Each month, we highlight a new Supermom of the Month, a volunteer who has gone above and beyond to advocate for clean air and children’s health. Our members in states across the country are more important than ever as we work to protect the hard-fought clean air and climate investments from attacks by the Trump administration. Will you join us?
This April, we are celebrating Kristen Payne, a psychologist and mom of three living in Milwaukee. Kristen was nominated by Jayne Black, Moms’ Wisconsin Field Organizer, for her outstanding work to protect children’s health from lead in school air, water, and soil.
Kristen’s journey as a lead remediation advocate started just a few months ago, when she received a notification that a student at one of her kid’s schools had lead poisoning. The Milwaukee Health Department, finding no lead hazards in the child’s home, suspected the culprit was chipping and peeling paint in the school’s lower-level bathroom. The school was built in the late nineteenth century, and in fact, a full lead risk assessment found lead dust throughout the entire building, including in some water sources and the surrounding soil.
In short order, three more children attending three other Milwaukee schools were also found to have lead poisoning. The Health Department launched investigations of those schools in addition to visual inspections of others, and four total schools have now been shut down. (One of these four reopened in mid-March.)
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We asked Kristen a few questions about the at times agonizing whirlwind of the last few months, the importance of access to data, and her tips for speaking out for children’s health at school:
What is happening right now with lead in Milwaukee Public Schools?
We were first alerted to the issue at the school that my eight-year-old attends on January 13, and supposedly remediation and cleaning processes have been ongoing this whole time. Students have remained in school despite our efforts to try to get them out to do virtual learning. We are told virtual learning isn’t an option.
For the three schools still shut down, they have arranged to have the children go to different schools while those buildings are closed. We can’t get any answers on whether the schools the kids are being sent to also have lead dust concerns. Many parents are asking, How do we know that the school that we’re sending our kids to now is not part of the problem?
The scope of this issue is huge: Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) has 144 school buildings, over 90% of which were built before 1978, when lead paint was banned. Maintenance rules are part of the MPS Lead-Based Paint Compliance Program, but the schools were obviously not following the rules for remediation. We were told they did yearly inspections at all schools. The Health Department has said that those inspections were either not occurring or were not occurring properly.
There are a lot of schools yet to assess. This is the first time the Health Department has been assessing schools; they’re typically assessing homes. So they’ve called in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency to help with some of these evaluations. Without these federal agencies and their resources involved, it would have just been the Milwaukee Health Department.
What are the symptoms of lead poisoning in children?
Sometimes kids can be asymptomatic, so you can still have lead poisoning and not show any symptoms. But typically, we’ll see neurobehavioral issues, like inattention, behavioral changes, and fatigue. Some children can complain of cramping or stomach issues, so it affects the whole body. It’s stored in soft tissue organs and in bones and teeth.
What is Lead Safe Schools MKE?
We are an MPS parent-led organization with the primary goal of demanding answers from the public schools and the Health Department for how we got here. We host community assemblies for parents to present all the information we have from press conferences and the lead risk assessments in one place. And children, including my eight-year-old, come to those meetings too.
We’re demanding that the MPS School Board hold a special session on lead. They have yet to speak out about the lead crisis, plus we want parents to have the opportunity to ask questions and get the answers that we need. They’re also the policymaking board for MPS, and so we want them to consider what policies are needed to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
We’re also doing a pressure campaign on the Milwaukee Common Council, again to get answers about how this problem happened and to investigate how we might put laws into place to prevent it from happening again.
It’s only been a couple of months, but have you seen any progress so far?
Yes! We demanded the primary lead pollution data from the school system and the Health Department because we had lost trust in their analysis. And we got it! They released the lead risk assessment data for all schools.
The Health Department now has a public-facing webpage about the lead crisis in schools so people can find data for any school that has been assessed. MPS also has a webpage with some of that data.
We’ve also asked that the information be translated into Spanish, and I’m happy to say that the Health Department is working on translating some of their literature.
Do you have any advice for other caregivers who want to take action to protect their children’s health, either at school or in their community?
Be aware of local politics and agencies and try to understand the landscape of who is involved in decision-making. For schools, what department in the school is responsible for the safety and health of school buildings? To what extent is the city government involved in the school system? Or in our case, to what extent is the city health department involved in making sure school environments are safe? Talk to the engineers to see what kinds of maintenance and other policies are in place to protect the health of school buildings.
We’re likely not the only community going through this, given what we’ve seen in Flint, Michigan, and other areas. And the road to a solution can be frustrating because as we wait for answers more and more children potentially are being exposed to poison.
We’re working on a toolkit for other community groups dealing with lead pollution, and when it’s ready, it’ll be on the Lead Safe Schools MKE website.