School District 57 has been testing all of its facilities for lead in the drinking water, with results expected by next week.
The vast majority of districts in the Northern Health region have taken the authority up on its recommendation earlier this year to start testing, especially in older buildings, Northern Health said.
The school board heard at Tuesday's meeting that the education services committee agreed to lead testing after it was raised as a concern.
"Lead in water is a very serious thing," said Sharel Warrington in her committee report. "We want to be sure our drinking water for our students is safe so we are proceeding with lead testing."
The report is sitting with L&M Engineering Ltd., said interim superintendent Sharon Cairns.
"Evidently some of the connections between pipes are old and may be lead-based and be leaching into the (water supply). So across the province the pipes are being tested in school and related buildings," Cairns said. The district has not started any lead mitigation efforts.
"We wanted a representative sample from all of our facilities without any extra measures taken ahead of time," she said.
Even small amounts of lead exposure can be harmful to health and children absorb lead more easily than adults, Northern Health has said.
Earlier this year, both the Ministry of Education and Northern Health called on school districts to undergo testing after four schools in Prince Rupert were found to have elevated lead levels in their drinking water. The health authority said there has been no evidence of children in B.C. showing health problems related to lead exposure.
Northwest Medical Health Officer Dr. Raina Fumerton said each district was sent a letter with various recommendations depending on the target group, with emphasis placed on schools with older infrastructure. That's because buildings built before 1989 face a higher risk for lead contamination.
The district's long-range facility report doesn't list the age of its buildings, but does rate their condition with three as poor, and should be considered for demolition, 33 as fair, two as average and three are excellent.
"When water stays stagnant for long periods of time like in contact with old plumbing materials that have lead in them, you've got three things acting together," Fumerton explained. "You've got the properties of tap water itself, so some is soft and acidic and tends to leach metals out of pipes."
That's not the case in Prince George, she said, but more on the coast.
The other two factors are the plumbing material and how long the water sits. Because lead gas and paint are no longer used the overall levels are decreasing in the population over time, she said. Lead exposure is most commonly through food, and in rare cases water.
"We know that lead can impact development in the brains in young children and fetuses... There's no good amount of lead ... so to the degree that we can reduce the level of lead in drinking water, we can and should do so," she said. "And particularly for those vulnerable populations, so schools are an easy target to address."
Education Minister Mike Bernier has instituted annual tests across school districts for lead after The Vancouver Sun reported more than a quarter of the province's districts found the higher-than-safe elevations in drinking water.
In the short-term, schools start a flushing program, but pushing water through the system first thing in the morning after it's been sitting overnight in the infrastructure.
"That's a very, very highly effective mitigation strategy," Fumerton said, but it does use a lot of water. Another short-term solution is having lead-filtered water stations that use a technology to remove lead from the water. The long-term solution would be changing the plumbing or doing corrosion-control programs.
Should lead be found in School District 57 buildings, the maintenance department would report back to the education services committee, Cairns said, and kickstart a process to seek professional advice for next steps.
"If there turns out to be evidence of lead in some buildings, they would begin the mitigation process," she said.
