Illinois PTA has a long history of advocacy success, and one of the biggest successes in recent years—testing school drinking water for lead—just had a follow-up article in the Chicago Tribune (Note: The Tribune has lowered its paywall for this article) along with a tool to see the results of your school district’s lead testing.

There is no safe level of lead exposure, so the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created an “action level” of 15 parts per billion (ppb) when entities would have to do something to reduce lead exposure. The bill passed in Illinois did not require schools to take action, but did set 5 ppb as the level that would require schools to notify families. However, since no school district wants to tell families that they found lead in drinking water that would harm their child but aren’t going to do anything about it, school districts took action.

Note that if you use the Tribune’s lookup tool on lead testing results, you may not see what steps your school district took to reduce children’s lead exposure. This does not mean that your district didn’t take mitigation steps, just that the Tribune could not verify what steps, if any, were taken. The district may have taken action, but not responded to the Tribune’s survey asking about mitigation.

If your school district had high lead levels in testing, this is an opportunity for your PTA or PTA Council to get involved in local advocacy: 

  • Talk to your school district about the lead testing results. 
  • Ask what mitigation steps were taken for each high lead level drinking water source.
  • If you are unsatisfied with the answers you receive, use the Illinois PTA Local Unit Advocacy Toolkit to build a local advocacy campaign on the issue. Lead in school drinking water is an easy-to-understand topic that almost every family will care about. If this is your PTA’s or PTA Council’s first local advocacy effort, this is likely the best issue you could have to get people involved.

Passing legislation is always an important part of advocacy, but advocacy does not end once a bill is signed into law. It is perhaps even more important to ensure that the law is actually implemented and that information gathered due to the law is acted upon.

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