Well, well, well: Polk Middle School kitchen shut down amid problems with school's well water

It started with a trickle.

Here and there, student teacher John Rojas said his students at Polk Middle School were making comments — “‘Hey, the water tastes funny,’ or, ‘Hey, the water looks like this.’ ”

But a little over two weeks ago, comments that the water tasted, looked and smelled odd started pouring in.

And on Sept. 27, the school community got a letter from Principal Ben Bustos — the South Valley school’s cafeteria was being ordered to cease operations after a county inspector found the water coming out of the faucets of the school cafeteria was coming out a “brown or rust color.”

“If we’re asking the students to come to a school and participate in learning, we need to provide an environment … for learning,” Rojas said. “It has to have clean water, it has to be a safe building, it has to have working lights, it should have air conditioning and heating — those kinds of basic needs.”

Bernalillo County forced the school’s kitchen to shut down and instead serve cold lunches shuttled into Polk from the district’s central kitchen. The closure lasted only days before the red sticker was removed and cooking could resume.

Still, Bustos said in the letter that during a regular test in early September, the water came back as safe for consumption, and that “at no time has the water tested unsafe.”

According to documents provided by Albuquerque Public Schools Chief Operations Officer Gabriella Blakey, that was true even of a test conducted right after the kitchen was shut down.

Blakey noted that while there was a red sticker on the door, the kitchen wasn’t officially red-tagged — just ordered to cease operations “until it is determined the water is safe to use.”

“At no time was anybody ever in danger,” she said. “It was kind of (preemptive) of the health inspector, I think, to turn it off … because it was for water discoloration. It wasn’t for unsafe water.”

Blakey also said Polk typically has had discolored water and, which “doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe.” District Maintenance and Operations Executive Director John Dufay said the discoloration comes from extra sand in the water, which could be a side effect of the water table dropping or of problems with the well’s casing, which helps keep dirt out.

Despite assurances that the water is safe, Rojas has told his students not to drink the water, “because I don’t know what’s in it.”

“I wouldn’t drink that,” he said, “so why would I have them drink it?”

Polk is one of roughly a dozen APS schools still on well water of any kind, Dufay said.

The district is now trying to fast-track getting Polk connected to the city-county water system, an estimated $440,000 undertaking that typically takes months but which APS is applying for as an emergency health and safety issue with the Water Utility Authority.

“The contractor and everything is pretty much ready to mobilize within a few days or a week or so — we just have to get everything authorized through the Water Authority,” Dufay said. “We just want to push that process quickly.”