New Lead Tests Set For Silver Valley Schools Sampling Will Be During Second Week Of October

Another round of lead sampling in Silver Valley schools is slated to start early next month.

The sampling - the result of a state lawsuit last spring - will test lead dust at seven schools and a day-care center in the valley.

School officials were notified Thursday of the testing scheduled to start between Oct. 9-13, said Greg Godwin, superintendent of Kellogg schools.

“As of this morning we were brought into the loop and certainly open to the testing,” Godwin said.

Classes won’t be interrupted by the sampling, he said.

Four schools within the Bunker Hill Superfund site were last tested in 1989. Schools in Osburn, Mullan and Wallace had not been tested before the lawsuit.

The testing stems from a state court decision in March. Idaho District Judge Deborah Bail ordered testing in Silver Valley schools as part of a larger school safety lawsuit.

Robert Huntley, the lawyer representing 15 schools in the larger suit, and Tina Paddock, a former Wallace resident who now lives in McMinnville, Ore., are leading the charge to test for lead.

Huntley paid for a preliminary round of testing in June. Of 103 samples taken at five schools and the Huggy Bear Day Care, eight exceeded interim standards.

This week, Huntley and Paddock notified the state that the scheduled testing will not provide an accurate picture of the amount of lead in valley schools.

The schools should have been tested by the end of this week, Huntley said in an e-mail message to the state official coordinating the testing.

The sampling should occur now, after students have tracked dust in and out, and before any “special clean-up” has occurred, Huntley wrote.

But Godwin said the schools did not plan any special cleaning.

“Just the routine cleaning that we do on a routine basis,” he said.

Paddock requested a review of the state’s testing protocol from Dr. Bruce Lanphear, with Children’s Medical Center in Cincinnati.

Lanphear criticized several aspects of the sampling, according to an e-mail message forwarded by Paddock.