Missoula’s Jefferson Pre-K is an unassuming brick building with a school bell out front and paper snowflakes in the windows. But before this summer, an elusive threat coursed through its core — its water pipes contained high quantities of lead, a metal that is extremely toxic to small children.
Chris Cornelius, head custodian of Philipsburg Public Schools, checks a faucet filter in a home economics classroom.
A survey of the site in 2021, mandated by Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services, revealed harmful lead levels in nearly every water source at Jefferson. Although contaminated fixtures were covered with plastic bags and taken out of use immediately, it took three years for a permanent solution to arrive.
“We had lead throughout the entire building,†said Burley McWilliams, director of facilities operations at Missoula County Public Schools.
Jefferson wasn’t alone in its findings. A statewide survey of school drinking water sources initiated in 2020 found that more than half of Montana’s schools contained fixtures creating unsafe lead levels. As the initiative’s fifth year approaches, improvements remain uneven, and 20% of the state’s schools have not yet submitted testing results.
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In Missoula, facilities staff have been chipping away at the problem. Jefferson underwent a complete re-piping this summer. Starting this school year, all of the water at Jefferson is lead-free.
McWilliams uses a tiered system to help track progress. Fixtures with a “green†ranking produced less than five parts per billion of lead in the water, indicating that mitigation was unnecessary. “Yellow†fixtures, with five to fifteen parts per billion, could stay temporarily on-line, he said, under the condition that they were flushed daily.
Sources in the “red†category, containing more than fifteen parts per billion, had to be immediately covered with plastic bags, removed or fixed, according to DPHHS guidelines.
“Probably a third of Jefferson was in the red,†McWilliams said. “The other two-thirds were pretty much yellow.â€
The lead comes from different sources — solder joints, faucets, shutoff valves or the pipes themselves. In some cases, a simple filter can fix the problem. But at schools including Jefferson, extensive work is required.
Although progress has been made in some districts, a fifth of schools, including many on Indian reservations and in rural communities, have yet to submit testing samples nearly five years into the project. That number has hardly budged in the past year.
DPHHS enacted the Lead Reduction in School Drinking Water Rule in January 2020. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality has been tasked with implementing the program.
According to a joint statement from DPHHS spokesperson Jon Ebelt and DEQ spokesperson Madison McGeffers, DPHHS initially extended some leniency to schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic. High turnover at schools and within districts has also stalled sampling.
Ebelt and McGeffers said that to address the issue they’re planning additional outreach to local and tribal health departments to ask that they communicate directly with schools. They also plan to communicate to schools about available remediation funding. Such funding includes $3.7 million designated by Montana’s Legislature in the spring of 2023 and another $565,000 in federal funds received in August 2023 through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The increased funding has been a huge boost for the effort, which initially allocated about $1,200 per school, the cost of a couple of filters. Now, up to $100,000 can be distributed. Currently, 21 schools have applied for reimbursement.
Scott Reiter, the director of facilities at Billings Public Schools, said his district had completed all necessary testing by 2021. Mitigation projects have been moving through the pipeline ever since, though Reiter was initially concerned about where the money would come from.
“We’ve been working on this since we first did the testing,†he said.
Reiter said he was contacted by DPHHS in 2023 and informed of the increased budget. His district, however, was ineligible to apply for the money until it had expended its Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, distributed to assist schools in recovery from pandemic impacts. Because Billings was running a summer school, ESSER funding was still paying out through last month.
“It’s not being talked about, but there’s a lot of work being done.â€
This past summer’s projects included a new service line at Rose Park Elementary School and fixture replacement at nearly a dozen other schools. Reiter hopes the schools will be reimbursed for those efforts.
“We’ll be sending our first round [of applications] this week,†Reiter said. “My goal is to be complete with [mitigation] by the summer of ’25, by the start of school next year.â€
Although the increased budget is a help, McWilliams, in Missoula, emphasized that the money still won’t cover all of the project’s costs. The re-piping at Jefferson alone cost $250,000, and Jefferson’s building is a fraction of the size of some of the county’s larger schools.
Meadow Hill Middle School, which also needs to be re-piped, is next on the district’s list. From there, McWilliams will move on to the next thing. Unlike Reiter, he has no end date in sight.
“It’s not being talked about,†he said, “but there’s a lot of work being done.â€
