By Brenda Goodman, CNN
(CNN) — The city of Milwaukee says it has finalized its efforts to stabilize nearly 100 public schools that were identified as having lead paint hazards earlier this year.
The milestone comes despite the city losing federal support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April due to broad cuts in the federal workforce. The CDC program supporting the Milwaukee Health Department through the lead crisis was reinstated in June and has been able to reengage with the city.
All of the schools identified as having problems have been inspected and deemed safe, according to Milwaukee Public Schools.
The district finished about 10 months of work to refurbish its schools roughly two weeks ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline. Teams addressed approximately 7 million square feet in schools across the district, including 2,700 classrooms plus common areas.
“This is an important milestone for the MPS community,” MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in a news release. “We have asked so much of our students, families, and staff over the past 10 months as we addressed this issue with the urgency it required … because of the hard work of so many dedicated teams in our district – we can move forward with the peace of mind that our schools are safe.”
In total, MPS had to temporarily relocate students or close parts of six schools because of the level of lead contamination in those buildings. Students were allowed to remain in the 90-plus other schools while the work continued.
In January 2025, an MPS student was diagnosed with elevated levels of lead in their blood. A subsequent investigation determined the child was likely exposed to lead through flaking paint in a basement bathroom of their school building.
Additional inspections determined lead hazards were present in 99 schools built before 1978, when it was still legal to use lead in paint. Many of those buildings had not been well maintained.
The district began intensive efforts to clean and repaint these schools, while the city’s health department ramped up efforts to screen other students for lead poisoning.
On Tuesday, April 1, the city’s health commissioner, Mike Totoriaitis, got a jarring email.
The environmental health team he had been working with at the CDC had been cut, swept up in a massive layoff of federal health workers, impacting entire divisions of some agencies. Many employees were immediately placed on administrative leave and were no longer able to access their work.
“They were able to send a last email giving us new points of contact, but the new points of contact were essentially unable to say what level of support they would provide us moving forward,” Totoraitis said at the time.
Totoraitis had also applied for Epi-Aid, a short-term loan of an officer from the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. That request was also denied.
The CDC team was eventually reinstated in June and was able to begin working with the city again.
“The City of Milwaukee Health Department is proud to have gone above and beyond to protect the city’s children, and we remain committed to this work as long as it takes,” Totoraitis said in a news release.
MPS says it has hired new staff and has new processes in place to safeguard schools against widespread lead contamination going forward. Distri