Class-Action Lawsuit Seeks Sweeping Help for Flint Students

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Several families have filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Michigan and the Flint school district, saying more needs to be done to help students whose academic performance and behavior have worsened since drinking the city's lead-tainted water.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court, says there "has been no effective response" to the lead-related problems faced by children in Flint's public schools. Families say the state Education Department, the Flint district and a countywide district are not complying with laws intended to help disabled students.

The state declined to comment. There was no immediate response from Flint.

While Flint used the Flint River as a water source for 18 months, lead leached from old pipes because the water wasn't properly treated. Lead affects the brain and nervous system.


Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/class-action-lawsuit-seeks-sweeping-flint-students-42883223

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FLINT, Mich. — Oct 18, 2016, 12:35 PM ET

Short article. No more at link.

[tonyt53]

1. Flint should be discussed every day. This isn't supposed to happen in the USA.

[Igel]

2. Lots of things happen that aren't supposed to.

With government, that's what you get with local control. Some governments do it right, some don't.

Then again, when you have centralized control either it's very strict (and when the government goes astray it's very, very bad) or it's not strict and bad things happen because of local corruption and non-compliance.

Then again, we've had fairly high Pb and As levels in a lot of drinking water. Surface water prone to having higher led concentrations if there's lead in the environment. Well water is prone to having higher concentrations of As.

Well water can also have fairly high concentrations of things like methane, in the right areas. There are wells that for decades have had so much methane in the water that you can set the tap on fire.

The goals usually date back to the '50s and '60s and in many areas are either difficult to reach or expensive to reach. But if you're out of touch with the physical background that the goals are intended to regulate, all you hear are the goals and assume that they're universally enforced except for those rare instances you actually hear about. Flint didn't have the highest Pb concentrations in their drinking water; moreover, it was sporadic, with some water lines emitting lots of Pb into the water but sections of the city where the water wasn't much worse than it had been. (But, again, we only hear about the bad areas and not the okay areas, so we assume that the entire city was uniformly blanketed with high Pb levels.)

[turbinetree]

3. And like I have been saying the rules for a class action have been redefined by this

Roberts Court and has been going on for a very long time with a conservative majority on the benches and when they had had power on the Supreme Court for the last 45 years.
He and the enablers on the bench and in Congress have made due process harder to achieve in the court system

Just look at an article in the magazine American Prospect

http://prospect.org/article/new-era-supreme-court