Nearly 3,000 drinking water fountains, ice machines, classroom sinks and other fixtures in Long Island schools exceeded the state's standard for lead, a Newsday review of school testing reports found — more than twice as many as reported in a state database.
Districts said these noncompliant fixtures, tested over the past three years, were immediately shut off, replaced or marked for hand-washing only, following state law. But the results, according to public health experts, show that thousands of schoolchildren could have been exposed to water with harmful lead levels for years.
