The presence of lead in a school's water is bound to raise a "high level of interest," said Goleta Union School District's superintendent, Bill Banning, confirming a tip that low levels of lead in three Goleta schools' water had been found.
Banning explained that three days after learning of a state-funded water-testing program this January, Goleta Union asked its water district to test all its schools. By March, five taps out of 50 turned up positive for lead. The only one at the actionable level, 15 parts per billion (ppb), was a kitchen sink at Hollister School used to wash dishes. It was placed out of commission until a filter could be installed and the water retested. No one drank from that source, Banning emphasized. Also, a lower level of lead was found in two of Hollister's drinking fountains: between 5 and 15ppb, a "reportable" finding. The district went ahead and removed one fountain — in the hallway outside Room 27 — and fit the other — 3rd-grade Room 20 — with an inline filter, said Banning, though neither was required to be fixed.
Kitchen sinks at Ellwood and Foothill schools, also used for dishwashing, Banning said, were found to have low levels of lead; water filters were placed on both. He added that all Goleta schools had added filtered-water filling stations for kids' water bottles since 2013. A report would be made to the Goleta district trustees on June 28, he said, including the schools' continued testing protocol for roughly 300 drinking fountains at a cost of about $15,000. In answer to the implied question about the seeming delay in reporting the lead findings, Banning said the state law concerning lead in water actually had a 90-day "cooling off" period before releasing information publicly, presumably to allow a school to fix problems before parents, and the press, jumped all over them.