Justice for Milwaukee’s School Children: Legal Action Against Lead Poisoning

By Matt Murdock, Esq.

The streets of Milwaukee are humming. It’s not the sound of industry or progress; it’s the quiet, simmering rage of parents who sent their kids to school to learn, only to find out they were being poisoned. As a lawyer, I see the paperwork, the reports, the statutes. But my other senses tell me the real story. I can smell the decay in the 100-plus school buildings built before anyone cared to ban lead paint. I can hear the frantic whispers of administrators who knew, or should have known, and did nothing. And I can feel the gnawing fear of a city betrayed.

Lead paint and dust, the ghosts of institutional neglect, are stealing the future from our children. With at least four students confirmed poisoned and nine schools temporarily shuttered as of spring 2025, this isn't a problem; it's a crime scene. The time for polite requests and bureaucratic hand-wringing is over. It’s time to wield the law like a billy club and get justice for these kids. Let's fight.

A Parent’s Nightmare: The Crisis Unfolds

Imagine you’re a parent in Milwaukee. You drop your daughter off at a place like Fernwood Montessori, a building you trust to be a sanctuary. Then the news breaks in January 2025: a child at Golda Meir School has elevated lead levels. The source isn't their home; it's the school itself. We’re talking about lead dust on windowsills measuring up to 170 times the federal hazard threshold. By April, the crisis has spread to at least seven schools, with multiple students poisoned and buildings closed for "remediation".

And what a remediation it was. At Fernwood, the district’s "cleanup" was so incompetent that state inspectors found lead dust and paint chips still scattered in classrooms after they let the children back in. Debris was found within arm’s reach of a child’s desk. This wasn't just a mistake; it was active endangerment, earning the district a fine from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services for 13 separate safety violations.

The CDC will tell you—before its own lead poisoning program was conveniently dismantled by federal budget cuts right when Milwaukee needed it most—that no level of lead is safe for a child. It causes irreversible neurological damage, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems. As a parent, you’d be furious. As a lawyer, I’m ready to make them pay.

The Legal Arsenal: Holding the Negligent Accountable

The law isn't just a collection of dusty books. It's a weapon. And in the fight for Milwaukee's children, we have a full arsenal. The crisis, born from decaying infrastructure and decades of looking the other way, opens several legal fronts.

Negligence: A Masterclass in Dropping the Ball

Let's talk basics. Negligence is the legal world’s term for failing to do your job when people could get hurt. To win, you have to prove four things:

1. Duty: Did they have a responsibility to keep people safe?

2. Breach: Did they fail in that responsibility?

3. Causation: Did their failure cause the injury?

4. Damages: Was there actual harm?

For Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), this is an open-and-shut case.

• Duty: Under Wisconsin law, school boards have a legal duty to "care for, control, and manage the property" of the district. That’s not a suggestion; it’s a mandate to provide a safe environment.

• Breach: Where to begin? Most of their schools were built before the 1978 lead paint ban, a fact they readily admit. They even created a "Lead-Based Paint Compliance Program" back in 2010, proving they knew about the risk. But health department investigations found "no prior record of lead risk assessments" at the very schools where children were poisoned, meaning their safety plan was just paper in a binder. Add to that the district eliminating 85% of its painting staff over the last 30 years—the very people who could have prevented this—and you have a textbook case of gross negligence.

• Causation & Damages: The link is tragically clear. The district’s neglect led to peeling paint and toxic dust. Children were exposed, and now they have lead in their blood. A 2021 study of MPS third-graders already proved a direct link between blood lead levels and lower math and reading scores. The harm isn't theoretical; it's measurable in stolen IQ points and diminished futures.

Wisconsin’s "Risk Contribution" Theory: Flipping the Script on Corporations

You might remember the headlines from 2019 when a Milwaukee jury slammed three paint companies with a $6 million verdict for poisoning three local men when they were kids. That victory was possible because of a unique legal weapon in Wisconsin's arsenal: the Risk Contribution Theory. This isn't your standard textbook law. It's a tool for justice forged in the landmark case of Thomas ex rel. Gramling v. Mallett, 285 Wis. 2d 236 (2005). Here's the beauty of it: normally, you'd have to prove exactly which corporation's poison is on the walls. An impossible task. But

Thomas flips the script. It allows us to drag a group of manufacturers into court—the ones who peddled this poison in our city—and forces them to prove they're innocent. If they can't, they pay. It shifts the burden from the victims to the culprits. This is how we hold companies like Sherwin-Williams accountable, a company whose own internal magazine called lead paint "poisonous in a large degree" back in 1904, six years

before they started mass-producing it.

Public Nuisance: A Threat to the Whole Community

A public nuisance is a legal term for a condition that endangers the health and safety of the public. Widespread lead contamination across a city's school system is the very definition of a public nuisance. This isn't just about individual harm; it's about a threat to the entire community.

This isn't a long shot; it's a proven strategy. In California, a group of counties and cities used a public nuisance lawsuit to secure a $305 million settlement from paint manufacturers to fund lead cleanup. They argued the companies created the nuisance by knowingly marketing a toxic product for decades. We can use the same playbook here, demanding that MPS and the paint companies that created this mess pay to clean it up.

Class Action: Strength in Numbers

Don't let them divide and conquer. They want you to feel isolated, like this is just your problem. It's not. With over 100 schools contaminated and hundreds of children at risk, this is a city-wide assault. A class action lawsuit is how we fight back. It's how we unify every parent, every child, into a single, powerful fist. Look at Flint, Michigan. They didn't win their

$626 million settlement by fighting one by one. They stood together. A class action for Milwaukee families isn't just about money; it's about power. It's how we demand compensation for medical monitoring for every single child who walked into those toxic classrooms. It's how we fund the educational support they'll need for the rest of their lives. And it's how we get a court order to burn down MPS's pathetic, negligent maintenance practices and build something that actually protects our kids.

A Fight for Our Children: The Path to Justice

This isn't just an academic exercise. For parents in Milwaukee, this is a fight for their children's lives. Here’s the battle plan:

1. Document Everything: Get your children tested for lead. Keep every medical record, every test result, every receipt. Document any learning or behavioral challenges. This is your evidence.

2. Gather Intel: Demand school inspection reports and maintenance records from MPS. The Milwaukee Health Department's investigations are public record and provide critical data.

3. Lawyer Up and Unite: Find lawyers who specialize in these cases. Join with other families. Your collective voice is a roar they can't ignore.

The stakes couldn't be higher. This is about a generation of children, predominantly from Black and low-income communities, being robbed of their potential by systemic neglect. The crisis is a symptom of a deeper disease: decades of underfunding, the firing of the facilities director who tried to block health inspectors , and a federal government that cuts its own public health experts loose when a city is drowning.

Conclusion: The Verdict

The lead crisis in Milwaukee's schools is a betrayal. It's a failure of duty from the school board to the statehouse to Washington D.C. But betrayal doesn't get the last word. The law does.

Through lawsuits based on negligence, public nuisance, and Wisconsin's powerful risk contribution theory, we can force these negligent agencies and corporations to answer for the harm they've caused. We will fight not just for compensation, but for a future where no child's classroom is a crime scene. The system is blind to their suffering. It's our job to make it see.

Matt Murdock Esq.