HARRISBURG — In the flurry of last-minute dealmaking to approve this year’s state budget, legislators tucked in eleventh-hour language that relaxes Pennsylvania's rules for publicly reporting the results of lead tests on school drinking water.
State law does not require schools to test for lead, as long as the topic is discussed at a public meeting annually. But if schools do test, they were previously required to report any finding above zero to the state so the results could be posted publicly.
The new provision, quietly inserted in the final 48 hours of budget negotiations earlier this month, requires schools that test to report lead levels above five parts per billion.
Lawmakers passed the change after several statewide associations representing school boards, principals, and other school officials complained to education leaders that the state's prior lead testing requirements were unrealistic, according to records reviewed by Spotlight PA.
Environmental groups say the change hinders the public from knowing the amount of lead in school drinking water, even though it’s a toxic substance with documented harmful impacts to children's health.
"At the end of the day, it means a lot of parents will be in the dark, and every day we know there will be kids out there drinking school water with lead in it even though we know that lead is unsafe at any level," said David Masur, executive director of the advocacy group PennEnvironment.
The original law, Act 39 of the Public School Code, passed as part of the budget in 2018. It created the requirement to test drinking water for lead or to discuss the issue at a public meeting. It also mandated that when lead is detected, a school must create a plan that ensures no one is exposed to contamination and provide alternative forms of drinking water. The state, meanwhile, is required to publicly post information about elevated tests.
But critics say the law is flawed to the point of being ineffective. Not only is it easy for schools to avoid testing; there is no accountability mechanism for ensuring schools that test report the elevated results to the state.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education also failed to accurately implement the law until recently.
According to emails reviewed by Spotlight PA, education officials initially provided guidance to school districts to report lead levels exceeding 15 parts per billion, rather than anything over zero.
Masur was one of the people who pointed out the error to administrators several times, he said.
It wasn’t until this year that officials revised the guidance, according to a copy of an email viewed by Spotlight PA. The agency told districts in May that when “a school tests for lead in drinking water and the result is in excess of 0 parts per billion,” the school must take the actions required by the law, including reporting the result for public posting.
In an email to Spotlight PA, a department spokesperson did not respond when asked why it took so long to make the fix.
The May directive prompted immediate pushback from school organizations and advocates and precipitated lawmakers’ decision to loosen reporting requirements.
State Rep. Peter Schweyer (D., Lehigh), chair of the House Education Committee, supported the change and pointed to a new requirement for schools to compile reports about the general state of their facilities, including the age of their buildings and whether they have damage.
The first of those reports is due at the end of next year, and they are required every five years subsequently.
“Up until this budget, we’ve never collected meaningful data across the commonwealth,” Schweyer said, “which is unreal to realize.”
Still, the new inventory reports do not explicitly require schools to report any information about lead. Lawmakers also didn’t address many of the other flaws critics have flagged about the lead testing law.
Faulty guidance
At the heart of state education officials’ incorrect guidance to schools were two different federal benchmarks for lead levels in drinking water.
The 2018 law said schools must implement an action plan if lead levels in drinking water exceed the “maximum contaminant level goal.” The Environmental Protection Agency sets that goal at zero parts of lead per billion. In other words, if schools detected any lead in their drinking water, they had to report it to the state.
But the EPA also sets what is called the “lead action level,” which is 15 parts per billion. “The lead action level is a measure of the effectiveness of the corrosion control treatment in water systems,” according to the agency. “The action level is not a standard for establishing a safe level of lead in a home.”
Lead contaminates drinking water through the corrosion of pipes or other plumbing fixtures. Any level of lead exposure can cause learning disabilities or damage to the nervous system, especially in young children, according to the EPA.
When the education department initially provided guidance to schools on the law, Masur said it told them to report if lead levels exceeded the federal action requirement of 15 parts per billion, not the EPA’s maximum contaminant level goal of zero parts per billion.
When state education officials issued the correct guidance earlier this year, the pushback was almost immediate.
A letter sent on June 9 to Pennsylvania Education Secretary Carrie Rowe, signed by six Pennsylvania school associations and obtained by Spotlight PA, urged her to consider limitations to achieving the standard.
“We respectfully encourage PDE to distinguish between an aspirational public health goal and a practical, scientifically actionable standard for implementation and reporting purposes,” the letter said.
The Pennsylvania School Boards Association, one of the groups that signed the letter, wrote in an email to Spotlight PA that resource-starved schools need better investments in infrastructure if they’re to meet stronger lead standards.
“Equating any detectable presence of lead with a significant exposure risk may create unnecessary concern among families and communities while setting expectations that are difficult, if not impossible, to meet in practice,” it wrote.
The decision to increase the amount of lead that can go unreported in schools took some back and forth between the Democratic-controlled state House and GOP-led Senate.
Members originally planned to increase the reporting level to the EPA’s “lead action level,” or 15 parts per billion, according to a draft of the code.
House Democratic spokesperson Beth Rementer wrote in an email to Spotlight PA that this level was championed by Republicans who control the state Senate before Democrats advocated for a more stringent level of five parts per billion.
The Republican caucus’ initial plan to set the level at 15 parts per billion was at the request of education leaders, Kate Flessner, spokesperson for Senate Republicans, said in an email to Spotlight PA. But after conversations with other legislative leaders and advocates, lawmakers decided to lower the threshold.
Schweyer said the new measure of five parts per billion balances public health concerns and what is realistic for schools to achieve. It’s also in line with the FDA’s standard for bottled water, Rementer wrote.
Masur said he would have preferred that lawmakers get more input from environmental, parental, and public health groups before making a change. Public hearings, for instance, would have allowed for more debate and context on what is undeniably a complex issue.
Instead, he said, the change was rushed through on a Saturday morning, as lawmakers hastily wrapped up the budget that weekend.
"It happened as many things tend to in Harrisburg: at the eleventh hour, in a back room somewhere in the Capitol, on a Saturday morning in July," Masur said. “It's a very undemocratic way to implement a wildly unpopular policy."
A flawed law
Critics say there are several issues with the original 2018 law.
Schools can forgo lead testing if they hold a public meeting to discuss the issue. There is nothing in the law that requires schools to report any information about these meetings to the state, so it’s impossible to tell whether districts actually comply with this provision.
Public meetings aren’t necessarily well-publicized, said Chad Baer, a parent from the Philadelphia suburbs and public health graduate of Yale. He has researched lead reporting in Pennsylvania schools and advocates for its removal.
The way the law was written allows some schools to tuck brief discussions about lead into any of their public meetings to escape testing requirements, he said.
There’s also no way to know if schools that do test and find lead in their water actually report to the state as required.
Under the law, schools with “elevated” lead levels must complete a report with information about how much was found, when the testing occurred, and remediation plans to address the problem. The state Department of Education then posts that information in a spreadsheet on its website. However, there’s no penalty for not submitting that report.
The agency says the online file is updated quarterly. The most recently reported tests are from August 2025 on the spreadsheet currently available online.
In an email to Spotlight PA, a spokesperson said the department “is in the process of modernizing our data collection system to make reporting easier for schools and more accessible to citizens.”
There are also no standards for how testing should be conducted. Baer said he discovered schools could run water for a period of time before testing, which would lower the lead levels that would show up. Testing equipment also wasn’t standardized across districts or verified by the state, and there was little state-level oversight of testing accuracy or consistency, Baer said.
In email correspondence from 2024 that Baer shared with Spotlight PA, a state education department official told him that “the interpretation of the statute was a local issue,” and questions about lead testing should be raised with school districts directly, despite it being set by state law.
“Breaking it down at the piecemeal level of district by district is totally ineffective,” said Baer. “It’s got to be top-down enforcement that things are actually being tracked and ensuring it’s a safe environment.”
Education department officials, responding to questions from Spotlight PA, wrote that the agency is not granted the authority to enforce remediation plans, but that the posting of data “ensures public notice.”
After the 2018 law passed, state Sen. Art Haywood (D., Montgomery) told WHYY the lead provisions were a compromise and “a first step toward a more comprehensive legislation.”
However, the new law does not fix those loopholes and problems. There are also no bills before the legislature that would mandate lead testing in schools.
Instead, two companion bills — HB 341 and SB 759 — propose to address lead-related infrastructure issues by requiring schools to replace water fountains with ones that are filtered. Both bills currently sit in state House and Senate committees.
When similar bills circulated in the previous legislative session, school organizations still found them to be unrealistic, despite a proposed state grant meant to fund eligible schools.
In an email obtained by Spotlight PA, a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials wrote to several legislative offices that it opposed the concept because “it requires a one-size-fits-all approach to a complex problem and creates a mandate onto school entities that will not be fully funded through the grant program provided in the bill.”
The Association of School Business Officials also signed the letter sent to Rowe last month. Officials there did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Baer said that the cost of remediation — say, replacing a drinking fountain — isn’t higher than the cost of not replacing it.
“[Lead] causes behavioral issues, lifelong cognitive impairment,” he said. “So the cost is being paid; it’s just that people aren’t seeing it as a line item. It’s being paid for by the kids.”
Spotlight PA’s Angela Couloumbis contributed.