Sacramento County school lead tests report nothing below 5 ppb. The state's health goal for lead is 0.2.

On May 31, 2017, a water sample at Sierra View Elementary in Sacramento County came back at 60 parts per billion (ppb) lead. Nineteen days earlier, another sample at the same school had read 27. The State Water Board's record lists the follow-up for both as a fixture removed from service, status complete. Both readings are over 15 ppb, the line California's school program uses to flag a sample. Both are far over a number most parents have never been shown: 0.2 ppb, the health goal for lead in drinking water that the state's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) set in April 2009.

The Water Board posts the results of its school program as a spreadsheet: 43,978 sample rows taken between January 2017 and October 2020, first under a 2017 state permit order and then under Assembly Bill 746, which required water systems to test public K-12 schools with buildings built before 2010 by July 1, 2019. Sacramento County has 1,748 of those samples, from 349 schools. Yolo County has 278, from 50. I counted a school as one school name served by one water system, since names repeat. The file flags 14 Sacramento samples and 5 Yolo samples as over the action level. It does not define its flag, but it behaves like a single rule: across all 43,978 rows the lowest flagged result is 15.2 and the highest unflagged result is 15.

Three numbers for one metal

The federal action level for lead is 15 ppb today and becomes 10 ppb on November 1, 2027. The text of 40 CFR 141.80 codified in July 2020 sets it at 0.015 mg/L, which is 15 ppb. The text in force since December 30, 2024 sets 0.010 mg/L, and the same section tells water systems to keep following the 2020 rules, with a few additions, until November 1, 2027.

Neither number is a health finding. The rule calls itself a treatment technique. When the 90th percentile of a water system's tap samples runs over the level, meaning more than one tap in ten, the system must act on corrosion control, lead pipe replacement and public education. OEHHA's 2009 document describes 15 ppb as a level EPA believes is feasible for water systems to reach. The school flag works on single samples, where one over 15 is enough, but it uses the same 15.

The health goal comes from a different calculation. OEHHA's April 2009 document starts from studies of children's blood lead and IQ, and treats a loss of 1 IQ point as its level of concern. It reports that "a threshold has not been observed for the non-carcinogenic effects (decrease in IQ points) of lead." From that it works out a daily intake from water of 2.86 micrograms, assumes water supplies 20 percent of a child's lead exposure and that a child drinks one liter a day, divides by an uncertainty factor of 3, and arrives at 0.19, rounded to 0.2 ppb. Bellinger's 2011 review found IQ deficits at blood lead levels well below 10 micrograms per deciliter, and a dose-effect curve that appears steeper at low doses. I have read that review's abstract, not the full paper.

Where the school file goes quiet

Most rows carry no number at all. Of the 43,978, a total of 41,628 are marked "<" and given the value 5. The spreadsheet does not say why, and I could not find the reason on the Water Board's page, so all I can report is that the lowest figure the file posts is 5 ppb. That is 25 times OEHHA's goal.

In Sacramento County, 1,680 of 1,748 samples are in that group, and at 296 of the county's 349 schools every posted result is. Another 43 schools had a highest result above 5 and up to 15, and 10 went over 15. In Yolo, 266 of 278 samples and 43 of 50 schools are under 5; three more topped out between 5 and 15, and four went over 15. For the under-5 schools the file can say the water read below 5 ppb. It cannot say whether it read 4.9 or 0.1, and the goal sits well under both. That is not a claim that the water is unsafe. How much of a child's exposure comes from the tap varies, and OEHHA's 20 percent is its allowance for that. What a parent cannot learn from this file is which side of the goal the water is on.

The samples over 15

In Sacramento County, 10 schools had at least one sample over 15 ppb: Warren A. Allison, Oakdale and Sierra View elementaries in the Sacramento Suburban Water District; Gold Ridge and Folsom Hills elementaries in Folsom's system; Rio Linda High in the Rio Linda/Elverta Community Water District; Mark Twain Elementary in the City of Sacramento's system; and Center High, McClellan High (Continuation) and Global Youth Charter in the CALAM-Antelope system. The highest was Sierra View's 60. The recorded follow-up is a fixture removed from service at six of the ten schools, resampling at three and corrective action at one, all marked complete.

Yolo County has four: Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High in Davis, at 24 and 20 ppb in October and November 2017; Greengate Center for Exception, as the file spells it, in Woodland, at 140 ppb on March 14, 2019, the highest reading in either county; Yolo County Special Education in Woodland, at 41 on January 15, 2019, with its follow-up still marked pending; and Esparto High, at 60 on September 1, 2020, with the follow-up fields blank. Those statuses are as of the state's March 2021 download. I do not know what happened after.

A file that ends in 2020

The newest sample in the file is dated October 2, 2020. The page says the results run through December 31, 2020 and were downloaded March 16, 2021, and the page itself was updated December 17, 2025. I found no later school file linked from it. The AB 746 testing deadline was July 1, 2019, and I found no later round described there. A child at one of these schools today drinks from plumbing the state last posted a reading for between 2017 and 2020.

Our view is that a posting of "under 5" answers a question the health goal does not ask, and that each result should be published with the lab's lowest reportable level beside it. That view would change if the Water Board documents a reason the floor has to be 5, or if OEHHA has revised its goal since 2009. OEHHA's current webpage sits behind a bot check and would not load for a script, so the goal cited here is the April 2009 PDF. How sure we are: high on the counts, which are arithmetic on the state's file and can be rerun; moderate on what an under-5 reading means for any one child, since the goal rests on OEHHA's stated assumptions.

The date to watch is November 1, 2027, when the 10 ppb action level applies to water systems. Questions about school sampling go to the Division of Drinking Water at [email protected], the contact listed on the Water Board's page.