Our children should not be exposed to lead at schools and child care centres.

We know that lead has many detrimental effects on health and brain development, especially for young children. These impacts can be lifelong. But the Ontario government has refused to adopt the federal guidelines for lead exposure, instead insisting that a level twice as high is safe for our kids. This is unacceptable.

In order to fix this situation, we have to eliminate the repair backlog in Ontario schools, which now exceeds $16.8 billion. Schools are already struggling to prioritize urgently needed repairs to address floods, mould, leaking roofs, and other hazardous situations with insufficient funds.

Instead of hiding their heads in the sand, the Ford government needs to properly fund school repairs so that our children can have safe, healthy schools.

We are calling on the Ontario government to:

• Adopt the federal guidelines for lead exposure
• Immediately create a lead remediation strategy for our schools and properly fund it
• Eliminate the school repair backlog by providing the necessary resources to fix our schools

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