By Rhythm Sachdeva and Robert Cribb
When Dr. Nicole Shadbolt discovered the drinking water her son consumes at his Ottawa high school had tested positive for elevated levels of lead, she took action.
The family physician immediately had the blood of her 13-year-old son Christopher tested after a recent IJB investigation revealed that his school’s drinking water contained lead levels exceeding federal safety guidelines.
The results showed elevated lead levels in his blood.
“I thought, oh my, this is not good,” says Shadbolt, whose son routinely drinks four litres of water at school each day. “We know that no level of lead is normal in the human body and we don’t have another source for this lead so it does seem like he’s probably ingested it at school.”
Dr. Shawn Kelly, the Ottawa pediatrician who ordered the testing for Shadbolt’s son, says the results were the highest he had ever seen.
“The expected lead levels for kids here is … zero,” said Kelly, who is also a pediatric substance use expert. “I was quite surprised.”
The testing found .09 micromoles per litre in the teen’s blood. The U.S. Center for Disease Control references .17 as a blood lead level requiring medical response. But there is “no safe level of lead in children,” the CDC notes, and “even low levels of lead in the blood can negatively impact a child’s health and should be viewed as a concern. “
Health Canada does not provide a maximum level or threshold for lead but said in a statement that even at very low levels, lead is associated with adverse health effects.
Ottawa area schools and daycares have some of the highest lead exceedances in the province, according to an IJB analysis.
In at least 44 schools, more than half of all water tests conducted between 2019 and 2023 exceeded the federal safety limit for lead. These tests are conducted by schools as required by provincial legislation.
A recent IJB investigation found more than 2,300 schools across Ontario had lead level test results that exceeded federal safety guidelines in the past four years. The results indicate as many as 800,000 students could have been impacted.
Five years after Health Canada adopted its more stringent lead safety guideline, Ontario’s guideline remains at 10 ppb — twice the federal standard.
Nearly half of Ontario’s public and Catholic schools have recorded at least one drinking water test exceeding the federal lead safety guideline of 5 parts per billion (ppb).
There is no safe level of lead, according to the World Health Organization. It is a neurotoxin associated with loss of IQ and cognitive development issues in children.
“(This is happening) in a place where kids are supposed to be developing their cognitive capacity and learning,” says Kelly, whose two children attend a school with lead exceedances according to a searchable database the IJB published for schools and daycares.
“This needs to be followed up with action and it’s to create safe drinking water for the kids in their school.”
It was the IJB database that first alerted Shadbolt to unusually high lead levels at Merivale High School, where her son attends.
Over 58 per cent of the tests conducted at Merivale between 2019 and 2023 exceeded the federal guideline, with 67 out of 115 tests surpassing the 10 ppb limit.
Even using the more lenient provincial guideline, Merivale High School still failed 36.5 per cent of the time.
One lead test in 2019 reached as high as 223 ppb, more than 20 times the provincial limit which Ontario schools continue to use as the safety standard for determining exceedances.
“Lead is not biologically normal,” says Shadbolt, who said she had the water at her home tested in June with no sign of lead. “We haven’t found any other sources of lead … and I do continue to think that it is [the school].”
The physician said she had never tested a patient for the lead content in their blood in her career – until now.
“I have started now asking kids when I see them what school they go to,” she says, adding that she checks the schools’ lead levels using the IJB database tool.
“It’s been a practice changer for me.”
While the city’s drinking water supply is free of lead, the neurotoxin can enter school drinking water “during its contact with lead pipes, brass fixtures, and lead solder if these were present within a school,” reads a statement from Ottawa Public Health.
The problem is typically greater in older schools since lead pipes were banned in 1975 when the national building code was amended.
School water tests are conducted in fixtures and plumbing such as water taps and fountains throughout the buildings.
Experts agree the only true solution is removing lead plumbing and fixtures from schools entirely – an expensive process at a time when Ontario schools already have a $16.8-billion backlog of repairs, according to advocacy group Fix Our Schools.
Cambridge Street Community Public School, of the Ottawa Carleton District School Board (OCDSB), saw results exceed the federal guideline in 41 out of 44 tests, a failure rate of 93 per cent.
And First Avenue Public School has a federal failure rate of just over 80 per cent, while Knoxdale Public School has a federal failure rate of just over 72 per cent. Both schools are with the OCDSB.
The OCDSB declined to comment on the findings at individual schools but, in a written statement to the IJB, said that any water fixtures where water tested above the provincial guideline have been “fixed.”
Resolving the issues involves multiple tests, fixture replacement, plumbing inspections, or adding lead filters, the board wrote in a June statement.
That process can produce test data showing multiple lead exceedances, even if they pertain to the same fixture undergoing repeated testing, it reads.
“We take issues of safe drinking water seriously,” the board wrote.
The data also shows high lead levels in schools and daycares that are part of the Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB).
Elmridge School Age Program, a daycare with the Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB), has a federal failure rate of 83 per cent, with 10 out of 12 tests exceeding federal guidelines for lead levels in the water.
Frank Ryan Intermediate School and Good Shepherd Elementary School – both in the OCSB – have failure rates of more than 56 per cent.
The OCSB also refused to comment on the test results on specific schools but said in a statement that the board installed reverse osmosis lead filters at fixtures where lead levels repeatedly exceeded safe limits.
The statement also says the board tested 123 water fixtures across its sites in June and found that seven exceeded the provincial lead standard.
“Those seven fixtures have had consecutive resamples that meet the provincial standard,” the OCSB wrote on Aug. 14.
Kelly has instructed Shadbolt’s children and his own kids to stop drinking water at their schools and to repeat their blood work for lead every three to six months.
Shadbolt contacted her son’s school but never heard back, she says.
She says parents were never notified of the exceedances by school officials.
“At a minimum, it’s a reasonable thing for parents to say, ‘we want to know what’s in (the water) when you’re testing it.”
According to the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, communications about testing results and “actions to address issues” are shared with the provincial government and Ottawa Public Health, and can be found on their website.
“I feel that it is the responsibility of those that are doing it in a provincial government to inform parents of what they can do with the results,” Kelly said..
“Parental knowledge could really prevent a influential exposure from occurring.
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