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Milwaukee built and painted the schools. They have had 50 years to
clean them up. Democrats prefer not to because it ensures a ready
supply of stupid voters when they grow up.

Kat Cisar, a mother of 6-year-old twins, found out in late February that
her kids were potentially being exposed to harmful lead paint and dust
at their Milwaukee school. By May, their school was on a growing list of
eight others across the city, found to have degrading, chipping
interiors that were putting children at risk.

Several schools have had to temporarily close for remediation efforts, including the one Cisar's kids attend.

"We put a lot of faith in our institutions, in our schools, and it's
just so disheartening when those systems fail," Cisar said.

Milwaukee's lead crisis began late last year, when a young student's
high blood lead levels were traced back to the student's school.

Since then, health officials have been combing through other Milwaukee
schools to find deteriorated conditions that could harm more children.
The plan now is to inspect roughly half of the district's 106 schools
built before 1978 -- when lead paint was banned -- in time for school to
return in the fall. They plan to inspect the other half before the end
of the year.

In the last few months, tests have turned up elevated blood lead levels
in at least three more students, and the health department expects that
number to grow as it continues to offer free testing clinics around the
city.

Lead exposure — especially harmful for young children — can cause growth delays, attention disorders and even brain damage, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cisar's own children's tests for lead levels showed no acute poisoning,
but Cisar said they'll have to keep monitoring it. Her children attended
the school for three years.

"When you have little kids who are 3, 4, 5, 6 years old in a classroom
like that, that's worrisome," she said.

The local impacts of federal cuts
Despite public health officials' requests, federal help is not coming to Milwaukee -- for now. The CDC's National Center for Environmental Health
was gutted on April 1, as part of the Trump administration's effort to
lay off 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department
(HHS), which oversees agencies like FDA and CDC.

The cuts included lead exposure experts who were planning to fly to
Milwaukee later that month to help the city respond to the situation.

That has complicated the on-the-ground response, Milwaukee Commissioner
of Health Mike Totaraitis told ABC News.

"We rely on the federal government for that expertise," Totoraitis said.
"So to see that eliminated overnight was hard to describe, to say the
least."

Erik Svendsen, division director of the CDC's National Center for
Environmental Health before it was eliminated, said the layoffs have
left Milwaukee on its own.

"Without us, there is no other unit at the federal level that is here to support them in doing what they need to do," Svendsen told ABC News.

And not just when it comes to this lead crisis, Svendsen said. Milwaukee
-- and other cities -- won't have CDC assistance for other environmental threats that affect the buildings people use, the air people breathe and
the water they drink, he said.

"States and local public health departments are on their own now as we
prepare for the heat, wildfire, algal bloom, tornado, flood and
hurricane seasons," Svendsen said.

An HHS spokesperson told ABC News the CDC's lead prevention work will be consolidated under a new division under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. — though Svendsen said he and his team have not been rehired.

Without the experts, Svendsen said the future of the work is still in
limbo.

For his part, Totoraitis, the Milwaukee health commissioner, said he
empathizes with the frustration expressed by parents -- some of whom
argue that the issue began at a local level and should be solved there.

"Putting my feet in the parents' shoes… thinking, 'Hey, I'm sending my
kid to school, it should be safe, it should be free of lead hazards' —
and unfortunately, that's not what we found," Totoraitis said.

"We found that systemic issues of poor maintenance and poor cleaning had
left countless hazards across multiple schools that really put students
at danger," he said.

But the extent of the problem, Totoraitis said, only furthered his department’s reliance on the experts at the CDC, with whom he said
they’d been constantly in contact with for the last few months.

Funding crunch: Hire more teachers or paint a wall?
Buildings in the U.S. built before 1978 can be properly maintained by
locking the old paint under layers of fresh new paint. But budget
constraints in Milwaukee delayed that upkeep, officials said.

"Underfunding in schools for many, many years has really put districts
at a very difficult choice of whether they should have teachers in the classroom and lower class sizes or have a paraprofessional to support --
or whether they paint a wall," said Brenda Cassillius, who started as
Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent one month ago.

"And so I think now we are learning and growing," Cassillius said, to
"make sure that we have the resources in place to deal with these really serious infrastructure issues."

Cisar, whose twins are back at their school after cleanup efforts, said
she still feels like there's lots of blame to go around.

The lack of CDC resources, she said, has only compounded a longstanding
issue in Milwaukee. But she said the lack of federal support has been disheartening, nonetheless.

"Maybe that would have just been a little bit of help -- but it really
sends the message of, 'You don't matter,'" she said.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/milwaukee-struggles-growing-lead-crisis-fed eral-found/story?id=121513560

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