Marty Kanarek:
The Wisconsin Division of Health — the Department of Health Services — has been working on this for years, working with all the counties. Milwaukee is like its own state on lead. They've been working with remediating old houses in Milwaukee forever. The Petit Foundation has given money to help with that. The problem is there's too many old homes. So unfortunately, what happens is they're remediating a lot of homes, but there's still many too old homes with old lead paint in it, or lead in the soil outside from either the gas or the paint that's deteriorated outside. What happens is a family rents a home, moves in, a child can get lead poisoned and then move out, and then another family can move in. But over the years, they've been working away at trying to remediate the houses. And now we're need to remediate some schools. Now it's, "I don't know the levels in those schools." Now, it's possible, since we've lowered the level of concern over the years that the level used to be labeled OK. Now, because we know there's no safe level of lead and the level is 3.5 micrograms per deciliter of blood — that it's above that level — so we're now saying it's not safe and we close those schools, but it might have been labeled safe 10 years ago.