(The Center Square) – It is taking longer than first thought to deal with the lead in Milwaukee Public Schools.
The city’s school district said Fernwood Montessori School will reopen Friday, instead of toady.
“Working in partnership with the city of Milwaukee Health Department has allowed us to move forward on our lead remediation work with urgency and precision. We have a lot more work to do in other buildings across our district and will move with the same level of urgency and care for those communities,” Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in a statement.
MPS closed Fernwood, Starms Early Childhood Center and LaFollette School last month.
The district had hoped to open Fernwood today, and open Starms by the end of the month. LaFollotte was slated to reopen sometime next month. MPS did not say anything this week about a timeline for the other schools.
The district did give parents a bit of a timeline for testing other schools for lead. But that testing will also be delayed.
Michael Turza, the man appointed to oversee lead testing across the city’s schools, told a parents group on Tuesday that MPS plans a wave of testing for the summer.
“Our goal is that by the beginning of the new school year, all of those pre-1950 buildings are done,” Turza said.
Milwaukee Public Schools have said it has more than 130 buildings that need to be lead-tested.
Turza said, even with a summer full of work, testing all of those schools is “massive work.”
“Hopefully by the end of the calendar year, this issue will be done, at least in the initial phase,” Turza added.
It is also unclear how long it will take for MPS and Milwaukee’s health department to test all of the students who go to schools with possible lead paint issues.
Milwaukee’s health department said that could be as many as 10,000 students. Public health managers have said in the past that they do not have the means to test that many students, and don’t know if that kind of testing will be available.
