Gothamist87%
Child poisoned as NYC special education classrooms lag in lead-paint inspections 6%
By Joe Hong30%
8/5/2026, 3:00:58 AM
Keywords: Lead Paint, Special Education, Nyc, Schools, Children, Poisoning, Inspections, Doe, Bronx, Pica, Autism
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Anecdotal, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 20.3% saturation with 442 hits. Analysis detected 2,580 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,177 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 14.5% and a BS Rank of 6% (27,014 of 28,464 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 94.90% of the article peer group.
It was around November of last year when Miguelina Rodriguez began noticing a change in her 5-year-old son, who has autism and is nonverbal.
He was suddenly trying to chew the walls of their apartment.
Rodriguez found teeth marks on the windowsills at home.
A teacher reported that he was doing the same at his public school for children with special education needs, and he had started biting and hitting his classmates.
By the end of January, he was diagnosed with severe lead poisoning, which can cause children to become aggressive, hyperactive and, when the source is old lead paint, to seek out more of it because the painted surfaces often taste sweet.
The boy’s transformation is detailed in a lawsuit Rodriguez filed against New York City’s Department of Education after health officials found multiple areas of deteriorating lead paint in his classroom and ordered the school system to immediately remediate the health hazard.
City law requires the education department to conduct lead-paint inspections in all classrooms serving children under 6 years of age in older school buildings three times a year.
The agency’s press secretary, Nicole Brownstein, insisted that school custodians meet those inspection requirements.
But a Gothamist analysis of the most recently available city data shows that the boy’s classroom had never been inspected since the department began following the current inspection regime in 2019, and that classrooms serving children with special education needs like Rodriguez’s son are less likely to be inspected overall than general education classrooms.
The comparison is difficult because the education department does not distinguish between grade levels for special education classrooms the same way it does for other students.
Children in special education are often in classes with a mix of age groups that match their developmental level, not the year they were born.
By that measure, an analysis of all classrooms serving elementary school students with disabilities shows that just 10% received at least one inspection in 2025.
Whereas 20% of classrooms serving all grade levels in general-education elementary schools received at least one inspection that same year.
Rodriguez declined to be interviewed.
Her lawsuit accuses the education department of prioritizing the safety of children in general education over its most vulnerable students with disabilities.
“This should be basic,” said Rodriguez’s attorney, Reuven Frankel.
“These kids should be in a lead-free environment.”
Brownstein said she could not comment on how the education department identifies which special education classrooms receive lead-paint inspections because of the pending litigation, but she said the agency is reviewing its procedures to ensure student safety.
"When parents send their children to school each morning, they do so with the expectation that their classrooms are safe.
In our buildings built before 1985, no classroom or common space serving children under six should ever go without rigorous, routine screening,” Brownstein said.
Public health experts said students with developmental disabilities are more likely to mouth painted surfaces or eat chipped and peeling paint.
The toxic qualities of lead are also more likely to harm their brain development.
Morri Markowitz, a professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director of the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Treatment Program at Montefiore Medical Center, said these two factors make lead paint especially dangerous for this student group.
“Are kids with disabilities at higher risk?”
he said.
“The answer for me is yes.”
City Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, who represents parts of the Bronx and chairs the education committee, called the low inspection rates “a severe problem.”
"A protocol that misses even a single classroom is not protecting the kids it's supposed to protect,” he said.
Rendy Desamours, a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Julie Menin, said, “The inexplicable disparities in inspections identified by Gothamist are concerning and must be addressed by the mayoral administration.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office did not respond to questions about why the inspection rate was so low for classrooms serving students with disabilities.
Health records obtained by Gothamist show that Rodriguez took her son to a pediatrician in late January after noticing the drastic changes in his behavior.
“He was an affectionate, happy, upbeat child” who had become “ angry, aggressive, withdrawn, hyperactive, really a completely different type of temperament,” said Frankel, her attorney.
In her lawsuit, the boy, who is nonverbal, is only referred to by his initials.
Rodriguez asked that the child not be named because of the stigma around childhood lead poisoning.
A blood test taken during that doctor’s visit revealed that the boy had 51 mcg/dl of lead in his system, more than 14 times the threshold set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He was hospitalized, and city health inspectors got to work.
All cases of elevated blood lead levels in children trigger a health department investigation to track down any sources of lead in their environments.
In most cases in New York City, the source is old, deteriorating lead paint in the home, according to the agency.
But Rodriguez’s apartment was constructed in 2015, more than 50 years after lead paint was banned by city officials.
A health inspector still tested 50 surfaces in her apartment and found no traces of lead, but did notice the same teeth marks Rodriguez had seen on the walls near the boy’s bedroom windows, according to health department records.
In addition to autism, her son has a condition called pica, which compels some children to place objects in their mouths, increasing their risk of lead poisoning.
According to the health inspector’s notes, his family suspected he had been exposed at his school, a hulking brick building in the Bronx that was originally constructed in 1911 with an addition that was added in 2019.
The building houses one general education public school and another for students with disabilities called The Bronx School for Continuous Learners.
In Room 551, where Rodriguez’s son attended class on a daily basis, an inspector tested 48 surfaces for lead paint in early February, according to the health department’s inspection report.
One in three came back positive for the toxic metal.
“This is every parent’s nightmare,” Frankel said.
The agency issued 16 lead paint violations and on Feb. 6 ordered the education department to correct them within five days.
But according to agency communications obtained by Gothamist, school officials didn’t start the abatement work until Feb. 13, two days after they were supposed to have finished addressing the classroom’s health hazards.
Records show the education department hired a company called Athenica Environmental Services to wet scrape and repaint the classroom.
On Feb.
15, Athenica’s risk assessor tested the classroom and found lead levels to be below the legal maximum.
But four days later, the health department re-inspected Room 551 and found that the school had not resolved all of the violations.
According to inspection records, lead paint on and around a radiator in the classroom had been removed but not replaced.
Rodriguez’s lawsuit accuses the education department of violating the health agency’s initial orders.
And lead poisoning prevention experts say the dangers in Room 551 may point to a gap in the city’s regulations for schools that’s bigger than a single classroom.
The Department of Education’s lead-paint inspection requirements date back to 2019, when a Gothamist investigation prompted the de Blasio administration to conduct citywide inspections that found over 1,800 3-K through first-grade classrooms had lead paint hazards in need of immediate remediation.
In response, the City Council passed legislation requiring the department to inspect all classrooms serving students 6 years old or younger in buildings built before 1985 three times a year.
Current inspection data shows that school staff discover lead paint hazards far less often than when the department first conducted citywide inspections seven years ago.
Between 2023 and 2025, less than 1% of inspections found deteriorated or damaged lead paint in need of remediation.
According to the city’s 2025 Lead Compliance Report, the education department in 2024 inspected 893 total buildings and found lead hazards in 74 of them.
The law focuses on younger children because they’re more likely to put their hands and other objects into their mouths, and because lead exposure poses a greater risk to early brain development.
Lead is absorbed into many of the same parts of the body as calcium, one of the key building blocks of healthy brains.
Lead can derail communication between neurons, causing long-term damage that makes learning challenges even worse for children with autism and other conditions.
Health experts say those risks last far longer for children with learning disabilities because their brains often develop at a different pace.
“You may be compounding developmental disabilities… causing more inattention, more hyperactivity,” said Rebecca Ann Muhle, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University who specializes in children with autism.
She said health professionals and behavioral therapists distinguish between a child’s chronological age, or the date they were born, and their developmental age, which is based on their behavior and neurological maturity.
Muhle said a student above the age of 6 could have the brain development and behaviors more typical of a younger child, especially if they have a disability.
And yet, there are no specific protections or inspection requirements for children with learning disabilities in the city’s schools.
In Department of Education parlance, any school that provides specialized support for children with disabilities is grouped into what it calls District 75, or D75 as it’s known more colloquially.
According to Gothamist’s analysis, their classrooms are less likely to be scrutinized for lead paint hazards than other classrooms.
At the Bronx School for Continuous Learners, state data shows that 66 Kindergartners and 67 first graders were enrolled during the last school year.
But not a single classroom received a lead-paint inspection in 2025, the year before Rodriguez’s son was diagnosed with lead poisoning, according to a review of the education department’s inspection reports.
“The parents had certainly understood that this child would have certain challenges,” Frankel said.
“They never imagined that by sending their child to a D75 school the child would suffer severe lead poisoning.”
At P.S.
46 Edgar Allen Poe, the general education elementary school that shares the building with the Bronx School for Continuous Learners, only two classrooms were inspected in 2025, according to the education department’s data.
The inspection reports do not specify what grade level the rooms were used for, and it’s unclear which classrooms are in the new addition to the building.
Rooms designated as first grade or kindergarten classrooms do not appear in the inspection data.
But school officials have found lead paint hazards in P.S. 46 classrooms in previous years.
In 2019 and 2021, school staff identified and remediated peeling lead paint in a total of four classrooms.
Brownstein, the education department’s press secretary, said Rodriguez’s son’s classroom was inspected in February, but she did not specify whether she was referring to the health department’s inspection after he was diagnosed with lead poisoning, or a separate inspection conducted by the Department of Education.
Rodriguez’s son was hospitalized for a week after his initial doctor’s visit in January, according to her lawsuit.
He received chelation therapy, a process that removes toxic metals from the bloodstream, but because he could not swallow the oral chelation pills, doctors tried administering the treatment through a tube threaded through his nostril and into his stomach, the lawsuit says.
“Agitated” and “inconsolable,” the complaint reads, her son tore the tube out of his own nose, forcing physicians to treat him intravenously.
His health records show his blood-lead level rose slightly higher before it began to improve.
By late February, more than three weeks after he was diagnosed with lead poisoning, his lead level had only dropped to 27 mcg/dl, still nearly eight times the CDC’s threshold.
Rodriguez’s lawsuit says her son will require “increased care” as a result of his exposure to high levels of lead, but for now he is back to attending school in the same classroom, said Frankel.
The health department finally deemed the room as safe, but he said Rodriguez remains concerned about her son’s safety.
“When you find lead in a special education classroom, you definitely lose any sense of confidence,” he said.
Rodriguez’s son celebrated his sixth birthday in April, which means his age alone would no longer require a classroom inspection for lead paint under the city’s laws.
But health experts said inspections are critical in classrooms in older buildings that serve students with disabilities regardless of their age, particularly those who have conditions like pica.
“Wherever there are kids who are engaged in hand-to-mouth activity, those are the classrooms to go to first,” said Markowitz from Montefiore, where Rodriguez’s son was treated.
Muhle, the Columbia professor, said the education department should not use chronological age to determine which District 75 classrooms to inspect.
“It depends on the developmental age of the child,” she said.
“If they don’t have a full understanding of the dangers of ingesting lead, they may not have that mental concept of, ‘Oh, this is dangerous.’”
Speakers
9speakers24%attributed speech1,659writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageFrankel
26 attributed words5.0% of attributed speech68% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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