Dear Freire Wilmington Families: Last month we reached out to families about the Delaware Department of Education and the Delaware Division of Public Health’s (DPH) initiative to identify the level of lead within the drinking water system. They completed their sampling in early 2022, which included testing three water sources at Freire Wilmington last January. All samples collected at Freire Wilmington in January yielded results that were below the EPA maximum contaminant level for lead. But, one of these samples from a non-drinking, hand wash station was elevated, with a reading of 0.00916 mg/L. DPH’s recommendation for any sample above 0.0075 is continued/additional monitoring. Freire Wilmington takes lead safety very seriously, and as a result, had all sources of drinking water re-tested immediately along with a proper retest of the hand wash station. We tested 15 water sources and found that: - All lead concentrations in the building’s drinking water were well below .015 mg/L (13 out to 15 samples did not detect lead above the reporting limit of .001 mg/L)
- No samples reached the DPH threshold for continued monitoring (0.0075 mg/L)
- The non-drinking sink that had the elevated levels in January 2022 has returned results below a detectable level. This indicates that the January 2022 result was likely due to a sampling error.
With no issues needing remediation, our next comprehensive testing is scheduled to occur in 2024 and at least every three years thereafter. Any samples that come back above the EPA action limit are marked “Not for Drinking,” remediated, and then retested to ensure they are safe. The full results from our recent round of tests can be found on the Freire Wilmington website. If you have any questions, please reach out to Freire Schools Operations Manager Colandus Francis at colandus@freireschools.org. Yours in partnership, |
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Maddie Weckel
Head of School |
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