Oakland High students fight for lead-free drinking fountains: ‘We should not have to beg … to get clean water’

Frustrated by what they see as their school district’s lack of urgency in responding to lead in drinking water, four Oakland High seniors have transformed a senior class project into a broader campaign demanding safe drinking water and stronger protections for future students. 

Out of a shared distrust of their school’s drinking water, Palmer Kayondo, Daniel Thomas, Jeremiah Evans and Nijeer Roy-Enis created Project Nemo, a name inspired by the movie “Finding Nemo,” about a campaign to return a fish to his ocean habitat. 

Project Nemo’s mission is to get the Oakland Unified School District and its board to move more quickly to return drinking fountains that have been decommissioned because of higher lead levels and to ensure that there is no lead in schools’ drinking water. The students take issue with the district for waiting so long before addressing the problem in 2018, and for the slow communication of test results showing elevated lead levels after retesting in spring 2024.

They have met with the Oakland High Parent Teacher Organization, partnered with community organizations and launched information campaigns around campus and online to raise awareness about lead in the drinking water and propose solutions. They also brought their fight to the School Board. 

“We should not have to beg you guys in order to get clean water, as clean water is a basic human right,” Kayondo said during the public comment period of the Feb. 26 OUSD board meeting.

The school board and district have yet to respond to Project Nemo’s findings or the students’ comments from two months ago. 

OUSD board President Jennifer Brouhard did not respond to Oakland North’s multiple requests for comment about Project Nemo, the board’s plans to improve water quality across the district or how the board intends to rebuild trust with students.

Elevated lead levels were first detected in OUSD in 2017, prompting broader water quality assessments across the district. Subsequent testing revealed that 22 campuses had at least one water source exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s action threshold of 15 parts per billion. In February 2018, the board set a stricter standard for the district, saying any fixtures that tested higher than 5 ppb would be removed from service within 24 hours. A fixture can be returned to service after a lead test shows a result under 5 ppb.

That doesn’t sit well with the Project Nemo team. 

“OUSD said that over 5 parts per billion is bad, but that’s not true — it’s bad no matter what,” Thomas said. “There is no safe amount of lead to drink.”

Elin Betanzo, drinking water expert and founder of Safe Water Engineering, an environmental consulting firm that specializes in detecting and resolving drinking water contamination, agrees, adding that lead is a potent neurotoxin for which there is no safe level of exposure. Betanzo played a pivotal role in the discovery of lead in Flint, Michigan, water in 2014.

“A big challenge is that lead release is sporadic and inconsistent,” she said. “You could take a sample today and get a non-detect, and you could take a sample tomorrow from the same place and get 50 parts per billion”.

Last spring and summer, OUSD retested schools in two groups. In the first group, the district retested 40 sites and found that 897 fixtures had lead levels below 5 ppb, while 186 fixtures had levels above 5 ppb. In the second group, which included elementary schools, 156 fixtures tested below 5 ppb and six fixtures tested above.

All fixtures with results below the 5 ppb limit stayed in service, while those with higher results were put out of service until they could be repaired and produced results at or below 5 ppb, according to information on the district’s website. 

In August, the district said it was assessing the age and condition of water sources, and planned to install an inline water filter to further reduce lead. If elevated levels persist, fixtures will remain out of service and further assessments will be done to determine whether lead is in the pipes.

“Because all fixtures on a campus are tested, elevated lead issues can be narrowed down to individual fixtures, helping to rule out issues with the underlying pipes,” according to information on the website. 

$50 million pricetag

Betanzo disagrees that lead issues can be narrowed down to individual fixtures. She said the most probable source of OUSD’s lead contamination is solder in aging pipes. In hot temperatures — and in places like schools where water use is irregular — the risk of solder lead flaking into the water is higher.

At a special meeting in September involving the School Board and the Oakland City Council Education Partnership Committee, officials estimated it would cost more than $50 million to fully address the district’s lead issue.

Though the Safe Water Act of 1986 prohibits the use of lead solder in drinking water plumbing, lead still often is present. Until 2014, materials could be labeled “lead free” and still contain up to 8% lead by weight. After 2014, the standard dropped to less than 2.5%. Any school built before 2014 is likely to have lead in its plumbing, Betanzo said. 

More than 6% of people between ages 6 and 21 in Alameda County have a blood lead level of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter or greater, according to the state Public Health Department. That is greater than the lead levels found in 97.5% of American children, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention information shows.

The Alameda County Public Health Department said in an email that California only requires children covered by Medi-Cal to undergo blood lead testing.

Lead exposure can cause lasting harm, even at low levels. It affects the nervous system, lowers IQ, impairs learning, and can damage the kidneys, delay growth and puberty, reduce hearing, and cause anemia, according to the state Public Health Department. High levels can lead to seizures, coma, or death. Lead has also been linked to increased antisocial behavior, adolescent arrests, and is a probable human carcinogen.

After the 2017 discovery of lead in school water, OUSD installed FloWater stations on affected campuses. They use a purification system that’s said to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants, including lead, microplastics, chlorine, pharmaceuticals and heavy metals.

According to a 2024 superintendent’s report, the district used funds from the city’s Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Tax, and the county’s Measure A, as well Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding received during the COVID-19 pandemic to install the initial FloWater stations.

In their Project Nemo research, students found that some of the stations were unreliable and hard to access.

“The Flo stations either break down all the time, or there are long lines at them between classes and we can’t get water without being late to our next class,” Kayondo said.

The group advocated for the district to install filtration systems inside pipes, believing it would help filter lead before the water reached school fountains. But Betanzo said that won’t take care of the problem.

“You want water to pass through a filter as the last thing that it does before it goes into your glass,” she said, adding that point-of-use filters are far more effective than filters placed deeper in the system, where water can still pick up lead as it travels. 

Students said they feel like they’re working against their school board to improve water and that the issue has further strained an already ruptured relationship between students and those elected to serve them.

“The board waited until things were really, really bad before they did something,” Kayondo said. “I hope that in the future the board shows us that they care about kids in our schools.”

(Top photo: Oakland High School seniors on Project Nemo: Palmer Kayondo (left), Jeremiah Evans, Daniel Thomas and Nijeer Roy-Enis, Courtesy of Project Nemo)

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