Getting The Lead Out
The Curriculum in the Community

Matt Corcoran is teaching a class of about 25 students at the Shaw Middle School in West Philadelphia. The fifth graders are looking at him through slides they hold up to their eyes. The slides are really diffraction gratings. Like a prism, they bend and break up light into a rainbow. The class is examining the spectrum of colors produced by the light from a red-glowing bulb screwed into the black box that Corcoran is operating.

Corcoran graduated last summer with a master’s in secondary science education from Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE). He is now completing degree requirements in the Master of Chemistry Education Program, a joint initiative of the School’s chemistry department and GSE.

"When you look at this rainbow," he expounds, "you’re looking at Mr. ROY G. BIV." The letters stand for the seven colors of the rainbow, the spectrum of white light: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Corcoran keeps swapping bulbs filled with different gases–helium, krypton, neon–so the children can see how each gas, when it glows, emits its own unique spectrum, a kind of fingerprint rainbow of discrete color lines amid gaps of missing hues. (Scientists use the technique to identify the elements whose radiation makes up the light of stars.) Three Penn undergraduates–Tanya Lee, Ellen Tarquinio, and Sueihn Lee–move among the Shaw students or sit beside them to help with the hands-on science lesson. They, along with Corcoran, are among 15 Penn students enrolled in Professor Bob Giegengack’s honors seminar on the Urban Environment (Environmental Studies 404). One of the course requirements is working with the students at the middle school.

"The classrooms are very ‘event full,’" says Corcoran, quoting one of his GSE professors, "but it is not unmanageable chaos." The rules for behavior are penned in magic marker and posted high on the wall. They are rudimentary: no street language; no calling out; no rude behavior; no fighting. "Students in these classrooms want to learn, and the difficult part is to consistently work with a class to establish the environment that will help them."

The condition of that environment is not inspiring. Most of the finish on the hardwood floor was scraped away years ago, and the drop ceiling is stained and dirty. The scratched chairs and splintered desks are neither in rows nor in discernible clusters. A few, along with the students who inhabit them, are turned toward the walls at the side of the room. Some grade schoolers grab at classmates seated in front of them. Many of the students stand and call out during the lesson, while one roams about, lost in the flickering light of some private movie in his brain, bringing to a boil the simmering disorder in the overheated classroom.

"Forty percent of the kids in this neighborhood have shown blood-lead levels that are considered dangerous," comments Giegengack, who is seated at an undersized desk and chair in the back of the room.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have set ten micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood as the threshold at which lead exposure harms the health of children. "That’s comparable to a lead pellet in a railroad tank car [full of blood]," he estimates. Those at greatest risk are children under the age of six. Researchers have documented the effects of lead poisoning on the developing brain, which even at this low level of exposure can result in hyperactivity, attention deficit, and other learning disabilities and behavioral disorders. The neurological damage is irreversible. Shaw School is situated in one of several lead hot spots in Philadelphia.

As the lesson proceeds, the cacophony of child voices almost buries Corcoran’s. "We raise our hands in here," admonishes the teacher who has allowed the Penn students into her classroom. She is wearing a pale blue sweater with white daisies. Some of the pupils now raise their hands while continuing to call out, but Corcoran is unflappable.

His lesson on light is an analogy that illustrates how scientists at Penn use radiation to look for the presence of lead in samples of dust and soil the elementary-school pupils have collected from their homes. Giegengack has brought along the X ray fluorescence spectrometer, purchased with funds from the Kellogg grant that paid for the course in previous years, to show the children one of the instruments scientists use to detect lead in the urban environment.

Since 1994, about 80 percent of the course’s students have been undergraduates from the College, most of whom have come through the General Honors Program. In large measure, his seminar teaches Penn students how lead has become ubiquitous in America’s cities and how it affects the health of inhabitants, especially young children. "I see my primary responsibility in Environmental Studies 404 to be to convey academic substance to Penn students," comments Giegengack. The students cement their grasp of the course substance by passing it on to the children at Shaw. "It helps the Penn students learn better," he notes. "Those of us who find ourselves in the teaching profession realize that the stuff we thought we knew, we didn’t learn very well until we turned around and tried to teach it."

The child who’s been wandering among the disarray of desks and voices picks a fight with another. The Shaw teacher grabs each by the arm and leads them into the hall outside. "Chances are," Giegengack muses, "the kids who are acting up and being taken out of the room are the ones who need to be here the most." If they were exposed to lead as toddlers, their younger brothers and sisters in the same houses are probably at risk too. It’s too late for these students, but the information they bring home could save their siblings.

"A child’s environment is full of lead," states the CDC. "Childhood lead poisoning is one of the most common pediatric health problems in the United States today." The EPA estimated in 1990 that 3 million American children had absorbed harmful amounts of the toxic metal into their systems.

Houses whose interiors and exteriors were coated long ago with lead-based paint are now the principal sources of the lead that poisons children in this country. In 1991 HUD calculated that 3 million tons of lead remain in about 57 million U.S. homes. In 14 million of them, the lead paint has become unsound, and about 3.8 million of these dwellings are homes to small children, who are most vulnerable.

Those at greatest risk, say the CDC, are poor and minority children. "Lead exposure is at once a product of poverty and a contributor to the cycle that perpetuates and deepens the state of being poor." The disadvantaged have few resources to maintain their homes and tend to inhabit old and dilapidated housing stock. As lead-based paint ages, it flakes and chalks. An invisible blizzard of tiny lead particles falls from decaying ceilings, walls, and windows onto the floors and into the soil surrounding the painted structures.

"The soils are especially dangerous," notes Giegengack. "Around the margins of houses in West Philadelphia all the lead that drains off a house stays there. We made measurements of the lead in soil samples adjacent to the foundations of houses, and sometimes we get 40 to 50 percent lead by weight. If a child is sitting against the foundation of his house eating a banana and drops it in the dirt, then picks the banana up and takes a bite, he’s got enough lead in that mouthful to suffer real injury."

Children, particularly infants and toddlers, naturally explore the world by putting things in their mouths. In these old, deteriorating homes the toxic dust gets "eaten" when children put into their mouths toys or hands or household items coated with a film of fine lead powder. The noxious metal readily substitutes for calcium and iron in important enzymes and interferes with many physiological processes, including neurological development. Chronic, long-term ingestion of the toxin has dire health effects on almost every system in the body.

"The legacy of that exposure is overwhelming," Giegengack reports. "Longitudinal studies have shown that people whose blood tests indicate lead levels above ten micrograms per deciliter as toddlers are compromised socially, academically, financially–by almost every measure you can come up with–for the rest of their lives. They get lower grades in school; they have lower standardized test scores; they have a lower graduation rate from high school; they have a much lower admission rate to college; they have a higher probability of going to jail; they have a higher probability of dishonorable discharge from the military, and so on."

Giegengack, a geologist and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, keeps a foam rock on his desk that looks convincingly like a chunk of gray granite. "I throw it at graduate students when they misbehave," he offers before demonstrating his technique.

Ira Harkavy, C’70, Gr’79, was once a student of Giegengack’s. As director of the Center for Community Partnerships, Harkavy is the organizing force behind Penn’s academic ventures into the off-campus community. "He called me up and asked me to participate in his program," Giegengack recalls. "For a long time I held him off with the argument that I would not go into the schools of West Philadelphia and try to persuade those kids that they should be interested in global warming, or the protection of biodiversity or the ozone layer.

"He said, ‘Where is your sense of civic duty? Where is your conscience?’ He would not stop reminding me of what he perceived to be my responsibility [toward Penn’s neighbors]. Finally I said, ‘Alright, I’ll do it because you’re so persistent that you don’t give me a moment’s peace.’"

Fall 2000 is the sixth time Giegengack has offered the seminar on the urban environment. "As a geologist I’ve studied the interaction among physical, chemical, and biological systems. . . . It’s not a stretch for a geologist to worry about what happens in a growing child’s brain if too much lead gets in there."

The course is an intensive study of the physics, chemistry, toxicology, and public-health threat of lead. Besides reaping the benefit of the Penn students’ acquired knowledge, the Shaw children are involved in collecting samples from their homes and assessing the presence of lead in their community as well as developing brochures to help educate their families about how to deal with the health threat.

Philadelphia’s Department of Health estimates that 400,000 of the city’s homes contain lead paint. The cost of removing the contaminated paint comes to about $25,000 per home, which puts the cost of making the city lead free above $10 billion. With that prohibitive price tag, public education becomes the best way to deal with the epidemic. Just knowing about the danger and taking precautions as simple as washing hands, cleaning floors with water, planting shrubs near the outside walls, and supervising toddlers more closely can dramatically reduce the blood-lead levels in an afflicted neighborhood.

"The Penn students draft and produce simple brochures [about lead-poisoning prevention] and give them to the kids, who go back into the neighborhood as ambassadors for effective lead hygiene," Giegengack explains. "They tell their parents, and they tell their next door neighbors, and they tell their uncles and their aunts, and they call up their relatives in Baltimore."

The EPA distributes literature about lead poisoning in many urban neighborhoods, but Giegengack believes the brochures put out by the Penn and Shaw students are far more likely to be read by parents and relatives. "The kids come home and say, ‘Look what we did!’ That gets parents’ attention, and the message gets around."

Since the students in Environmental Studies 404 have worked with Shaw, the blood-lead levels of children living in the surrounding area have declined, but it’s hard to tell if this is a product of Penn’s outreach or the efforts of the city’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (CLPPP). Giegengack is convinced that part of the credit belongs to the efforts of his students and hopes to develop the data that would document it, perhaps by showing a steeper rate of decline in the Shaw School vicinity than in other neighborhoods.

CLPPP director Richard Tobin has for years been making presentations at the Urban Environment seminar and is interested in some of the undergraduate research that gets passed on to him. "Anything other people do, complements our work," he says.

Besides public education, CLPPP maintains a database that analyzes pediatric blood screenings and tracks the lead-poisoning epidemic throughout Philadelphia. Initially, the data showed wide swaths of "lead belts" in certain sectors, but now mapping programs can resolve the data to isolate distinct blocks where children suffer from lead poisoning. In the fall, a team of undergraduates studied a six-block hot spot just north of campus to ascertain why blood-lead levels were so much higher than the surrounding blocks. Tobin is looking forward to the results. "We’ve done mapping all across the city," he says. "It’s a matter of resources: at some point you just run out of bodies. We’ve been working with Bob and his students to find and understand these islands in order to target them."

"It’s a very, very serious problem," says Giegengack, "and if we can make any kind of a dent in the magnitude of that problem, that would make much more of a contribution to the welfare of our immediate neighbors than would teaching them about some esoteric aspects of environmental science."

As for the Penn students who enroll in the seminar, he has seen them walk away with two important benefits. The second is that none of them will ever have a lead-poisoned child. Lead poisoning is not just an affliction of the poor. There have been many cases of children being poisoned when affluent families moved into an old home and then renovated it, releasing the lead that had remained buried for decades under layers of paint.

"The first thing they learn," Giegengack points out, "when they go into the Shaw Middle School, is how lucky they are. They walk out of there the first day in complete shock. They have no idea what life is like in an urban school: most of them grew up in the suburbs and attended suburban schools." The journey into the urban environment, in may ways, is similar to the learning experience Penn Abroad students undergo when they venture to a foreign land.

At the back of the classroom where Matt Corcoran has been teaching, metal bookshelves covered with peeling contact paper hold rows of dog-eared books. On the wall above are timelines that the children drew, chronologies from 1988 to 2000 that mark important events in their lives. Someone recieved a puppy in 1990. Another got her first bike in 1992. One child moved back with his mom in 1996, and an arm was broken in 1998. A poster near the windows shows a green caterpillar at the top and a brightly colored butterfly below. Between them on a cobalt-blue background is a Shakespeare quote: "We know what we are but not what we may be."

The Shaw School is the alma mater of Penn president Judith Rodin, CW’66, who grew up in West Philadelphia. On this day, though, it’s hard to envision what bright butterfly could break from the chrysalis of this classroom.

"The kids in the Shaw School are just like any bunch of 11- and 12-year-olds," Giegengack resumes. "They haven’t gotten cynical yet; they haven’t gotten bitter yet: they’re great, great kids. And the Penn students realize that almost immediately. What falls away is their accumulated fear of what might happen if they venture into an urban school. The Penn students and the teachers who stay at Shaw see the potential. Many of them care deeply about the future of Philadelphia public schools and the kids who attend them."