Don’t delay on getting lead out of CMS drinking water. The money is there.

The writer is a Clean Water Associate with Environment North Carolina.

After months of anticipation, Congress has finally passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill. One overlooked feature of the package is $200 million to stop lead contamination of water in schools. This funding can’t come soon enough.

Here in North Carolina, 67% of children who were tested had lead in their blood by age 6, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Unfortunately, N.C. kids are at risk of additional lead exposure from the drinking water at our schools. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has tested fixtures at 89 of its oldest schools and found lead over 15 parts per billion in 41 of them. This does not include faucets or fountains where low levels of lead were detected.

Even low levels of lead are linked to learning disabilities, impaired hearing, nervous system damage and “impaired formation and function of blood cells,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency. More than 24 million children in America are at risk of losing IQ points due to low levels of lead exposure, according to study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

While alarming, this health threat is not surprising. Contamination is bound to be similar in other North Carolina schools as well. All too often, our schools are built with faucets, fountains and plumbing containing enough lead to leach into our kids’ drinking water.

Plainly, it’s time to get the lead out at school.

And there is a simple and effective step our school district can take right now: replacing fountains with filtered water bottle stations.

Water bottle stations are now available that come equipped with filters certified to remove lead. They even have indicator lights so parents, teachers and administrators can see when the filters need to be replaced.

Filters are highly effective at removing lead from water, and should also be installed on faucets used for cooking lunch and drink preparation. And, follow up testing should be done to ensure that lead in schools’ water never exceeds 1 part per billion — the limit recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

No doubt, installing and maintaining these filtered hydration stations will cost money. But our kids’ health is worth it.

Our school district now has resources needed to complete this task. It would only take a fraction of the federal stimulus dollars the school district is receiving to install and maintain these filtered hydration stations for all students.

And now, with the bipartisan infrastructure package passed, there is an additional $200 million ready and waiting.

Like most school districts, we know that Charlotte schools are facing multiple challenges right now. Yet as surely as district leaders are working to retrieve “lost learning” due to COVID-19 pandemic, let’s resolve to prevent further lost learning from lead.

Protecting our children’s brains should be a no-brainer. Working together with our local school leaders, we can get the lead out.