Lead in Rhode Island school drinking water

What Rhode Island publishes about lead testing in its schools’ drinking water, what those numbers cover, and how we checked it. One row of a 51-jurisdiction survey, verified jurisdiction by jurisdiction rather than compiled from a single list.

Rhode IslandPartial

Publishing status: Publishes results
Coverage: Partial — some schools only
Data vintage: rolling — the programme is running and the data is still being added to
Evidence: confirmed at sourceConfirmed at source 2026-08-09

Action level

Published action level, as verified in 2026: 1 and 15 ppb

Action levels are not comparable between jurisdictions: across the 51 we surveyed they run from 1 ppb to 20 ppb, so a share of results above “the action level” measures the threshold as much as it measures the water. We never rank states on it. Where a jurisdiction explains how its own level was set, the verified research note at the foot of this page records the explanation verbatim.

No statistics on this page yet

Rhode Island publishes results, but we have not yet ingested them row by row, so this page carries no counts or rates for it — only what the survey verified about the publication itself. We publish a figure once we hold the rows it is computed from, and not before. The jurisdiction’s own results are linked below.

What changed since 2021

The baseline is the National Association of State Boards of Education’s 2021 survey. Every 2026 value below was re-checked for this survey; a value that did not move is a finding too.

Testing required: 2021 baseline: Yes · verified 2026: Yes
Action level: 2021 baseline: 1 and 15 · verified 2026: 1 and 15
Publishes results: 2021 baseline: Yes · verified 2026: Yes

Nothing in this row moved between the 2021 baseline and our 2026 verification.

Source and verification

What we checked: https://health.ri.gov/data/testing-school-drinking-water-lead
Checked on: 2026-08-09 — confirmed at source
Machine readability: T3 — document only (PDF or report)

Verified research note

Our field note for Rhode Island, published verbatim rather than summarised. Where it quotes a figure from a source, that is the source’s own number reproduced as we recorded it, not a rate we computed — everything we compute states its denominator and its unit.

Confirms NASBE. RIDOH publishes results on its website; program is a RIDOH + URI Cooperative Extension + RIDE partnership offering free testing, extended to child care facilities in 2024. Progress as reported: 148 public schools covering 60,000+ students, 1,022 faucets and fountains tested -- about half of public schools done, so coverage is partial. ⭐ KEY METHODOLOGY ILLUSTRATION: nearly 80% of FIXTURES detected no lead and under 4% exceeded 10 ppb, but about 70% of SCHOOLS had lead detected in at least one fixture and 21% had high levels in at least one. Same data, wildly different headline depending on the unit of analysis. Our methodology page must state which unit every figure uses.

Cite this page

TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Rhode Island." TapWaterData national school drinking-water lead testing database. Last updated 2026-08-09. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/rhode-island

@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
  author       = {TapWaterData Editorial},
  title        = {School drinking water lead testing: Rhode Island},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/rhode-island}},
  note         = {Last updated 2026-08-09. Licensed under CC BY 4.0}
}

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence — free to republish, chart or build on with attribution. Last updated 2026-08-09.

All 51 jurisdictions — the national scorecard, the tier map, and the methodology behind every rating on this page.