Baltimore Schools Installing Water Coolers to Combat Lead Contamination

After 15 years of trying to remove the lead from public school drinking fountains, the Baltimore school system is choosing instead to install water coolers which will use purified bottled water.

Yesterday's announcement came after the city Health Department discovered that 10 fountains that had passed previous tests still contained unacceptably high levels of lead. Once schools chief Andres Alonso learned that it would be cheaper to provide bottled water to all schools than to continue lead testing, he said, the decision was a "no-brainer".

The Health Department collected water samples last month from 84 randomly selected fountains, all of which had passed previous inspections. While 74 of the fountains had lead levels below the limit of 20 parts per billion, 10 fountains had levels above the maximum allowed.

The 10 fountains, which were immediately turned off, were at four schools: City College, Carver Vocational-Technical High, Frederick Douglass High and Northwood Elementary. All those schools had bottled water already, so officials said students likely were not drinking regularly from the fountains.

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