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Darlene Medley stood up to speak and immediately choked up.

Medley, a single mother to nine children, has twin sons who have been poisoned with high blood lead levels. At a town hall held Tuesday by the 100 Black Men of Syracuse, Medley emphasized the strain on her family as a result of lead poisoning in her home: one developed a stutter, and the other developed ADHD.

“I’ll tell him to do his chores when he gets home from school. And he wants to do it. I promise you, you can see in his eyes he really wants to do it,” Medley said about one of her sons. “I’m looking at his hands and basically telling his hands like just come on. You got to do this.”

The event was held Tuesday at the Southwest Community Center by 100 Black Men of Syracuse, a local nonprofit with the goal of empowering Black communities. The town hall aimed to educate the community on the health dangers of lead and provide resources for residents to protect themselves.

The town hall is the second the organization has hosted regarding the city’s lead poisoning crisis, said Charles Anderson, chair of the organization’s health and wellness committee. During the first town hall in 2019, the organization reported 11% of the city’s children had unsafe levels of lead in their bloodstream.

A year later in 2020, 32.5% of children from the 84% Black census tract 54 in the Southside neighborhood tested for high blood lead levels, Anderson said. As of 2020, 40% of the tract’s residents were living in poverty.

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Both Anderson and Joe Driscoll, Syracuse’s Interstate 81 project director and the event’s moderator, pointed to the city’s lack of progress in remediating the lead crisis despite years of efforts to increase awareness and testing. Anderson said the lack of progress was especially concerning in consideration of children and young people’s future.

“It’s unclear how much appreciable improvement is being made, even now with an influx of state and foundation money,” Anderson said. “This situation is robbing too many of our children of their potential, and it ought to be viewed not only unacceptable by anyone who cares, but everyone should want to get involved to make the current crisis a part of public health history.”

Driscoll said there was no legislation on lead amounts in homes when he was running for Common Council in 2017. He said code inspectors would see visible evidence of lead in homes and knew the children were being poisoned, but legally couldn’t do anything because lead paint wasn’t a code violation at the time.

Driscoll said the Syracuse Common Council used Rochester as a guide for what the city should do to lessen the effects of high lead poisoning cases. The Common Council knew it would be too expensive to remove all the paint in every home that tested positive for lead, he said. Instead, the Council recommended homeowners put a fresh coat of paint on their homes that would keep them lead free for a few years, but not permanently.

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The city began conducting testing for lead in homes with code inspectors in recent years. In 2023, the city’s completed 500 house inspections, Driscoll said.

“There’s still a very long way to go. 500 homes in the city that has 140,000 residents is not the end of the crisis,” Driscoll said.

Onondaga County acquired a new mobile testing kit expected to be deployed later this year, said Debra Lewis, program coordinator for the Onondaga County Health Department. The clinic will prioritize accessibility for parents who need to determine whether their child can be tested for lead poisoning.

Although residents have a right to ask their doctor whether they can be tested at any age, the county is making sure kids that are required to be tested by public law — specifically kids aged between one and two years old — take priority, Lewis said.

Onondaga County will also implement a program called “Lead It Go” to offer free and voluntary home services to families of children with high blood lead levels, Lewis said, with a goal to help them learn strategies to counteract the negative impact lead poisoning has on children.

With these initiatives still in their early stages, Medley emphasized the importance of children having priority for lead testing.

“It is time for everybody to wake up because in a minute, all of us are going to be older soon. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid,”she said. “These are our future children, our future leaders— if we are not protecting them, then who is going to protect them? We have to be together.”

Published on April 19, 2023 at 4:15 am