The Place Where Ludington Talks
The Killers in Our Schools
Being that today is the same day that area law enforcement was holding an active shooter training day at Mason County Central (MCC) High School while the students are present, you probably have guessed that this article deals with that. You'd only be half right. The other killer may still be lurking, as it has for decades, having been recently found in a couple of campuses in the Ludington Area School District (LASD). But first, the overt killer and the training.
The Faux Killer at MCC
At around 10:00 this morning, a lone shooter (but very far from acting alone) entered the corridors of MCC High School. Surrounded by 'control' agents and neutral police officers an orange garbed gunman wound up killing eleven students before a police response arrived seven minutes, 16 seconds later before neutralizing him.
According to my sources within the student body that I talked with just after the event, student activity during the drill was basically limited to going over the procedures with the 'trainer' embedded in each classroom over what to do in various situations and discuss potential weak points. Here, the principal made an announcement over the intercom about where the shooter was.
In the video below, courtesy of the Mason County Press, the shooter is seen coming through near the front office into the cafeteria area. In that scenario, students on the other end of the school would have been evacuating after the principal's announcement, while those too close for comfort would be seeing their teacher use the Boot on their doors and hunker down.
If this shooter was all gunned up, looked for a respectable body count, and entered anytime during the lunch hours, only eleven casualties would be a respectable outcome. As noted in this Torch article, involving kids in a live-action scenario like this may not have been the brightest thing to do.
My embed thought it rather weird, and expressed a high degree of nervousness with all the gunmen at the school (the various law officers), much like Makayla Franklin in the video. Emily Scharich in the video seems pleased that the students were given a more active role than usual, finding it much more pleasing than hiding in a dark corner like she did in the past.
My outlook remains unchanged and vindicated. There is some value in training police officers and school personnel to react to these and similar circumstances; I see only negative value when you involve the kids beyond having them obey the commands of their teacher. Exercises like these only instill anxiety, hopelessness and give them a skewed vision of the world.
Besides, if a meaningful police presence is at least seven minutes away under optimum conditions, wouldn't it be wise to allow a certain amount of teachers the power to carry heat if you were really serious about keeping the students safe in such events? Teaching kids that good guys with guns neutralize bad guys with guns is a better lesson than teaching them to throw pencils at gunmen when they barge into the classroom.
The Real Killer at Ludington Schools
Now that we are through with the lead story of MCC, it is time for the lead story of Ludington School's water. You've undoubtedly heard of the Flint water crisis where a lot of customers of the municipal water system were getting a lot of lead ions from their pipes in their water.
Unless you follow the Ludington Torch, you probably are unaware that Mason County, after leading quite significantly in the category of having young kids with elevated blood lead levels (EBL) in 2013, slipped to number two in both 2014 and 2015 in that category. Flint's county has never broke into the top 25. Here are the numbers and the source.
However, John Shay and his lackey at the Water Plant, Supervisor Kurt Malzahn, lied to us earlier this year when they told us that lead was not turning up in the water anywhere. Shay said no lead at all to a local TV station, Malzahn insisted there was never any place in Ludington that tested over the action level (over .005 mg/L). That was demonstrably false in the last two rounds of testing at least, as shown here in a building actually owned by the City of Ludington.
Thankfully, somebody at the schools had the idea that very high EBL rates in our children and lying city water-supplying officials should be looked at. The LASD Board contracted with Trace Laboratories to test all the water taps and drinking fountains within the schools that service the LASD on the chance that they might not be as lead free as our city officials would like us to believe.
They report on their homepage: "Given recent concerns regarding drinking water safety, we made the decision to test our City drinking water throughout the school district. The City is responsible for testing the water they provide to the community. We are required to test our pool water and drinking water coming from wells.
Ludington Area School District tested 51 taps, and two of the 51 exceeded the threshold for parts per million of lead. Both taps testing over the threshold were taken out of service, and replaced with lead-free fixtures."
Cognizant of this admission, I asked for the testing and the remedial actions through a FOIA request to the LASD, and they timely replied during the time the MCC training exercise was held! The results include two places where the water exceeded the M.C.L. twice, and many other taps that fell above the minimal reporting level on either copper or lead. The tests were done shortly after school ended in the second week of June. Here are the results:
No tap exceeded the M.C.L. however each tap exceeded the MRL for copper, and three of the seven taps also had lead levels above the MRL.
The tap in the Lakeview kitchen came in at .018 mg/L, over the .015 action limit. What this means is that this tap, which one would assume would provide water for food preparation and dish cleaning, could have added lead to the diets of the kids that matriculated through Lakeview.
What is perhaps even more shocking is that all nine taps at Lakeview have above the Minimum Reporting Level (MRL) in copper, and four are above the MRL in lead. This indicates that much of Lakeview still must have copper conduits.
Franklin never exceeds the M.C.L., but each of its nine taps have above the MRL for copper, though none exceed the MRL for lead.
Like Franklin, Foster exceeds the MRL for copper on all taps, but has one tap with lead above the MRL. Nothing exceeds the M.C.L.
A drinking fountain outside room 146 had lead levels more than twice the M.C.L. rate
Each of the six fountains had copper above the MRL, incredibly no other tap had a lead problem.
None of the ten taps exceeded even the MRL for lead, although each exceeded the MRL for copper.
The two taps at Lakeview and OJ, as noted at the LASD website, were repaired: Repair Invoices.pdf. The worst one at the middle school had been replaced with a new drinking fountain that can fill water bottles. Unless the old fixture was the source of the lead, this tap may still be giving out leaded water, it deserves to be retested ASAP.
The school's independent test results are markedly different from the city's testing of twenty city properties (many owned by officials who have likely replaced copper fixtures (w/lead soldering) on their own initiative, if their building ever had them). It should be concerning for all parents who have had their kids exposed to these dangers that our water-suppliers tell us is not a problem. Thank heavens, our school leaders are taking the initiative in gaining control over the problem, while our city leaders do nothing other than tell us lies.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by XLFD on
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The COLDNews put out a nice sensationalized headline giving free advertisements for the success of The Boot, "11 'Dead', but all in Boot classrooms safe, training finds".
In the planned scenario, the script called for the principal to be shot while giving the warning over the school intercom in his final heroic action, then incredibly nobody else was killed except ten in one classroom where the Boot was disabled. This is totally unrealistic, I go into OJ Dejonge Middle School all the time during the school day and there's always a handful around the office and the halls are packed with students during the passing time. Shooters out for mayhem will come during recess or passing times.
The problem with silly training like this is it could encourage a student or some other deranged lunatic in the community to show the limitations of such training, and the smarter elements of our society to wonder: "Hmm, if Principal Brad Jacobs carried a handgun, there may not have been any killed here."
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Permalink Reply by Willy on
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You are exactly right, X. How stupid can these officials be? 11 dead but everybody else is OK. Tell that to the families of the 11 dead students who could be alive if the office personal had access to a weapon. What is the matter with these people? They're more worried about school officials being armed than a crazy person bent on killing innocent children. This up with down logic is what's making children vulnerable to the nut cases in the World. Rush is right, progressive/liberalism is a mental disorder. Another excellent report X.
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Permalink Reply by stump on
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I hope the kids that they murdered today didn't have any mental problems before this stupid training.
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One of the fatalities was known to have mental problems, that would be Principal Jacobs, who consented to this and is on the commission that thought it up. Like the ten kids that fell while throwing erasers and protractors at the shooter, he should be remembered as a hero at his funeral, whose selfless action of getting on the intercom and warning everyone was particularly valorous.
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Permalink Reply by shinblind on
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If I recall correctly the lead in the school drinking water does corresponds nicely with the increase lead found in children.
I believe the data in the 3 county area of Mason, Manistee and Oceana shows that the lead level in infants and toddlers starts out as being similar.
But as a child grows older the lead levels in Mason County and particularly the Ludington area remain elevated or increase while they trend downward in Manistee and Oceana.
Could the source of the lead be directly from drinking water in the schools itself?
It sure appears that way.
It would be nice to know if the schools in the other Counties were tested and the results of those tests.
We were told that the lead in Ludington might be from paint even though all the counties have housing that is of similar age. Also the soil was suspect even though the 3 counties have a similar history.
It is unfortunate that this issue was allowed to happen for so long.
This is what happens when you have a City Council that are incurious and ignorant as to what is happening around them. They are only concerned with maintaining a righteous status quo and circle the wagons following the weak and ill informed City Manager John Shay.
My hats off to you X for being the catalyst that brought this issue forward and whomever on the school board that authorized getting the water tested.
It will be interesting to see if there are any beneficial results from this in the upcoming years.
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