Water dripping off kids’ chins wastes 7 million gallons of water per year at each fountain, LAUSD says.

As the state reported today that Californians’ conservation efforts are slacking off, millions of gallons of water are still being wasted each year by LA Unified because of unnecessary flushing of the water fountains, a report revealed Tuesday.

Plans to end the practice won’t take place until the end of the 2017-18 school year, but board members expressed the need for higher urgency at a committee meeting Tuesday night and planned to notify the superintendent immediately.

“We have been spending a fortune flushing entire campuses when theoretically only 20 percent needed to be flushed at all,” said board member Monica Ratliff at the Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee she runs. “That’s a lot of wasted water.”

The facilities division has spent $5 million of a $20 million program to upgrade and fix the 42,814 water fountains throughout LA Unified. The plan has also included installing bottle-filling stations at a cost of $4,135 each, which a few of the school board members seemed to think was too costly for the district, especially for the plans to include one or two at every school site.

“Couldn’t we teach the students to just tilt the bottle to fill it up?” asked Ratliff when hearing the cost of each new bubbler.

The water concerns come not only as the district is facing severe budget shortfalls in the near future but also as California officials noticed a severe drop in water saving measures over the past few months. Californians saved less than 18 percent in August, according to the state Water Resources Control Board, and the state is at a “yellow alert” status and is still in drought status.

Flushing the water fountains every day at LA Unified schools is being done out of an abundance of caution because of lead found in about 10 percent of them. Lead can affect the brain and nervous system and is particularly harmful to children.

“The district has been overly cautious when it comes to lead in the water, so we do more than what the environmental regulations suggest,” said Mark Hovatter, the district’s chief facilities officer. “But we do want to end the practice as soon as possible.”

If one fountain at any school registers any lead in the first 30 seconds, then all the faucets in the school must be run for at least 30 seconds every day. That’s 9,500 gallons of water a day, or nearly 2.5 million gallons a year going down the drain, most of it unnecessarily.

• Read more: Yes, you can drink the water. No lead scares here, LAUSD says.

“We took the ultra-conservative approach that if one fountain needed flushing we flush the whole campus,” Hovatter explained. “When we first started doing it we didn’t know a lot about lead in the water and wanted to be fully safe and fully educated.”

In fact, the nation’s second-largest school district was far ahead of national standards. LA Unified started the flushing in 1988, according to Robert Laughton, the director of the district’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety. That was long before federal warnings of lead in 1991, state legislation in 2009 and federal laws in 2011. Now fountains that show any lead levels are being replaced or taken out altogether.

“We all agree flushing is bad for a variety of reasons,” Hovatter said.

Ratliff pointed out, “At a meeting last week the superintendent said, ‘Please, please stop doing resolutions’ and what you’re telling me is that it sounds like this calls for a resolution. We have the power to change our policy. It sounds to me that what you’re saying is that we could identify the fountains that need to be flushed and do not need to flush the entire campus. I will send that along to the superintendent that we do that.”

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Already 11 percent of the school sites, or 113 schools, have been exempted from the daily flushing of the fountains, and schools continue to be added to the list. The district has surveyed 894 schools (89 percent of all school sites), completed sampling of 300 school sites (about 30 percent) and become better at water flushing compliance throughout the district, Hovatter said.

Among the myths, Laughton said, is that newer schools have cleaner water. That ended up not being true, and in their sampling, the district found an elementary school built in 1913 with 100 percent of the faucets without lead levels, while a middle school built in 1969 had only 65 percent deemed safe, while a high school built in 2009 had only 44 faucets deemed safe.

“Are you telling me, and I hesitate to ask, that there’s a school built in 1913 out there that is 100 percent safe and we are flushing the entire school every day anyway?” Ratliff asked.

Yes, for now, until that school gets added to the exemption list, Laughton said. But they are working to add as many schools as possible to the list and as fast as possible.

Chief Facilities Officer Mark Hovatter said nearly 2.5 million gallons of water each year is going down the drain, most of it needlessly.

“Somewhere along the way it became very uncool to drink water, and we take some of that responsibility upon ourselves,” Hovatter said. The fountains were put in sunny areas where the water became hot, or at the end of water lines where the water was stale. Some fountains weren’t cleaned regularly. Other fountains have filters that weren’t cleaned.

Melinda Rho, LA Department of Water and Power manager of regulatory affairs and consumer protection, spoke to the committee and explained how the water in Los Angeles was safe and among the best in the nation. She said it has been unnecessary to filter the water and that it gives the impression that drinking out of an unfiltered fountain is bad.

Hovatter said the district will eventually phase out fountains with filters, and that will cut down on maintenance.

Cutting back on flushing will also save an average of 500 hours a day or nearly 130,000 hours a year of custodial and administrative staffing “for them to focus on greater needs at the school sites,” Hovatter said.

Mathew Medrano, who teaches at Green Design School, is helping with a pilot program to get students to use reusable bottles.

The district is trying a pilot of getting students to carry water in reusable bottles that can be filled at a filling station. Mathew Medrano, a teacher at the Green Design School at Diego Rivera Learning Complex, brought half a dozen students to talk about the success of the program after it had been in place only a few months. The students took a survey and found that most students would pay about $5 for a reusable bottle with their school logo, then found a place to get them for $2.97 each. The profit was going to buy another bottle filling station to add to each of three floors of their school.

“We found that fewer students are buying water and using disposable bottles that contribute to the landfills,” Medrano said. “Anecdotally, people say that the water tastes like it’s from Arrowhead or Niagara, but it’s the same water as the other fountains on campus. It is definitely making drinking water cool again.”

Hovatter said he needs to have a staff of 42 people (he has 25 now and is looking for a few good plumbers). He said his goal is to include one or two of the bottle filling stations at every school, but it would require more money from the school board.

“I have a concern that it costs $4,000 per machine when they could just as easily tilt their bottles to fill them up,” Ratliff said.

Hovatter said that they figured out that there is a lot of water that gets lost when it drips off a child’s chin while slurping from a bubbler. That’s a loss of 7 million gallons of water a year for every fountain at LA Unified that the bottle filler stations would save.

“Any way we do it,” summed up board member Ref Rodriguez, “we need to figure out a way for kids to drink more water again.”

The board members asked for another report from Hovatter about the plans for the remaining water fountain funding and approximate costs.

So what about LA?

“Yes, our water is safe, not only LA Unified, but LA has some of the safest water in the nation,” said Robert Laughton, director of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety for the district.

“I have never seen an agency that goes as far as we do to ensure safe drinking water,” said Laughton, who was expecting phone calls about LA Unified’s water after the Flint and Newark news reports but has yet to receive any. “I haven’t even heard of any agency that does all the things we do.”

Laughton detailed for LA School Report what’s different in LA, how LA Unified tests its water and a new program the district is rolling out for drinking water in the schools.

NO LEAD PIPES

The problems on the East Coast stem from lead pipes. “No one I know, no plumber has ever seen a lead pipe,” Laughton said.

Pipes in California are made from cast iron, but what holds those pipes together does contain small amounts of lead.

Until 1998, solder materials were 50 percent lead and 50 percent tin, so if water stagnates in a pipe, lead could leach out into the water. “We all have that problem,” Laughton said, not just schools, adding that the city of Los Angeles is continuously testing its water supply and “I meet with DWP regularly.”

“The other issue is brass,” Laughton said, a metal alloy used in faucets that until Jan. 1, 2014, could be made up of at least 8 percent lead but now can be no more than a quarter of a percent, so “we are basically lead free at this point,” Laughton said.

FLUSHING

But to make sure no one is drinking water with lead, fountains and other taps where the water is used for drinking or in food preparation are flushed — by running water through them — for a minimum of 30 seconds each day throughout the district.

There are about 48,000 drinking fountains in the district, and LA Unified tested all of them in 2008 to determine which ones had elevated levels of lead. Those offenders, which constituted about 2 percent of all fountains, were removed.

But to be safe, all fountains have continued to be flushed and will be until the district completes a lead-mitigation program approved by the school board in September and begun about three months ago.

Only about 40 schools no longer need to flush their fountains because they have been cleared by that program, part of a $20 million bond-funded drinking water program in which every school in the district will be surveyed. If any fountains require flushing because of their lead levels, the fountain is either removed if the school can live without it, or the plumbing is changed out or a filtration device is added. Within the next 18 to 24 months all schools will have been cleared and then flushing will not be necessary.

About 500 LA Unified schools currently have no more than one drinking fountain that requires flushing. All fountains in early education centers already have been switched to filtered water “as a precaution,” Laughton said.

The flushing is conducted by different people depending on the campus — the plant manager, teachers, classroom volunteers or even students designated by the teacher — but each school’s principal must verify at the end of each month that the flushing was completed. Then the local district superintendent verifies the principal’s logs. And Laughton’s office performs safety inspections at each school every year to evaluate the flushing logs.

Chief facilities director Mark Hovatter said in a report in January that eliminating flushing would save 9,500 gallons of water a day or 2.5 million gallons a year. It would also save 500 hours of custodial time a day or 130,000 hours a year.

HYDRATION SYSTEMS

The district’s next frontier in drinking water is the installation of hydration stations. The vertical appliance is built into a pole and dispenses water, like on a refrigerator door, and will allow students to fill their own water bottles and encourage them to drink more water.

The first two have been installed at Jefferson High School and at district headquarters downtown, but schools throughout LA Unified will be getting the hydration stations in the next few months, with 800 schools slated to have them within two years.

“It was good timing,” Laughton said of the district’s efforts this year to ensure lead-free drinking water. But he noted about the current news stories on lead in drinking water, “What is lost is this is not a schools issues, this is a societal issue. It’s the same plumbing system everywhere. Courts, hospitals” — and homes.