May 11, 2026

What’s Causing New York’s Lead Crisis? With Shannon Burkett

Lead is in the walls and water of an untold number of places New Yorkers live, go to school, work, and visit. Its life-altering impacts pose a potential danger to everyone in our state, but lead poisoning disproportionately affects Black and Brown New Yorkers. Thousands of people’s lives are impacted by lead poisoning, but our state and local governments aren’t doing nearly enough to combat it.

On this episode, we speak with Shannon Burkett, an award-winning actor, writer, producer, and nurse who created the podcast “Lead: How This Story Ends is Up to Us,” which tells the true story of her family’s experience with lead poisoning.

We also talk with Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, the Director of the NYCLU’s Racial Justice Project about an ongoing lead water crisis in Syracuse and about what we can do to prevent lead poisoning in New York.

Please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.

Resources

Shannon’s podcast: Lead: How This Story Ends Is Up to Us

Transcript

Shannon: [00:00:00] My son was diagnosed when he was nine months old. The construction site below our apartment contaminated our apartment with lead dust. He lost the ability to speak. He was saying, “Mama, Dada, hi, bye, Allah,” and it was gone. He stopped pointing. He stopped waving. He stopped responding to his name to the point where we thought he might have hearing loss.

Simon: This is Rights This Way, a podcast from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of New York State. I’m Simon McCormack, editorial manager at the NYCLU and your host for this podcast, your best listen for the civil rights and liberties issues that impact New Yorkers most.

Lead is in the walls and water of an untold number of places New Yorkers live, go to school, work, and visit. Its life-altering impacts pose a potential danger to everyone in our state, but lead poisoning disproportionately [00:01:00] affects Black and brown New Yorkers. Thousands of people’s lives are impacted by lead poisoning, but our state and local governments aren’t doing nearly enough to combat it.

On this episode, we’ll speak with Shannon Burkett, an award-winning actor, writer, and producer who created the podcast ‘Lead: How This Story Ends Is Up To Us,’ which tells the story of her family’s experience with lead poisoning. We’ll also talk with Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, the director of the NYCLU’s Racial Justice Project, about an ongoing lead water crisis in Syracuse and about what we can do to prevent lead poisoning in New York.

Before we get started, just a quick note that outside guests on this show do not represent the NYCLU, and their views are their own. And with that Shannon, Lanessa, welcome to Rights This Way.

Shannon: Thank you for having us.

Lanessa: Thank you.

Simon: Yeah. It’s really great to have you both. Lanessa, I wanna start with you just to give you a sort of general setup question to [00:02:00] talk about lead and lead poisoning, how does it happen, and who’s impacted most by it historically?

Lanessa: Well, that’s a tricky question because lead happens everywhere, right? Lead is in our soil. Lead is in our dust. Lead is in our paint. Lead is in our water. We’re just constantly exposed to lead, some danger- more dangerous than others, right?

For example, if you look at disenfranchised communities or disinvested communities, primarily low income, Black, brown neighborhoods, they are inundated with lead, right? They likely live in dilapidated housing that’s likely, more likely to have lead poisoning in their walls, and also in their infrastructure, right?

Their lead service lines. And so it’s kind of everywhere, and it’s our job to manage it.

Simon: With that, Shannon, I wanna talk to you about your personal experience with lead and, what made you actually want to tell people about it?

Shannon: My personal experience is my son was diagnosed when he was nine months old. [00:03:00] The construction site below our apartment contaminated our apartment with lead dust, and he got very sick. When his levels went from nine to 19 in one month, he lost the ability to speak. He was saying, “Mama, Dada, hi, bye, Allah,” and it was gone. He stopped pointing. He stopped waving. He stopped responding to his name to the point where we thought he might have hearing loss, and this is actually not unusual for parents of lead-affected kids. He went on to have one of the worst cases of pica, the eating of non-food items, his pediatrician has seen in her 20-year history. He ate sheetrock off the wall. He ate his bed. He ate books. He ate the sleeves off his shirts, and when I cut the sleeves off, he ate… started chewing on his arms. Another mother calls it the pica frenzy.

He also had terrible GERD and the rage. The rage is actually, like, still to this [00:04:00] day, I’m always shocked how hard it is to talk about because I went from having this, like, Buddha baby to a roided-up NFL player. The rage was not normal. He also had no idea of his safety. He would escape the apartment, and again, this is another thing that I’m learning.

I know another mom who has to have, ugh, she has to have alarms on her windows and her doors so her child doesn’t escape. When we would go away, my husband would have to sleep in another room and push furniture up against the door so Cooper wouldn’t escape. He escaped our New York City apartment, and he was down in the stairwells, and it caused so many, so many issues.

Cooper: My name is Cooper Burkett. I’m 15 years old, and I grew up here in Lower Manhattan. I was diagnosed with lead poisoning when I was nine months old. The construction site below our apartment contaminated our apartment with lead dust, and I got sick. My parents were told repeatedly by the contractor that there was nothing in the dust And the building told my parents [00:05:00] that there was nothing they could do about the dust.

I’ve had to live with multiple side effects from my lead exposure as a baby. Shortly after my lead levels shot up, I lost the ability to speak. I have processing issues, short-term memory loss, anemia, and asthma. The GERD and pain in my stomach was so bad that I barely ate and became failure to thrive. I had an ulcer when I was five.

Biopsies from my endoscopy revealed damage to the tissue and the lining of my stomach. I also have had the worst case of pica, the eating of non-food items, my pediatrician has seen in her 20-year history. I ate the frame off my bed, the paper off books, the thread off my clothes, and the sheet rock off the wall.

Shannon: It was one of those things that I really, honestly, as each thing would happen to my kid, I couldn’t believe that this is what lead does to a child. I really, honestly, for a very long time, thought that we were just very, very unlucky and alone. I did not realize that other [00:06:00] people, this was happening. As you were saying, like it happens in pockets.

We were more of an outlier, and which also I think plays into the racial inequality of it. But we started speaking out because I was literally doom scrolling one day and I saw Vice President Harris mention the Lead Pipe and Paint Act a few years ago, and I literally burst into tears. I just started crying because I was so relieved that there was an administration that was paying attention to this.

And it wasn’t until that time that I really took a deeper dive and realized that the year that Cooper was diagnosed in 2008, over 40,000 children in the city of New York were diagnosed with lead poisoning. They had, not diagnosed, they had lead poisoning. It’s a little bit of a difference. Diagnosed meaning they were diagnosed, newly diagnosed, but these are 40,000 children in the city of New York had lead poisoning.

He was just one of [00:07:00] 40,000. We are down to 4,600 in the city of New York, but that’s still not okay. These are 4,600 kids where many of them may also lose the ability to speak. They may also get aggression issues. And if they are not able to get the kind of services that they need in order to help them process and work through it.

They go to class, the class, and I know with my own son, they can’t sit, and they can’t retain information. They have memory loss. Cooper also has short-term memory loss. And they have a very, you know, I’m saying the collective they, but not every kid has the same experience, but in our experience and in many lead-affected kids’ experiences, they have a really hard time sitting.

They have aggression issues. They’re more likely to have ODD, oppositional defiance disorder, conduct disorder, and they end up in our criminal [00:08:00] injustice system. I didn’t realize until I took a deeper dive, which is why I have a little more empathy for people when they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t know this was a thing.” I’m like, “I know. I didn’t know it was a thing until it happened to me. The leopard ate my face, and now I know that it is a thing.”

Simon: What do you wish you did know that you didn’t know before?

Shannon: I mean, I just, I wish the Lead Paint Right to Know Act had been in place. You know, because if the Lead Paint Right to Know Act had been in place, I would’ve gotten something more than just a pamphlet that would’ve said that there was lead in my apartment deep within my walls.

But then when the store space below us contaminated my entire apartment with lead dust, I wouldn’t have believed the contractor when he said there was nothing in the dust. I would’ve been like, “No, there’s something in this dust. It’s called lead.” So I wish that there had been a law like the Lead Paint Right to Know Act in place because it could have prevented him from getting sick, or it could have at least helped us figure out the [00:09:00] source faster.

And every moment a kid is sick is crucial. Like, it is critical to get them the help that they need, but it’s also critical to figure out how they’re getting sick. The problem with us is if we moved, we would’ve taken all of our contaminated things with us, so we could have moved and then our son still would’ve gotten sicker and sicker and sicker.

Simon: And Lanessa, you touched on this in your first answer, but I’m curious, how common is lead poisoning, and where does it happen the most in New York specifically?

Lanessa: I think the most common source of lead is lead paint and lead dust. That’s the most common source of lead, primarily because before the 1970s, we all painted our houses with lead, right?

Lead was perfectly acceptable to use in our gasoline, in our walls, in our interior paint, and still acceptable in exterior paint. So many of the bridges you see, many of the larger infrastructures you see, they still use lead paint. [00:10:00] And so they’re still chipping away and kind of contributing lead dust to our communities.

Simon: Interesting. And can you talk a little bit more in depth about the racial disparities in terms of which New Yorkers are most likely to be impacted by lead?

Lanessa: Yeah, and I wanna build off what Shannon was discussing, ’cause I think it’s a very important point, right? And so what we see is the most impacted kids are Black boys, specifically Black boys. And the reason behind that is because often their symptoms display through forgetfulness, can’t sit down, aggression, right? And those are typically kids that get labeled, right? Maybe they need an IEP. An IEP is an individual education plan, meaning, like, you can’t manage being in a classroom on your own and you need special assistance, or a 504 plan, which is another plan for special education children.

So these kids often get funneled into the special education pipeline, and they don’t get tested for lead poisoning, primarily because there’s no requirement in New York State to test children for lead poisoning after the age of two. And [00:11:00] so if you’re exposed to lead poisoning, if you move to a new house and you are exposed to lead dust or lead paint…

And I also wanna be very clear that people hear the word lead paint and they think of children eating paint chips, right? Because that’s what we were told. Your child’s in the corner eating paint chips. And some of that rhetoric really falls on the parent, right? ‘Cause you feel guilty. How did I not know my child was eating paint?

Was I not watching my child? And society treats you that way, too. That’s not, in fact, what’s actually happening. Lead paint means dust is coming off of your walls and into your child’s mouth. Something as simple as opening your window could spew in lead dust from the paint on the walls, right? So if you have a kid that’s playing in a windowsill, you’re opening the windows ’cause you’re cleaning, that can be exposing them to lead paint if there’s lead paint in your home that’s not adequately covered.

And so I think what we’re seeing across New York State is a real epidemic of Black boys being under-diagnosed with lead poisoning, and we see that funneling through the education system. We see that funneling through the prison to pipeline, [00:12:00] the prison, school to prison pipeline system, and it’s just kind of been cycling over and over for generations.

Simon: And why does it predominantly impact Black and brown children?

Lanessa: I think why everything else impacts Black and brown neighborhoods, right? They’re just not invested in, right? I can give you an example. For example, in Syracuse, about 70% of Black Syracusians are renters. That means they’re relying on landlords to take care of their home.

They’re relying on landlords to disclose that they have lead paint or lead water in their homes. And so often when you’re in neighborhoods that are blighted and ignored by the local and state and federal government, those are the neighborhoods that have the poorest infrastructure. And so it’s really an example of what structural racism looks like, and it’s an example of what environmental racism looks like.

Simon: And Shannon, what would you tell parents who are concerned that their children may be exposed to lead or their family members may be exposed to lead?

Shannon: I mean, the first thing that I would say is, like, go to your [00:13:00] pediatrician and you can get a finger prick test. So the finger prick test, it’s minimally invasive. I mean, it’s the same as, like, if you’re a diabetic, you, you know, you prick and you just test. And then if it comes back positive, you can do a venous, which is a little more invasive, but then you get a more accurate reading. And I would also… I mean, that is honestly because we don’t know. And from there, if your child tests positive, then you have to do the detective work of where is it coming from.

There is some exciting research at Columbia right now where they’re trying to really define the isotopes, meaning, like, so they could tell whether or not it’s coming from water, whether or not it’s coming from dust, like, where it’s coming from by examining the different atoms of the lead, which I think is incredibly exciting because as we were talking earlier, every minute is critical.

And when Cooper was diagnosed, it took us a whole month to figure out how he was getting sick. And if we hadn’t been signed up for the 9/11 study and had access to the EPA, which a [00:14:00] lot of these parents, most of these parents do not. I mean, I really shudder to think what would’ve happened to Cooper if he had continued to get exposed, his numbers continued to go up.

And because we were part of the 9/11 study, because we had access to the EPA and the toxicologist came in and figured out how he was getting sick, we were able to stop it before it did any more damage. I also, you know, wanna mention too, like, so my apartment, it was the construction site that below my apartment that contaminated my apartment with lead dust.

One of the laws that we’re trying to get passed is, I don’t think people know that the, in New York State and not many states around the country, there is a clause that actually the landlords, their policy does not cover lead poisoning. So a kid can fall on the stairs on a faulty stair, break their arm, you can sue your landlord.

But if your child gets lead poisoning and has [00:15:00] permanent brain damage from lead poisoning, they cannot sue their landlord. They can sue their landlord, but the insurance policy does not cover it. It is very difficult to get a lawyer to take on your case because for the lawyer’s perspective, it’s like, “Well, I can’t get blood from a stone, and if I can’t get money from an insurance policy, then I’m gonna have to liquidate their assets.”

It’s a whole thing. Whereas, because in my case it was the store space below, I was able to hold, and it was the only way I was able to hold the people who hurt my son responsible. I wasn’t able to, which I actually think we should, we shouldn’t just be able to pay off these people. You know, they shouldn’t be able to pay me off and make me go away quietly.

I never signed an NDA. But that is a huge problem that these families cannot get restitutions. They cannot hold the people who hurt their children responsible. They cannot get the funding to, and resources, to be able to take care of these kids. And I think [00:16:00] that is emblematic of the racial disparity with lead.

Simon: Lanessa, I wanna zoom in to the lead crisis in Syracuse. Can you talk about that? I know you have an enormous amount to say about that.

Lanessa: Yeah, sure. I mean, and I just wanna go back to Shannon’s point, ’cause I thought it was so important that she said it’s, you have to figure out where your child is being lead poisoned. No one’s coming to save you, right? And so as a regular person, you have to become a scientist and try to figure out, is it the dust? Is it the paint? Is it the water? It’s an almost impossible task for parents who just don’t know where to look and don’t know where to turn. And then also, if you do find the source of the lead, there’s no recourse.

You can say, “Oh, it’s my lead paint. It’s the paint in my walls.” The landlord’s not required to come and cover that paint immediately. You may not be able to afford to move immediately. [00:17:00] So sometimes folks are living in homes knowing they’re exposing their children to lead and don’t have anywhere to go. Or the alternative, move into an equally dilapidated apartment where they run the same risk of being exposed to lead.

So I think it’s just, it’s just circular and sick how it is all the onus goes on the renter or the homeowner or whoever the parent is, all that kind of ownership goes to them. So in Syracuse, July of 2024, there was a lead water testing that was done in the city of Syracuse. Required by the EPA every year, every municipality across the country, they have to test their lead, their water for lead.

And so Syracuse did their yearly test, and the test results were astronomical. And I don’t use that word lightly. They were astronomical. They were 12, 15 times higher than what the EPA allows. And arguably the EPA already allows too much, and starting in January they’re gonna lower that. So, like, they’re 12 and 15 times higher than what the EPA allows. So groups like Families for Freedom from Lead now approach the [00:18:00] NYCLU and said, “Hey, there’s a problem here. We have to do something about it.” And so we did our own investigating, and we found out that they have known about this lead water crisis for about 10 years that we could prove, right? The records go back about 10 years.

And what we later learned is about 600 kids per year get poisoned by lead in Syracuse. One in four of those kids are Black boys specifically. And we don’t know how many people are not diagnosed because we just don’t know who’s not being tested. We also identified hotspots for lead poisoning in Syracuse, and they mostly were low, all 100% were low income, about 80% of those low income neighborhoods were Black or brown, and a lot of them lived in, like, industrial neighborhoods where you’re, you know, you’re really close to highways like Interstate I-81. You’re really close to other kind of environmentally toxic facilities. So they’re living in these environments that are already environmentally toxic and they’re, and they’re being exposed to lead.

For a long time we thought because we have some of the oldest housing stock in the country, our lead poisoning was coming from [00:19:00] lead paint, not a clue that it was also coming from lead service lines underground. And so that’s something that we’ve been working on for quite some time, trying to really get the city of Syracuse to recognize, one, there’s a problem, and two, at the bare minimum, educate the residents on what lead poisoning is, what are the early symptoms of lead poisoning in children or adults, and do something about it in terms of replacing the lead service lines where we’re getting our drinking water from.

This has been an ongoing fight since 2024, and we’re slowly inching towards something, but I would, I have to say the city of Syracuse is being really reluctant on addressing the problem. Some of my guesstimations are that they don’t wanna be tagged as a city with lead water. It’s just not a good, it’s just really not good public-facing tagline when you’re bringing industries in like Micron and other big businesses that are coming into the city of Syracuse as a part of, like, this national surge of chip plants.

And so there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of to-do around covering up how [00:20:00] bad the problem is. The city of Syracuse claimed it was a fluke. They retook the test, and this time the test was pretty questionable. They’re, you’re supposed to test 100 homes according to the EPA, and they tested 144. They did not test 100% of the homes they had tested prior.

So they did a couple violations in their retesting, and they came just below what the EPA required. And so we’re advocating for the folks in Syracuse, people like me, I’m a native of Syracuse, to have drink- clean, lead-free drinking water.

Simon: And, here’s something that I should have asked before, but I wanna circle back to it, and this is for either of you. Why does lead especially impact young people?

Shannon: It’s their brains are developing. So lead doesn’t affect an older person the way that it does a young person. The younger you are, the more immature and sort of at the beginning stages your neurodevelopment is. And lead [00:21:00] is extremely toxic, and as the brain is developing, it does more damage.

Simon: Okay.

Lanessa: Lead embeds into your bones. It embeds into your lungs and embeds into your brain. So every part of your body. So if you’re still developing, it actually goes into the DNA of your body. For example, you can get lead poison at the age of two and then have a child at 22, and your child could be lead poisoned, because once you become pregnant, it comes back out of your system and into your baby.

So it’s something that stays with you forever when you, well, for mostly forever when you get exposed as a child, but it’s also not safe for adults. I think we talk a lot about children, rightfully so, but like in adults, it causes neurological issues. It creates violent tendencies, impulse control, liver disease, kidney disease. So it’s not safe for anyone, particularly children, but it’s not anything that anyone should be intaking.

Shannon: It also causes, again at Columbia, they’re doing a study on how it affects the cardiovascular disease, and I [00:22:00] thought Dr. Schilling actually explained it to me really well, which is like the molecule of lead is large.

And if you’ve ever played, you know, a game of like volleyball or bats, anything with a net, right? And it, that ball or that thing goes through the net, and now there’s almost like a, an oversized hole. And that’s what happens in your cardiovascular system and can cause, so the lead punctures through it, and then you get the hardening of the arteries, and then that hardening of the arteries is what cause cardiovascular disease.

And again, I, you know, I always say that there just isn’t enough research. African American community is disproportionately affected, and that’s one of the number one killers. So what was the chicken or the egg, you know? Did, is this population, was this population more exposed to lead, and their cardiovascular diseases are due to the fact that they had lead?

And it does, I mean, it spends decades in your bones, and you’re [00:23:00] absolutely right. I’m now, I became a nurse after Cooper was sick. And, you know, I work at two major hospitals in the city, two major hospitals in the city. I work both in the NICU and in well baby, and I specialize in lactation, and I have to educate our pediatricians on lead and how it reenters the body when a woman is lactating in pregnancy, and how if this mom had an elevated lead level, it doesn’t mean that she was just exposed. It could mean that she was exposed as a child, and it’s now coming out.

Simon: So I should’ve said actor, writer, producer, and nurse. So that’s correcting the record. Okay. So you’ve both laid out the problem really well, I think. And now I wanna turn to some possible solutions or ways to address this problem. Lanessa, I’ll start with you. What bills or actions at the state level are there that would help prevent lead poisoning and reduce the number of people impacted by lead?

Lanessa: [00:24:00] So the Environmental Protection Agency put out a requirement that every state has to replace their lead service lines before 2037. That sounds great on paper. New York State passed an infrastructure bill in 2017 to do exactly that. And we are nine years in, and we haven’t accomplished nearly half of what we were supposed, 10% of what we were supposed to be doing. The Comptroller put out a report January 5th of this year to kind of figure out where’s all the funding going, right?

This is, be clear, this is not a funding issue. I just wanna repeat that, this is not a funding issue. Governor Cuomo, before Hochul, gave about $250 million to replace the lead service lines. Governor Hochul just gave $160 million to replace lead service lines. So, you know, rightfully so, the New York State Comptroller wanted to know, where’s all this funding going?

They did a statewide kind of audit and found that people are just not– municipalities are just not replacing the lead service lines for various reasons. [00:25:00] Some of it is just mismanagement. Some of it is like, “Oh, we can’t get access to the house,” or, “We don’t have a plan. We’re creating a plan. We’ve been doing this since 2017.”

So what we’re pushing for now is the Lead Service Replacement Plan Act, and that act we hope to get passed this year. What it does is it create a statewide uniform plan that each city, municipality has to follow to replace their lead service lines by 2037. We kind of listened to the mayors across the state and heard that access was the number one issue, right?

The prior 2017 bill said that the landlord, the homeowner, property owner had to grant access to change the lead service light, pipe. We changed that. Anyone over 18 opens the door, they can come in, and they can change the lead service plant, lead service pipe. Which makes sense, right? We’re kinda treating it like how you would treat Con Ed or National Grid, right?

You can come in. You can check the meter. And the other thing it does is prioritizes neighborhoods that have low income hotspots for lead and/or children. So if the neighborhood has a daycare or if it has a childcare [00:26:00] center, or if it’s a neighborhood that you know is disproportionately impacted by lead poisoning, it prioritizes those neighborhoods.

Why that’s important, for example, a city like Syracuse, we know 14,000 homes in Syracuse have lead service lines. That’s what we know. There’s another 27,000 we don’t know if they’re lead service or not. In the past 10 years, under the 2017 Infrastructure Act, Syracuse replaced 750 odd lead service lines. None of them were in the 14,000 or the 27,000 unknown. 100% of those lead pipe replacements were in neighborhoods that were well-to-do and wealthier. So we need to make sure we have something on the books that say you have to prioritize neighborhoods that you know are impacted by lead poisoning. So I think that’s the main bill that we’re focusing on.

We would hope to get that bill passed this year, and we would like to see some fast-tracking of these lead service line replacements. The really only way to get it out of your water is to replace the pipes.

Simon: And I also just, I should follow up and say, what are you calling on the [00:27:00] city of Syracuse to specifically do in terms of their lead crisis?

Lanessa: We would love for them to call a state of emergency that way we can access additional emergency funds to be able to fast-track this process. We saw New Jersey do something very similar, and they had a 10-year plan. They were able to do it in three, so we’re hoping that they do that. We want an educational outreach plan.

We want them to tell the public, admit to the public what the problem is and the symptoms. I mean, something like refrigerator magnets, post-its, you know, things that can actually help folks kind of avoid this. And then we also want water filters for every single family in Syracuse, every single home in Syracuse, with a six-month replacement plan.

Simon: Great. And Shannon, can you talk about some state legislation you’re, you have your eyes on?

Shannon: Yes. The Lead Paint Right to Know Act, it has just actually passed the assembly. Assembly Member Rivera passed it again. I just wanna also stress how difficult that is. We need Senator Kavanagh to bring it to the floor, [00:28:00] and it’s never been brought to the floor.

So we need to have, this is a democracy, we need to be able to vote on it, but it has to be brought to the floor. Unfortunately, the real estate moguls and community is very strong and does not want the bill to pass. I just feel so strongly that people just have a right to know whether or not their home is safe.

This bill would require a seller or a landlord to test the dwelling for lead and provide that report to the new renter or new owner, and it would state whether or not there was lead in the home and where it’s located, which is so important. That way people would know how to keep their family safe, which is huge. And since lead paint is primarily, and we need to take care of the lead pipes. We need to, you know, make sure that the products that come, that we’re consuming or playing with are at all in our environment, we need to make those, make sure that those are safe and our food is [00:29:00] safe. But lead paint is also one of those that we really need to make sure that people know.

The other bill that I think is really important would, and again, it’s also Assemblyman Rivera from Buffalo, who’s actually running for the Senate. He has a bill that would take that clause out of the insurance policy. That is huge twofolds. One, of course, we would get the resources to the kids that need them.

We really, those kids need it, and I can tell you firsthand how expensive those kids are. My son also had an IEP, a 504. He was part of the, you know, ICT class. He had therapies starting at 18 months, but we also scaffolded him with tutors. We scaffolded him with therapy, sports. You know, we took that aggression and we channeled it.

These kids have a very low threshold for frustration, and we noticed in, you know, in fourth grade, it was like he could read a math question, and we were not reading the [00:30:00] same question. Like, it was so jumbled in his brain, and so we had, we knew we had to get in there, and we knew that we, he needed extra help.

That costs money. That costs money. You know, Cooper’s a freshman at NYU, but that cost money. That cost time. That cost money, and that also cost like, that took knowing, you know? And not every parent should have that information. Like, I grew up, my father was a doctor and my mother was a social worker.

She classified kids for, that was her career. So when he started having those deficits, I knew that I needed to get my kid help. But not every parent knows that, and a lot of parents are really afraid of the stigma, and they’re really afraid of having their kids labeled. So the other way that the insurance bill would help is that it would put pressure on the landlords, because if you can’t get an insurance plan because your dwelling is filled with lead, then you’re more apt to [00:31:00] fix your dwelling before you can rent it. And there’s no reason for us to have that clause. That was done years ago, and it was basically a gift to, you know, the real estate, you know, companies.

Simon: Lanessa, I’ll start with you, but I’m curious what both of you hear from lawmakers when you talk to them about this legislation and about the problems of lead. What do they tell you?

Lanessa: You know, we had two recent lobby visits, and I feel like they’re kind of like this is a common sense bill. They also don’t wanna drink lead water. They also don’t wanna be exposed to lead paint. So I feel like it’s a common sense bill. I think exactly what Shannon was kinda referring to is where are the barriers, right?

Those are the unseen barriers ’cause we don’t know what’s happening on the other side. We don’t know how hard real estate lobbying firms are actively trying to prevent this. And really it comes down to bottom dollar, right? Like, [00:32:00] is this going to lower the value of my properties? And if it is, we are going to lobby to prevent it. So I think talking to legislators, they’ve been understanding, they have been agreeing. The Lead Pipe Replacement Act has a ton of co-sponsors, and so we’re feeling really good about it, but, you know, it’s always kind of nerve-wracking to try to get something across the finish line, and then get it signed, of course, by our governor.

Shannon: I vacillate between being incredibly proud, you know, when I hear, you know, Assemblyman Rivera say that this should be a no-brainer, that our kids should not be the canaries in the coal mine. We should not wait for a child to get sick to try and fix a problem. You know, we know that this is a problem, and we’ve known that this is a problem for decades.

And yet, here we are waiting again until child after child loses their potential. They lose the future that they were supposed to live. And then I hear other representatives say things and manipulate [00:33:00] statistics and in nursing school, research was one of my favorite classes. And, you know, when I hear them say, “Yes, we have reduced lead in the city by 90%,” and I’m like, “We’re still talking about 4,600 children.” Like, yes, we have reduced it, but to hear people use stats as a way to brush this under the rug as if we’ve reached a tolerable level of children getting their brains damaged.

Lanessa: Their future taken from them.

Shannon: Their future taken from them. Cooper stopped speaking. He stopped responding to his name.

Eventually, he started speaking, and he started interacting. But there are children and children that I have met that they didn’t start speaking again. They lost the ability to communicate with the outside world, and we don’t know if they’re gonna get that back. You know, I can think of two children that are still in diapers.

They’re five and six, and they’re still [00:34:00] not speaking. They’re still not responding to their name. They’re still escaping. I don’t think that the general public understands the perniciousness and the prevalence of lead. I do think there would be more outrage if people really did understand, and again, I go back to having empathy for people that didn’t know because I didn’t know.

I do wanna talk to how going across the state, taking the podcast on tour across the state, and hearing from other moms, it really honestly was one of the first times that I was able to meet that many other parents who have also had lead-affected kids, and it is really eerie to hear the similarities in how lead manifests itself.

And the other thing that I want people to understand too is they threatened to take our kids away. You know, I had a social worker, because I had to lock my son in his room for his own safety overnight. You know, I had a social worker say, “You know they can take him away from you for that.” And [00:35:00] I heard over and over and over again by these other mothers, like, that if it was an inspector or a social worker or somebody else who would say, “Well, you know, it’s you, and you’re gonna get your kid taken away.”

And I remember you said to me, you were like, “Shannon, how, how… You seem really strong. Like, how did you not fight back?” And I’m telling you, lead erodes a mother’s, a parent’s self-confidence and their ability as a parent. And when, in that moment, I really did believe myself that I was an inadequate mom. I actually remember having, like, crying at the kitchen table with my husband and just saying to him, like, “Cooper deserves to have a better mother.”

You really believe in your soul that you have failed your kid, and I’m still struggling with that. I still wonder whether or not, you know, there was , you play it over and over again in your mind. So I also just want people to understand that these are good mothers and [00:36:00] fathers and people and folks, and they are made to believe that it is their fault.

And I think we do this in our country, and it’s easy to say, “Well, well, they, they live at or below the poverty line. Those kids weren’t gonna, you know, they weren’t gonna perform in school anyway.” So there’s a lot of writing off of these children that is really part of the systemic racism. And I’ve been talking about it with other mothers too, of just, like, the experience of lead as a white person and an experience as a Black person and as a brown person and Asian and somebody of this socioeconomic bracket and this socioeconomic bracket. To ignore that is a disservice to us all.

Lanessa: I just wanna plug Shannon’s podcast. That’s how I met her. She was doing her statewide tour, and as a part of her presentation, she has, in our case, it was medical students and the panelists listen to parts of her podcast and then have a [00:37:00] discussion. And I was just so profoundly impressed by, like, what she went through, overcame, where Cooper is now, and, like, all the advocacy that she’s doing on this.

It really kind of makes you feel unified in a way of, like, lead, lead poisoning certainly impacts communities more than others, but it impacts everyone. And when you have someone like Shannon, who’s a powerhouse, that’s saying, “I’m gonna call attention to all these levels of impacts,” I just think it’s fantastic.

And she reminded me of a story that I was told by a parent in Syracuse, what she overcame. And there was a young mother, and she had two children, four and two. I think as we’re trying to crack down on lead paint, Syracuse passed an ordinance a few years ago that every home would be tested of lead paint.

And so well intended, but the consequences were actually to the renters. And so what happened was her home was tested through a code enforcement officer. The test came back positive. They [00:38:00] alerted the landlord, never alerted the tenant, and told the landlord, “You have 30 days to resolve this issue and show us proof that you resolved this issue.”

He obviously ignored the notice. They sent him another notice with another 30-day requirement. He ignored that one as well. And 60 days have went by, the tenant has no idea what’s happening. She actually called down to the code enforcement and said, “Hey, what happened to my test results?” And they said, “Well, your home has been deemed uninhabitable, and you have to move, and the sheriffs will probably be there in the next day or so.”

They showed up at her house, gave her a 72-hour notice. She refused to move. They then contacted Child Protective and Family Services and said she was endangering the welfare of her children because she had them in a house that had lead poisoning. They hadn’t tested the kids for lead. They didn’t know if the kids actually had been exposed to the lead in the home.

They just knew what the test results had said. And her case manager called her and said, “If you don’t move out of that apartment, we’re taking your children.” And no mother should have to kind of [00:39:00] bear that burden. And she ended up taking her two children, walked to the nearest shelter, and stayed at the shelter until she was able to find different housing, which likely also to be have lead paint on the walls.

So I think these stories are so real, and they’re impacting people’s everyday lives, and we really have to think about legislation in a way where we’re actually uplifting people and helping people. And one of the ways to do that, I think, is to really center on the property owners, making them accountable.

I mean, we are a country where we pride ourselves on capitalism, right? You have the right to own property. You have the right to rent property. Housing is a private industry, and it’s been lobbied heavily to remain a private industry. And so we also have to hold these private actors accountable for them harming our communities.

Simon: Absolutely. And so for people who now know, what can they do if they hear this and they want to be a part of this fight to deal with this lead crisis? What can they do? Lanessa, I’ll start with you.

Lanessa: Well, [00:40:00] I mean, I think the first thing they can do is call their state legislator and ask them to pass a Lead Service Pipe Replacement Act, Senate Bill 6892. So call your local legislator, your statewide legislator and have them pass that bill. I think that’s what they can do. They absolutely have to take matters into their own hands and educate themselves about the lead poisoning, lead poisoning symptoms and risk of lead poisoning.

Shannon: I would, you know, we have a website called endleadpoisoning.org, and you can go to that website and send a letter to the key representatives. You absolutely should send one also to your own, but you can send it to the ones that we need to give a nudge to.

Simon: And we also have an e-action on our site, and we will link to it in the show notes for this episode for folks who want to contact their legislators about the Lead Pipe Replacement Act in New York.

All right. Well, Lanessa, Shannon, thank you both so much for being on Rights This Way. [00:41:00] This was great.

Lanessa: Thank you.

Shannon: Thank you so much for having us.

Simon: Thank you for listening. You can find more on everything we talked about in this episode by visiting nyclu.org, and you can follow us at NYCLU on YouTube, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Facebook.

Until next time, I’m Simon McCormack. Thank you for fighting with us to deliver more liberty and justice to all New Yorkers.

What’s Causing New York’s Lead Crisis? With Shannon Burkett

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