Yes, it is a Bubbler. And No, You Cannot Drink from it.

Recess is over and kids are racing to the school entrance to be first in line for the drinking fountain—or bubbler, depending on where you are from.

Imagine if once the rush of students approaches the bubbler, a sign above it reads “Do Not Drink: Water is tainted with nitrates, a potential carcinogen and a pesticide that may cause male sterility.” “Do Not Drink” is about the only thing that will register and considering a 9-year-old’s thirst after recess, tainted or not, water will be gulped down. And who can blame the kids? After an intense game of tag, how can you not hit up the bubbler? You played hard! And moms and dads always say to drink eight glasses of water a day. Water is good for you, right?

No unfortunately, not all water is good for you.

Recently, an AP investigation found that contaminants have surfaced at public and private schools in all 50 states—in both small farm towns and inner cities. Scary, I know. According to the AP investigation, 1 out of every 5 schools with its own water supply violated the Safe Drinking Water Act in the past decade. That’s a staggering 20% of schools.

Yes, this is really happening. Here are two examples of reported effects of toxic school drinking water:

• In 2001, 28 children at a Worthington, Minnesota elementary school experienced severe stomach aches and nausea after drinking water tainted with lead and copper.
• In Seattle, a 6-year-old girl suffered stomach aches and became disoriented and easily exhausted. The girl's mother asked her daughter's school to test its water, and also tested a strand of her daughter's hair. Tests showed high levels of copper and lead.

Luckily, steps have been taken. See improvement options, according to the article, below:

• Improve Water System: In California, the Department of Public Health has given out more than $4 million in recent years to help districts overhaul their water systems.
• New School Building: After wrestling with unsafe levels of arsenic for almost two years, administrators in Sterling, Ohio, finally bought water coolers for elementary school students last fall. Now they plan to move students to a new building.
• Bottled Water: Many school officials say buying bottled water is less expensive than fixing old pipes. Baltimore, for instance, has spent more than $2.5 million on bottled water over the last six years.

I know Chemistry is a subject in almost every school; it should not be in every school’s water.