This article was written by Quintessa Williams for Word In Black.
Dionna Brown was two weeks shy of her 15th birthday when her world turned upside-down. An outstanding public high school student in Flint, Michigan, with a report card most of her peers would envy, she suddenly began to struggle in the classroom for no obvious reason.
“I was in AP and honors classes — a straight-A student,” she recalls. “Then all of a sudden, I couldn’t remember things. I couldn’t concentrate.”
Rushed to the hospital, doctors pinpointed the problem: tests revealed elevated levels of lead, a potent neurotoxin, in Brown’s blood. In high enough concentrations, lead can cause permanent brain damage, lower IQ, learning disabilities — and even death.
Brown became one of the many young victims of the Flint water crisis without knowing it. But her story is being repeated in cities across the country.
For generations, America’s crumbling infrastructure has quietly poisoned its most vulnerable populations. From peeling paint in public housing to unsafe water pipes beneath city streets, lead has lingered long before and after its federal ban in 1978.
While the government has taken action against lead exposure in homes, experts say its impact on schools remains overlooked.
In January, the issue made headlines again when a child attending a Milwaukee public school tested positive for elevated lead blood levels. The discovery triggered emergency inspections and forced at least four other schools in the district to close temporarily.
Subsequent data found that children in cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago also face disproportionately high levels of lead exposure in schools. Cleveland topped the list, with nearly 9% of children under the age of six showing signs of elevated lead levels in their blood.
“Once a child is exposed to lead, the impacts are irreversible,” says Dr. Denae King, Associate Director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. “There’s not a lot you can do to undo that damage — and it’s still happening.”
These cities share more than aging infrastructure: they also serve large Black K-12 student populations, often in racially segregated neighborhoods. And even Flint, whose water crisis made national news, still hasn’t fully established safe drinking water for its children.
While Milwaukee’s crisis may feel like the beginning for some, the poisoning of Black communities by lead — especially in schools — began long before 2025.
Today, Brown, now the National Youth Director of Young, Gifted, & Green, a non-profit organization, has spent years fighting for environmental justice. But what still haunts her the most is how little has changed.
“That was over a decade ago,” she says. “And we’re still here. Kids are still being poisoned in our schools and communities.”
Schools built to fail?
Nationwide, more than 38% of public K-12 schools were built before 1970, well before the government banned the use of lead-based paint. Many of the schools were built to serve Black students in underfunded, segregated neighborhoods, and these aging buildings often contain lead service lines, contaminating the water that flows into cafeteria faucets and hallway water fountains.
According to a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Black children face higher levels of early lead exposure. The report found that exposure was linked to significantly lower standardized test scores in fourth-grade reading and math compared to their white peers.
“Most of the Black kids we’re talking about attend schools built before the ban,” King says. “That means many of them are still walking into buildings that are not only failing structurally, but failing them academically, too.”
The educational cost
King explains that the root of the lead crisis in schools often begins underground, with lead service lines — city-owned pipes that deliver water from municipal systems to homes, businesses, and schools.
“Most cities still have lead service lines,” she says. “So it’s no surprise students are being exposed. She adds that even if a school updates its internal plumbing, “students remain at risk” if city pipes aren’t upgraded.
“Once a child is exposed to lead, the impacts are irreversible,” says Dr. Denae King, Associate Director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University.”
Dr. Denae King, associate director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even low levels of lead exposure in children can cause irreversible damage, including reduced IQ, learning disabilities, developmental delays, and behavioral problems.
“The data is very consistent when we think about learning and cognitive ability with lead exposure in children ages zero to six,” King adds. “By the time you get to first or third grade, you start to see the results of that early exposure.”
Just as striking as the exposure itself is the uneven response.
In wealthier districts, King says, active parent-teacher organizations (PTOs) can quickly raise money for water filtration systems. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in predominantly Black or low-income communities, where PTOs and other resources are underfunded or absent altogether.
Who should be held accountable?
Cleveland, Ohio, currently leads the nation in childhood lead exposure, with more than 8% of children younger than age 6 testing positive for elevated blood lead levels. The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) serves a student population that is 64% Black.
When asked about lead in students’ blood, CMSD told Word In Black they’re “concerned” about the health hazard and will “continue to strongly support the work done by the City of Cleveland and the Lead Safe Coalition to identify and remediate lead in our neighborhoods.”
While the school district did not directly address the problem, Dr. David Margolius, the city’s director of public health, says school systems aren’t entirely to blame.
“This is the fault of the generations of disinvestment in housing and public infrastructure in poor communities — which leads to exposure in the first place,” he says.
“We need reparations — full stop. We need healing, investment, and policy change that will center our survival.”
Dionna Brown, National Youth Director of Young, Gifted, & Green
However, both King and Brown say the problem is nuanced.
“There are different levels of accountability that include the municipality and homeowners,” King says. “But on the school side, they are responsible for ensuring their campuses are safe. You send your child to school expecting they’ll be protected, not poisoned.”
She also adds that parents are often left in the dark.
“Many parents have shared that they are concerned that their children are not learning at the same level as other students in their classes,” she says. “And I am surprised that schools don’t do a better job of educating parents about the risk of lead exposure and that they don’t provide wraparound services once a child has been exposed.”
Brown agrees: “Schools still have a responsibility. Kids spend 8-plus hours in school buildings every day.”
Moreover, federal programs intended to address the crisis have faltered. While the Biden administration’s Infrastructure and Jobs Act was designed to fund the replacement of lead service lines, access to the resources remains inconsistent across cities, often leaving underfunded and de facto segregated school districts behind.
“There’s no agency that owns the problem,” Margolius adds. “There’s no one taking ownership for how to fix this at the federal level. That’s the real issue.”
Making matters worse, the CDC recently laid off its entire childhood lead poisoning prevention staff, shifting responsibility to the newly formed Administration for a Healthy America under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Experts are concerned about whether the federal government is prepared to meet a crisis of this scale.
Communities as first responders
Houston offers a glimpse of what’s possible. There, the Bullard Center and community groups are training parents and neighborhood leaders to identify lead hazards and demand answers from school officials.
King also encouraged students to write letters to the district. She said systems have begun to respond.
Community groups “did all the education themselves,” she says. “We trained them on what lead looks like, how it’s affecting their children, and then they got out there and educated others. The community stepped up where the system failed.”
Back in Cleveland, Margolius hopes to see a similar momentum, but on a national level.
“Keeping these stories alive in the media and community discussions is essential. Without sustained attention, the crisis will quietly continue.”