Lead-tainted water: What Newark can teach US about investing in safety

Yvette Jordan remembers the day she learned the water fountains at her school were dangerous. 

It was in March 2016, and Ms. Jordan was teaching history at Barringer High School in Newark, New Jersey. At a gathering in the school’s gymnasium, she recalls, city officials told the crowd that high levels of lead had been discovered in the school’s drinking water, which public health officials say is harmful to both children and adults.

The officials insisted that Newark did not have a Flint, Michigan, situation – a reference to the lead-laced drinking water crisis that had made national headlines earlier that year. They would just need to shut down the water fountains. But additional tests revealed high lead levels elsewhere in the city’s water system, and community members began to mobilize. 

“Water is a right,” says Ms. Jordan, who is also the chair of an educators’ social justice group called the Newark

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