The library at Starms Discovery Learning Center has cheerful peach and blue walls, and squat wooden shelves filled with books wrapped in thick plastic jackets to protect them from the touches and smudges of many small hands.
On Monday, the library became a place to exchange other stories, too – darker stories. These were stories of stressed mothers and anxious kids, of graduating fifth-graders missing out on end-of-year celebrations.
The stories were about families with a dangerous toxin – lead – in their homes and now in their public schools. Those families shared stories about brain damage and learning disabilities, and about a federal government that has denied them help.
“I am here to elevate your stories,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Madison who is the junior senator from Wisconsin.
Baldwin, flanked by officials from the city’s health department and school district, had come to Starms to meet with families and community activists and to hear more about their lives since the discovery that a child had been poisoned by peeling lead paint in one of the city’s aging and poorly maintained school buildings.
The city’s health department ordered the school district to remediate the hazard, but the scope of the problem turned out to be much larger than a single building. So far, the district has closed six schools for cleaning and repainting, displacing roughly 1,800 students. Over the summer, the district’s efforts will kick into high gear. It has a goal of visually inspecting all school buildings by September 1.
The district, which is the largest in Wisconsin, has 144 buildings. All but 11 were built before 1978, when it was still legal to use lead in paint. The average age of an MPS school is 82 years.
A few blocks away, Starms Early Childhood Center, the sister campus to the elementary school, is one of four that remains closed. It was built in 1893 and its preschool and kindergarten students and their teachers were moved into the elementary school. Though the city has cleared the building to reopen, many families said they’d prefer to remain where they were through the end of the school year to minimize further disruptions. Friday is district’s last day before summer break.
Several students in the district have been found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. One case has been definitively linked to deteriorating paint in the basement of a school building, Golda Meir elementary. Two other cases involved students at Trowbridge and Kagel schools. Investigations determined that the source of the lead was most likely a combination of exposures from home and school.
Other cases have been investigated and the schools were cleared as the source, said Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the Milwaukee Health Department.
Since the crisis started, Reinwald said, about 550 children have been screened for lead at clinics run by the health department and Novir, a company hired by the city to assist with screening. That doesn’t include kids who might have been tested through their primary care doctors.
“We need to test many more kids for lead,” Milwaukee Health Commissioner Dr. Michael Totoraitis said on Monday.
The City of Milwaukee Health Department had been working with experts in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch when the entire team was laid off in the federal government’s Reduction in Force cuts in April.
The city had requested that the CDC dispatch disease detectives to help mount a wide-scale blood testing campaign of kids in city schools. That request was also denied, citing the agency’s loss of its lead experts.
Families who attended the meeting with Baldwin said they were outraged by the Trump administration’s apparent lack of support or interest.
“We need our children to be protected right now,” said Tikiya Frazier, who has nieces and nephews at two of the closed schools. “We need them to understand that and come and help us. This is a state of emergency for us.”
On Monday, Baldwin issued an open invitation to US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to visit Milwaukee to see and hear the issues for himself. She has twice before pressed Kennedy about the denial of federal aid. Both times he gave mollifying answers.
“Do you mean to eliminate this branch at the CDC?” Baldwin asked him in a hearing in May.
“No, we do not,” Kennedy responded.
But he has yet to reinstate the fired experts or reopen the lead program under his planned Administration for a Healthy America. He’s also given no timeline for when federal lead poisoning prevention activities might continue.
When Baldwin asked Kennedy about Milwaukee’s situation in a budget hearing a week later, he responded that “We have a team in Milwaukee.” The team was a lab technician who had briefly come to help calibrate a machine in the city’s public health lab.
Although the city had requested and needed that help for years, officials said it was not the work they had recently asked the CDC to tackle: helping get more kids’ blood tested for lead exposure.
“Either he was lying, or he didn’t know what was happening in his own agency. Either one is unacceptable,” Baldwin said after Monday’s meeting.
Kennedy has also failed to respond to a letter that Baldwin and US Rep. Gwen Moore sent in April, urging him to reinstate the CDC’s lead team.
On Tuesday, Baldwin and her colleague, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, sent Kennedy another letter with detailed questions about the fate of the Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. They gave him until June 16 to respond.
“We’ve got to hold the Trump administration accountable,” Baldwin said. “They could make the situation better today by rehiring these experts.”
“I’m angry because Wisconsin is always there for other states,” said Koa Branch, who has four children in Milwaukee’s public schools.
When the tap water in Flint, Michigan, tested positive for high levels of lead a decade ago, Branch said, she remembers community members packing up food and supplies and going for support. But now, “where’s our help? Where’s help for us?”
Branch had two sons at Westside Academy when it closed in early May. She was notified via a newsletter sent home with her children and later a phone call.
“My anxiety hit the roof,” she said.
The school district relocated classes to Andrew Douglas Middle School, about 3 miles away, or gave students the option to take classes online.
Branch says her easygoing 5-year-old, Jonas, took things in stride, but her sensitive fourth-grader Jerell, 10, couldn’t handle the change.
“I had to make a choice. I had to separate the two,” Branch said. Jonas moved with his class and teacher to the new campus, while Jarrell took classes online after Branch got home from work at night.
“I can’t speak for everybody else, but it stressed my household,” she said.
Branch said her kids have a vigilant pediatrician who has tested them for lead at each yearly wellness visit. So far, their test results have been normal. Still, she planned to take her youngest to a free clinic at a local church to get tested again.
Santana Wells said she had a son and a niece attending fifth grade at Brown Street Academy, which closed May 12, about a month before school ended.
Being at a different school caused her son to miss out on a lot of activities Brown Street had planned for its departing fifth-graders, she said.
“Brown Street used to do a carnival every year. They do a picnic. They have a long list of what they were doing for their graduates,” Wells said. Now, she said, it was a pared-down field trip, which felt unfair.
Wells said she “runs a tight schedule” at home to make it to work by 3 p.m. each day. With the change in schools, her son was arriving home later, which made her late to work, on top of everything else.
Several parents said their kids had questions about the lead and felt anxious about going back to school in the fall, even though the city has tested their schools and deemed them safe to reoccupy.
The stories told on Monday weren’t just for the ears of the federal government. Totoraitis said the questions from children were a light-bulb moment for him, too. The health department’s workers took great care to explain the lead situation to parents, but they hadn’t done as much to try to answer kids’ questions about what was happening. He said the department would work on that.
He also hopes to temporarily hire at least one of the laid-off CDC lead experts for a few weeks to come review the city’s efforts and make sure they are on track.
Baldwin hopes the federal government will rehire them, too.
“These were the renowned experts on childhood lead mitigation and remediation, and the federal government needs to have that staff capacity to help, just as they did in Flint, Michigan,” she said. “That’s needed here, right now, in Milwaukee.”
The US Environmental Protection Agency lifted its emergency order on drinking water in Flint last month — nine years after it was put into place.