Milwaukee needs more manpower in the fight against lead paint.
Since the start of this year, Milwaukee's health department has temporarily closed more than half a dozen schools after finding elevated levels of lead dust. Lead dust is often caused by chipped lead paint.
In March, Health Commissioner Michael Totoraitis called for more backup. He asked the CDC’s team of lead contamination experts to send three to four people to Milwaukee. They would help coordinate testing for vulnerable families, review data from school campuses and share expertise from lead cleanup in other cities.
Then came the Trump administration's layoffs at the CDC.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cut 2,400 jobs at the agency this month, including all of the staff who worked in lead prevention.
“To see that all of our partners at the CDC had been let go was pretty difficult," Totoraitis said Monday. "At this point, we don’t have any contacts at the CDC for childhood lead poisoning. It’s a pretty stark moment for us in the department not to have someone to reach out to federally.”
Three schools in Milwaukee remain closed for lead paint cleanup: Fernwood Montessori School, Starms Early Childhood Center and LaFollette School. The health department couldn't give an estimated reopening date for any of the schools Monday.
Four other Milwaukee schools have been closed temporarily or undergone lead cleaning overnight. Those schools are Golda Meir's lower campus, Maryland Montessori, Albert E. Kagel School and Trowbridge School of Great Lake Studies.
Milwaukee's schools average 82 years old. How can they all be cleaned and tested for lead paint?
The rejection from CDC didn’t stop work to clean up lead contamination. But it did result in the delay of a community testing event by a week or two as city health department staff tried to regroup.
Now, Totoraitis said the health department and MPS have to go it alone. They can’t call the CDC when they need help processing data, or talk to CDC epidemiologists who have handled lead issues in other American cities.
It all seemed to end abruptly, too.
“The part that’s really concerning for us is that there hasn’t been any communication warning us of these changes," he said. "Now we don’t know who to call. We don't know how to respond to some of the challenges that we’re dealing with right now.
"We don’t know if I’m reaching out today, if they’re going to be there tomorrow," he added Monday.
Totoraitis says that the health department and MPS are finalizing a large-scale lead remediation plan to clean up all the toxic paint across the district.
Although lead paint was banned in the United States 1978, it was commonly used in older buildings built as early as the 1910s.
While national data shows that the average age of a school building in the United States is 49 years old, the average age of an MPS school is 82.
Katherine Kokal is the education reporter at 89.7 WUWM - Milwaukee's NPR. Have a question about schools or an education story idea? You can reach her at kokal@uwm.edu
