Back To School, How is the Water in Your Childrens School?

Summer vacation is almost over. Parents and grand parents all over are getting ready to send their kids off to school.  The back to school lists are made, we watch for the big sales. Our children are supposed to be safe at school. Improvements are being made in  the lunch room, to insure they get good nutrition, teachers are honing their skills to give the best education, but are they missing something that could be undermining the education that our children receive?

MSNBC reports that many schools across the country have water contaminated with lead, pesticides and many other toxins. The Federal Government is really dropping the ball here! Most contaminants found in our schools have been proven to cause learning disabilities. Some states require households with children to have their water tested to insure it is safe, but do not regulate the water supply in public school systems.

An Associated Press investigation found that contaminants have surfaced at public and private schools in all 50 states — in small towns and inner cities alike.

But the problem has gone largely unmonitored by the federal government, even as the number of water safety violations has multiplied.

The contamination is most apparent at schools with wells, which represent 8 to 11 percent of the nation’s schools. Roughly one of every five schools with its own water supply violated the Safe Drinking Water Act in the past decade, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by the AP.

• Water in about 100 school districts and 2,250 schools breached federal safety standards.
• Those schools and districts racked up more than 5,550 separate violations. In 2008, the EPA recorded 577 violations, up from 59 in 1998 — an increase that officials attribute mainly to tougher rules.
• California, which has the most schools of any state, also recorded the most violations with 612, followed by Ohio (451), Maine (417), Connecticut (318) and Indiana (289).
• Nearly half the violators in California were repeat offenders. One elementary school in Tulare County, in the farm country of the Central Valley, broke safe-water laws 20 times.
• The most frequently cited contaminant was coliform bacteria, followed by lead and copper, arsenic and nitrates.

Read the complete report here.

Check the map here and see what the results were in your state.

So, what can we do to make sure our children are not drinking poison when they go back to school? There are several alternatives to letting our children drink water at school.

The first one that may come to mind is sending them with bottled water, but bottled water is not at all eco friendly, and it can be just as contaminated as the school water.

Another option is to purchase a great water filter to insure there are no water contaminants effecting your child’s learning in your home water and use a reusable, BPA free water bottle to send your water to school with them. This may not be enough to get them through the day and they will drink the contaminated school water anyways.

There is a new tool that parents can use to make sure the kids are drinking safe water, anywhere they go. The Multipure wriggle. The wriggle is a filtered, reusable, water bottle. Using a personal water filter, the kids can fill it up an you can feel confident that the water they drink anywhere, is as safe as it can be.