PROVIDENCE – On Thursday evening, Nov. 12, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., in the Rotunda at Café Nuovo, the Childhood Lead Action Project will be celebrating its 23rd year of activism in working to get the lead out in Rhode Island.

The master of ceremonies will be Mario Hilario, the WJAR weekend sunrise anchor, and the honorees will include Wendy and Traecina Claiborne, a local mother and daughter affected by lead poisoning whose persistent efforts to hold their Pawtucket landlord accountable paid off in a historic legal victory this past summer. [See link to ConvergenceRI story below.]

Also honored will be Boonie Cassani-Brandt, the Environmental Lead Program Manager, Center for Healthy Homes and Environment, the R.I. Department of Health, and David Jacobs, the research director at the National Center for Healthy Housing.

In October, the Childhood Lead Action Project was one of four New England nonprofits to receive funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: $30,000 to work in Central Falls in a “Lead-Safe Central Falls” program, to help reduce to the incidence of childhood lead poisoning, working with residents to address the presence of lead-based paint in their community.

As much as the event will celebrate the accomplishments and efforts of a local grassroots organization to battle against the pernicious affects of lead poisoning, it also underscores the continuing, preventable disease that plagues so many Rhode Island children – particularly families of color.

In 2014, there were nearly 1,000 children identified through screening that had been poisoned by lead for the first time – an environmental toxin that is not beneficial, in any amount, in any form, according to Roberta Hazen Aaaronson, executive director of the Childhood Lead Action Project.

A slide presented by Dr. Patrick Vivier, director of Hasbro Children’s Hospital Pediatric Primary Care Clinic, at the 2015 Community Conversations held on Nov. 5 at the Park Theatre, drove home the point: Of the more than 10,000 children receiving care over a three-year period at the clinic, one fifth – some 2,000 children – had been lead poisoned.

Further, governmental efforts in Rhode Island to enforce lead-free housing certificates has led to dramatic improvements in test scores for African American students in Rhode Island, according to a new study.

Entitled “Inequality in Lead Exposure and the Black-White Test Score Gap,” the study was conducted by Anna Aizer, Patrick Vivier and Peter Simon of Brown University and Janet Currie of Princeton University, and was published in August of 2015.

It documented the racial disparities in test scores, focused on African-American students’ disproportionate exposure to environmental toxins, and, in particular lead. The study conclusion suggested that “environmental regulation, when targeted to those children at risk, is effective in reducing environmental exposure and that declines in racial disparities in exposure, test scores, and ultimately, economic outcomes, could follow.”

A call to action
ConvergenceRI sat down last week with Aaronson and Laura Brion, the group’s community organizer, to talk about the group’s successes and challenges moving forward.

ConvergenceRI: What are you excited to celebrate at this year’s event?
AARONSON: We have played a significant role in the rates of lead levels and lead poisoning go down; they should be close to zero, but they’re not there yet.

Communities are supposed to be complying with municipal housing codes, asking for owners to lead safety certificates. That’s not happening uniformly. We are getting more communities on board. Providence, I think, has been the model.

BRION: Education and awareness are always important, but financial assistance for homeowners to help them fix up their homes is really important.

AARONSON: We need carrots and we need sticks. We need resources for people to fix up their homes and keep kids safe. We also need more enforcement.

ConvergenceRI: This year, you are honoring a mother and daughter who won a lawsuit against their landlord in a jury trial. Why did you choose them?
BRION: A mother and a daughter, the daughter who was poisoned by lead by a negligent landlord, brought that landlord to court. There was a jury trial that lasted almost two weeks. There was a real public accountability process.

At the end of the trial, the tenant won, the jury awarded damages for the pain and suffering already experienced because of lead poisoning, and they also imposed punitive damages on the landlord.

In addition to being noteworthy and successful, in a financial sense, it was also extremely brave. They deserve an enormous amount of credit.

They had been so badly harmed by the power imbalance between them and the landlord. The lead poisoning happened in the late 1990s. So the person who went to courthouse to talk about the effects of lead poisoning was the child herself; she’s now 19.
To have persisted for all these years to seek some kind of justice through the courts is really noteworthy and we want to honor that.

To have sat through the entire court process, hearing her whole life discussed and analyzed, and to a certain extent, attacked, that was an accomplishment.

I hope it sets an example for other families to take a similar action.

AARONSON: It also sends a really powerful messages to landlords like this person from Pawtucket, who testified on the stand that he had had so many properties over the course of his career, he couldn’t remember them all.

ConvergenceRI: What do you say to people who believe that the problem with lead has already been solved?
BRION: I think it’s tragically misguided.

AARONSON: We show them the data. There is almost no community in Rhode Island where some children have not been lead poisoned.

We had close to 1,000 kids who lead poisoned for the first time identified in 2014.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges that there is no safe level for lead.

For anyone who thinks that we may have solved the lead issue, they need to understand that lead is something that is not beneficial, in any amount, in any form, to humans.

There is not level of lead above zero that has been proven not to be harmful.

ConvergenceRI: What kind of outreach has been done with the real estate community?
AARONSON: Every Realtor is required to take a lead-related class every two years to maintain their license.

They also teach the in-person lead hazard awareness seminar at their main office in Warwick.

BRION: I think your getting a bigger question, about reaching out to beyond any one particular audience. We need a new call to action on the issue of lead poisoning, a new large-scale campaign to raise awareness about what lead poisoning means now – about what it does to our kids and our communities.

It’s almost a different disease than it was 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. At the same time, we know so much more about the very serious, community-wide effects that come from the very low levels of lead poisoning.

We need to be talking about root causes; we need to be talking about poverty and income inequality; it’s a huge driving factor [in lead poisoning.]

As along as we have the severe income inequality we see in our communities, we’re never going to be able to eliminate issues like lead poisoning.

AARONSON: I’ve always said that if lead poisoning was predominately in wealthier communities in Rhode Island, such as Barrington or East Greenwich, I don’t think we’d be sitting here having this conversation.

It’s not an equal opportunity disease; it has to do with wealth and power. People of color, children of color, are disproportionately impacted.