In 2025, Milwaukee Public Schools took on a lead paint cleanup project at 100 of its campuses.
This came after the Milwaukee Health Department found that MPS failed to keep up with maintenance in some of its old school buildings, putting children at risk of lead exposure.
Lead paint creates toxic dust that can negatively impact a child’s development. Some schools were temporarily closed for cleaning in spring and fall.
But the district announced this month that the project is now complete.
WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal spoke with Michael Turza, interim chief operating officer at MPS, who has been at the helm of the lead remediation project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Katherine Kokal: It's December, and over the last 12 months, MPS has taken on this task of remediating toxic lead paint dust in 100 of its schools. How did we get here?
Michael Turza: Basically, we decided that any school that was built before 1978, which was when lead paint was officially eliminated, that they had the potential to have lead in them. So that was about 101 schools out of our 158 schools.
Once all the schools were closed for the summer, that's when the effort began. One of the things that really surprised us more than anything was how much work we had to do in these schools. Even though we knew that there was lead-based paint in some schools, we had to almost take every surface, every square inch of surface, and remediate it. So with that in mind, we basically finished all of the schools with regard to the painting by around the middle of August.
Then we began the process of cleaning the schools and getting them ready to have the analytic wipes, which were required by the Milwaukee Health Department in order for them to clear the school for occupancy. They had to beat a standard that was less than 10 parts per billion. That was almost a very, very difficult thing to do. I mean, you take any house, probably the one you're living in, and you do an analytic wipe, and you probably would not pass that. By the first week of school [we were] able to say that all of our first 50 schools were remediated and passed the necessary clearances by the health department.
So those were the oldest schools in the district. What about the work you did after the first day of school?
The next 50 schools that we had to do were those that were basically [built] after 1950, [built from] 1950 to 1978. Lead-based paint had kind of been falling out of favor, so it wasn't used that extensively. But there were still lead-based paint in some of the schools.
We had to remediate those and we did those primarily after work hours and on weekends. [We were] able to clean those all up and get those passing the necessary inspections by the end of November. The last school that we were doing was Congress Elementary, and that was done just the week before Thanksgiving holiday.
The books are not closed on this yet, although a majority of the work is done. How much money has MPS spent on this project?
To date, we probably spent upwards of $43 million. Maybe we'll go as high as $45 million.
Where did that money come from?
We have a construction fund. It's not part of our general operating fund. It's a separate fund that is used for construction, deferred maintenance, things like that.
And that was the fund that we tapped to do the lead remediation. There was about close to $100 million in that fund. And so we've used almost 45% of it.
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
