 in 2011;
58 in 2014; and 87 in 2016:
http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/d...-03-160355-530 )


The range of lead values for each category of sample was given.

For the "before" samples the range was 1 to 605 micrograms of lead
per liter of sample.

For the "after 3 mg/L phosphate addition" samples the range was

1 to 188 micrograms of lead per liter of sample.

For the "after 1 mg/L phosphate addition" samples the range was

1 to 299 micrograms of lead per liter of sample.

[Dumpling]

The DWSD seems to have settled on 1 mg/liter as a suitable
concentration of phosphate to add, partly due to permit
requirements for the Detroit WWTP [[NPDES permit MI 0022802)
which were given as being 1 mg/liter for the Detroit WWTP at that
time.

Currently, however, in part due to continued concern about toxic
algae blooms in Lake Erie, the permit allows about 0.6 mg/liter
for the GLWA Detroit WWTP. As noted in the article, ferric chloride
could be added to reduce the amount of phosphate to this desired
limit if necessary.