While Republicans invent new tax cuts for billionaires and wealthy Americans bribe colleges to admit their dullard children, the rest of the American education system continues to be largely ignored unless and until strikes shutter individual districts.
The Flint, Michigan water crisis, which had a tremendous impact on the city's schoolchildren, was caused by state officials' criminal indifference to the safety of residents. But unsafe drinking water isn't just a Flint crisis. Schools throughout the nation have been identified to have high levels of lead or other contaminants, and there's no organized plan for dealing with it.
More than half of public schools in Atlanta were found to have high levels of lead, in some cases 15 times above the federal limit for water systems. Schools in Baltimore, Portland and Chicago were all found to have significant amounts of lead in drinking water.
The culprit is old lead pipes installed long ago, before the dangers were apparent. The solution is to replace them. But there is no federal requirement that school water supplies even be tested for contamination, leading to a haphazard system in which some states require the tests while others do not. Of the district testing that has taken place, according to Mother Jones, lead was found over one third of the time.
That seems the sort of thing that an "infrastructure" proposal might want to address. It would cost billions to tear out and replace all lead pipes found in the nation's schools, to be sure, but the healthcare costs of lead contamination are considerably more. Given lead's role in hindering development and increasing aggressive behaviors, it would likely also do more to reduce crime than any $5 billion border wall.
Perhaps we need to find a way to make Americans racist against heavy metals? That seems to be one of the few reliable ways to rouse the public to action.