Pennsylvania's 2026 state budget changed one number, and almost nobody noticed.
Since Act 39 of 2018, a Pennsylvania school that tested its drinking water had to report any detectable lead — the threshold was zero, matching the EPA's maximum contaminant level goal. As of May 2026, schools only have to report results at or above 5 parts per billion. Republicans pushed for 15 ppb, the federal action level; 5 ppb was the compromise, matching the FDA's standard for bottled water.
Spotlight PA reported the change on July 23 and noted, accurately, that it had no figures on how many districts actually test or what they found. So we went and got them.
We pulled the Pennsylvania Department of Education's own spreadsheet — the public "list of schools reporting elevated lead levels," updated quarterly — and matched every reporting entity against the federal school district universe. Here is what the rule that just ended had collected.
Only 67 of Pennsylvania's 500 school districts have ever reported
Pennsylvania has exactly 500 local school districts and 2,958 public schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data.
Across seven years of reporting, from March 2019 through today, the state's list contains 102 distinct reporting entities. Most are school districts, but a third are not: intermediate units, career and technical centers, charter schools, and private and religious schools including the Diocese of Scranton, Melmark School, and Upland Country Day School.
Matching those names against the federal district list leaves 67 unique school districts — 13.4% of Pennsylvania's 500.
The other 433 districts have never reported elevated lead to the state. That does not mean their water is clean. It means Act 39 never made them look.
This is the part of the law that matters more than the threshold. Act 39 does not require Pennsylvania schools to test their water at all. A district can satisfy the law by discussing lead at an annual public meeting. There is no state verification that the discussion happened, no standardized testing protocol, and no penalty for failing to report results. The list is a record of who volunteered.
What the old threshold caught
Among the buildings that did report, the readings were not marginal.
Under the old rule, Pennsylvania collected 999 readings from 764 school buildings. The distribution:
| Threshold | Buildings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 5 ppb (new reporting threshold) | 867 | 87% |
| ≥ 15 ppb (federal action level) | 859 | 86% |
| ≥ 50 ppb | 276 | 28% |
| ≥ 100 ppb | 162 | 16% |
| ≥ 1,000 ppb | 11 | 1% |
The median reading was 26.6 ppb — the typical reported building sat above the federal action level, not near it. The mean was 96.2 ppb, dragged up by a long tail.
The highest single reading in the file is 8,768 ppb, recorded at Duckrey Elementary School in the School District of Philadelphia in June 2019. That is 585 times the federal action level. The state's own record notes the outlet was converted to a handwashing sink.
That context belongs with the number. Philadelphia accounts for eight of the ten highest readings in the entire file, nearly all from a 2018–2019 testing round that the Philadelphia Inquirer covered at the time, and the remediation column shows action taken — fountains shut off, bubbler heads removed, faucets replaced. These are not live hazards sitting undisclosed. They are what a zero-threshold reporting rule surfaced, and a record of the system working roughly as intended once a school chose to test.
The first three months under the new rule
Since the change took effect in May 2026, the state's list of schools reporting elevated lead contains 88 result rows from 12 entities.
Fifty-five percent of them are non-detects. The highest reading is 1.2 ppb. Not one result reaches the 5 ppb threshold that now triggers a reporting obligation.
A list of elevated lead readings in which nothing is elevated is a strange artifact. But we want to be careful about what it proves. The new regime is roughly three months old, the file updates quarterly, and schools sit at different points in their own testing cycles. Some of that emptiness is certainly reporting lag. The honest statement is about what the state's list currently records, not about what exists in Pennsylvania's school plumbing. We will re-check after the next quarterly update.
There is a second, quieter problem. Pennsylvania changed the format of the file at the same time it changed the threshold. The old sheets recorded a low-and-high ppb range per building. The new sheet records individual fixtures, with a result and a unit column that mixes ppb and ug/l. The before and after cannot be compared directly on any per-fixture basis. Whatever trend existed in Pennsylvania's school water data, the series breaks in May 2026.
Three other states went the opposite direction
Here is the context that makes Pennsylvania's change worth noticing.
The most-cited national picture of school lead testing is a 2021 landscape survey by the National Association of State Boards of Education, covering all 50 states and DC. It is the table policy researchers still quote. It is also five years old, and we have been checking it state by state against current sources.
It is wrong in a consistent direction. Seven of the nine states it lists as not sharing school lead results publicly now do. Three of the clearest reversals:
- Michigan reversed on both counts. The Clean Drinking Water Access Act of 2023 — "Filter First" — requires schools and child care centers to adopt a drinking water management plan, install lead-reducing filters on every consumptive fixture, and test the filtered water. EGLE publishes a public sampling dashboard. NASBE lists Michigan as requiring nothing and publishing nothing; it is now among the more protective states in the country.
- Indiana publishes school-by-school results through the Indiana Finance Authority — facility, county, whether fixtures exceeded 15 ppb, remediation status — updated quarterly.
- Minnesota launched a public interactive map in March 2025 covering every public and charter school and licensed child care center. State law has required testing every five years and public results since 2017.
We have now verified all 51 jurisdictions, and the complete refreshed table is published as our school drinking water lead testing database. Of the nine states NASBE recorded as non-publishers, seven have since started publishing, and the number sharing results publicly has gone from 26 in 2021 to 43 today. Only Illinois still requires testing while publishing no results.
Pennsylvania moved the other way.
What this means if you have a child in a Pennsylvania school
Three practical things follow from the data. Pennsylvania's current reporting rule, action level and official sources are summarised on our Pennsylvania school lead testing page.
Absence from the list means almost nothing. With 433 of 500 districts never having reported, not appearing is far more likely to mean "never tested" than "tested clean." If you want to know, ask your district directly whether it has tested, when, and at how many fixtures — Act 39 gives them the option to have simply held a meeting instead.
Ask what threshold they are using. After May 2026, a district can test, find 4 ppb at a kindergarten fountain, and report nothing to the state. There is no safe level of lead for children; the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a 1 ppb ceiling for school drinking water, and Massachusetts already uses it. A "nothing to report" answer now covers a wider range of results than it did in April.
Fixtures matter more than pipes. The pattern across Pennsylvania's records, and in Buffalo and Milwaukee before it, is that the lead usually comes from fountains, bubblers, and kitchen faucets rather than the service line to the building. That is why single outlets in a building can read in the thousands while the rest read near zero — and why filtered bottle-filling stations, Michigan's approach, address the problem more directly than testing alone.
Methodology and limits
The source is the Pennsylvania Department of Education's public list of schools reporting elevated lead levels, an Excel workbook of three sheets covering March 2019 to July 2025, August 2025 to April 2026, and May 2026 to present. We downloaded it on August 9, 2026.
District counts come from the NCES Common Core of Data for 2023, retrieved through the Urban Institute's Education Data API. Pennsylvania's 500 figure counts local school districts specifically; the state has 795 local education agencies in total once charter LEAs, intermediate units, and state agencies are included, and conflating the two inflates any denominator.
Four limits we would want a reader to hold onto:
- This is a floor, not a prevalence estimate. Only schools that chose to test and chose to report appear at all.
- The readings are not a random sample. They are self-selected, and the extremes cluster in one district's testing round.
- The file has data quality problems. Duplicate entity spellings ("Bucks County IU" and "Bucks County IU 22"), malformed dates, mixed units, and results stored as text like
<5. We deduplicated entities before counting. - Remediation is recorded for most extreme readings and should be read alongside them.
This analysis is one state's slice of our national school drinking water lead testing database — a maintained refresh of the 2021 landscape survey, verified jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with the methodology behind every rating published in full.
Data and methodology questions are welcome. Underlying figures are published under CC BY 4.0 — please cite TapWaterData and link back if you use them.
