LORETTO — Throughout the past two years, some Saint Francis University students have been diligently working outside of their classroom and laboratory schedules to raise awareness about a statewide lead problem, which affects many cities — including Altoona.

Samantha Radford, an assistant chemistry professor at Saint Francis, said about 20 percent of children in Altoona have elevated blood lead levels. She also said Altoona-area children have a higher lead exposure rate than children living in Flint, Mich.

“It does not mean that the children who have high lead levels here have higher levels than the children in Flint,” Radford said. “What it means is that we have more children here with the elevated blood lead levels.”

She said that elevated blood lead levels in children are not safe to have.

“One in five kids (who live in Altoona) has too much lead in their body, essentially,” she said. “Any house that was built before 1978, is pretty likely to have leaded paint in it, and of course, there’s lots of older homes here in the region. So, it’s mostly coming from paint and soil. (Around here, lead is) less likely to come from water from old lead pipes, which was the problem out in Flint, Mich., a few years ago.”

Every year in the fall semester, Radford teaches a community-engaged course, alternating between human toxicology and environmental chemistry. She said, when she first started teaching the courses a few years ago, students did not engage the community outside of the students’ classroom and laboratory schedules. She said that all changed once she had taken paint samples from a house she rented in Cresson.

“I took some samples to the lab for my students just to give them practice with running that kind of analysis, and lo and behold, there was a ton of lead in it,” she said. “Of course, that concerned me, and we ended up moving soon thereafter, and that spurred me to expand the project to be able to help other people in the community and to raise awareness about it.”

In fall 2017, 11 human toxicology students learned how to safely lower lead levels and applied their knowledge by splitting into two groups, one of which painted over a local garage that contained lead.

“That’s the best way to keep people safe,” Radford said. “Instead of trying to sand it off, which is not safe, just paint over that old leaded paint. Then the other group went to help build a raised garden bed because, again, if you have lead in your soil and then you try to grow a garden where you’re eating the fruits and vegetables out of it, you’re going to get lead exposure from your produce.”

Last fall, Radford taught her environmental chemistry course, which had seven students studying some soil samples to see whether high levels of lead were present.

Her students also took paint and water samples from volunteer participants in Cresson, Ebensburg, Indiana, Hollidaysburg and Loretto, before analyzing the samples in their laboratory and sending a report of their findings back to the volunteers.

One of the students who analyzed samples in Radford’s course last fall was senior chemistry major Paul Kasunic. He said he enjoyed being able to apply classroom knowledge to different local communities.

“That’s something that I thought was really impactful … being able to do this for the community,” he said. “Everything we did was volunteer work, but it was still good to get that experience and to see how things really work outside of (Saint Francis University).”

Senior chemistry major Kassidy Troxell said she has taken both of Radford’s community-engaged courses since 2017.

Troxell said she enjoyed being in both courses because it allowed her and her classmates to help the community with their knowledge, skills and analytical techniques. She also said she had enjoyed the courses so much that she plans to continue her environmental chemistry education after her Saint Francis graduation.

“The research and projects that I have worked on throughout Dr. Radford’s courses sparked my passion to pursue environmental chemistry in graduate school and my future career path,” she said. “I could not have asked for a better professor than Dr. Radford to mentor my classmates and I throughout the courses’ projects and community involvement.”

Radford said she was proud of her students for going “above and beyond” in their work.

“Usually when you do these classes, you go to class, you go to lab and then you go home. But they came together to develop schedules to go all over central Pennsyl­vania to take samples. They worked really hard outside of class to make sure they got their samples done on time to be able to give people their feedback, and I was just really impressed by their work ethic and the quality of work that they did,” Radford said, adding that both community-engaged courses will be taught again in future years.