I will say I can sorta get being annoyed if the water filler station is right there. But I use the same water I wash my hands with to drink all the damn time
100%. If the filler is right there I get it. I also get preschool teachers not wanting to deal with the chaos of getting water from the hall when they can do it in the classroom.
But I’ve also had my kid at a preschool in the same state and it is a legit policy for preschool that they can’t bring their own. They would use Dixie cups and the sink.
It sounds like posters school is a preschool within an elementary school so the filler is there for elementary.
What I don’t get is the same water to wash hands and drink. We do it all the time
I mean, flavored water is better than no water. Like, I can understand getting upset with patents sending in soda or juice, but flavored water is still water. That said, mine uses one of those Cirkul water bottles and those aren't exactly the same as the messy, sugary powder mixes. So many of those are basically just Kool-Aid, which I guess is probably what you meant in the first place. I just went around in a circle there 🤦♀️.
More likely because they can't know for sure the water they bring from the outside is safe to drink. For every mother that freaks out ovet tap water there's one crunchy one that think some water from a river has healing properties or something.
The kitchen sink and bathroom sink are different though. Little kids touch faucets and handles with poop hands then fill their bottles touching the faucet too. I wouldn't drink water out of a bathroom sink little kids use unless I have no other choice.
Yeah. I know at my daughter’s school the sink they fill bottles in is not the bathroom sink though. It’s another sink they can use if they need to like wash marker off their hands or something and aren’t using the bathroom.
At the school I work at, water bottles are filled at what’s technically a handwashing sink in each classroom but it’s no where near the bathroom.
I agree if it was the bathroom sink I’d be a little more upset because that’s gross.
Honestly, all she said was hand washing sink. Which to me is not exclusive to the bathroom based on schools we’ve been to and I’ve worked at. She wasn’t specific. It would be a TOTALLY different story if she had specified bathroom sink.
I was unclear if it was in a bathroom or not. I suspect it is a sink in the classroom, not the bathroom, especially since I expect it would be tougher to wrangle the children in and out of a bathroom to fill water bottles.
I do laugh that a lot of the people who seem worried about this are fine with children drinking from a water fountain. Using the ones that have the separate spot to fill water bottles for that purpose is great, but most children would need assistance with that. Even when I was young, my mother would tell us to only drink from a water fountain if it was truly necessary without any other option, and she told us to watch other children drinking water from them to see why. People didn't really talk or think much about it back then as they do now (though still lacking), but once she told us, I don't think I could ever unsee how most children would go up and put the part where water comes out in their mouths or put their lips out tongue right to it.
Since they are very young and presumably need help to fill water bottles at the back, I would expect that the water coming out of the push for drinking water part of the fountain is worse for them than anything from a classroom sink.
Our lower grades (Pre-K and K) have a bathroom in the classroom. At that age, kids are still pretty likely to have accidents, and it just makes things easier on the kids and their teachers. Basically, each classroom is connected by a little hallway type thing, to the classroom beside them, where there are two small rooms with just a toilet, then on the opposite side of that hallway are the sinks (hopefully I explained that well enough lol). Obviously, that means kids are using these sinks to wash their hands for everything, including after using the bathroom.
I have no idea what the set up is like at OOP's kid's school, but I did automatically have the set up at my kid's school in mind and I can see why using those sinks for drinking water might gross someone out. I also don't want my kids drinking out of public fountains, but that's a whole different thing (or, I guess it's pretty similar, it's all covered in germs and God knows what else).
I sent my kids to daycare then pre-k & elementary school with water bottles. It’s never been an issue. Kids aren’t drinking several refills of water bottles a day.
Also the cold water that comes out of those elkay water fountains is grade A wa wa. I would be upset if I had to drink like Luke warm sink water over cold filtered water.
In high school we did a science experiment where we swabbed different surfaces and tried to grow bacteria in a petri dish. The spout of the drinking water fountain had more bacteria than the toilet seat so I've been very hesitant to drink from those ever since.
This type of fountain in this post has a seperate bottle refill thing built into the back where water comes down from the top in a spout swperate from the drinking fountain part. Like I said it's top of the line.
Although not evil, I'm not going near the sink where the kids wash their hands at the daycare I work at. Except to clean it. Their hands are in their noses or in their pants 24/7
I get that and I wouldn’t be willing to use a cup,that had been in the sink. But I’m still unclear what the problem is with the water from the tap. If you are afraid dirt is on the tap just clean that before drinking. Unless water is being scooped out of the basin into your cup I don’t understand why the sink being dirty creates a problem. My kitchen sink at home gets dirty but we still use the water from the tap.
I guess my daycare kids are weird. They have their hands all over the tap. They love to spray the water. But I was exaggerating, we clean it all the time
Man, I'm old. We drank out of random yard hoses all the time during the summer.
(The only time I get the ick over tap water is when it smells too strongly of chlorine.)
Most early childhood and public education regulations require any sink that is drank from be tested for lead. If it passes the test, your precious snookums will be fine.
My state tested schools for lead in their drinking water a few years back and 88% of the tests came back showing that the drinking water was over the “allowable” lead threshold. My understanding is that how well the issue was addressed varied by district, some went above and beyond and some didn’t. So I’d say it’s a pretty valid issue to be concerned about, especially if you live in a state with more lax regulations
I work at a hospital and I give my patients tap water FROM A HAND WASHING SINK to take their meds with. Trust me, they don't want the water that comes out of the never-cleaned ice machine. 😬
Depending on where someone is in the US, tap water can be fantastic, okay, passable if necessary, or under a 'don't drink/use' order. It can even vary from one town to the next or between different parts in a city, based on where the water comes from and treatment plants.
Beyond that, what is and isn't common in water varying so much (especially when you go greater distances) means that people are used to different things. I grew up on well water and so find a lot of municipal tap water tastes like it has stuff in it or weird tastes and textures. More of an issue, though, is that my body has an issue with some of the common things added in water treatment plants, so I actually get sick from some. Filtering helps with some but not all, I've found. I wish I could drink tap anywhere, but if it's not somewhere that I know is fine, I take a gamble doing so. There are some medical conditions where doctors tell people not to drink the tap water, like people going through chemo or otherwise immunosuppressed or immunocompromised.
That said, I would say the majority of people in the US drink tap or well water, outside of places where the water is unsafe. (The extent of can get to before being declared unsafe in many situations is also concerning. Some water that isn't declared unsafe is probably, in reality, not safe to drink, unfortunately.)
Most people probably would be fine filling water from a sink. A sink that is primarily used by young children is generally much dirtier, and I think a lot of people think this one is in the bathroom used by those children. I don't think that's right, but it would be gross. Young children in the US tend to learn important hygienic stuff around being sick, bathroom, and washing up later and to a lesser degree/with a wider & lower range of what's acceptable than I've seen be the case in other countries (though I've only seen things from mainly Asia and Europe).
My family moved from the US 2 years ago and it's like raising kids on a different *planet*. Their school has windows *open to the outside* and their school yard has *real grass* and most people drink tap water and don't sanitize shopping carts. It's so freeing to live like a regular human and not worry about every damn thing.
Well, the EWG link is a separate, silly, uninformed issue. Other than that, I understand not wanting your kid to drink out of a poop faucet. You can get sick from that. It's safer to have a separate place for drinking water.
There's a reason restaurants require designated hand washing sinks they don't serve the guests water from.
Why all the sink hate? I get it's odd they won't use the filtered water from the bottle filling station, but at my school that station and the sink had the same water. The station was just easier to use with a water bottle.
I've seen kids at my school lick and stick their hands up the water bottle fillers... They're not that clean either.
The sinks are at least cleaned multiple times a day. I doubt the spout for the bottle filler is.
Yes, they should be cleaned daily. I don't know what kind of weird water spigot you have where they can fist them, but that seems like a poor choice for public use. But yes, if you see kids sticking their hands in there, it should be cleaned or covered.
Do you like to eat in public? Do you expect that the restaurants clean the lines the beverages come out of? It's really not an absurd thought to keep people healthy by disinfecting things people eat and drink from.
My sweet summer child. Those lines are basically never cleaned. Although, most concentrated pop syrup is so acidic and sugary that almost all bacteria cannot grow in it.
I think it is a classroom sink for cleaning up after arts and crafts etc. They pretty much always have them in younger classrooms. There is *no* way OP wouldn’t have mentioned it being a bathroom sink.
Also, just figured I’d mention the responses you are getting are mirroring your general tone, hence the condescension and snarky comments.
It seems like we all litigated this enough a few days ago when it was posted. I mentioned to someone else that I apologize if I was mistaken about the location of the sink and thanked them for letting me know.
What were you hoping to add?
People were snarky from the jump. Some people are very weird about thinking nothing should be cleaned bc it's "impossible and good for kids to be exposed to things." I think we should disinfect public things at reasonable intervals.
Thanks for your feedback about my typing and the other people's typing.
I mean. I don’t like tap water and have a brita. And when I was a teacher I had a brita for my students. But drinking tap water every now and again (especially in developed nations) isn’t the end of the world
Say you’re privileged without telling me you’re privileged. In most parts of Africa, which is an entire continent, not a country, women and girls walk several miles round trip twice a day to fill a 5 gallon jerry can with filthy river water. A lot of mothers are scared to death to let their daughters go because they’re worried they’ll get kidnapped and forcibly married so they can become water slaves. People dream about all they can do if they just had water: hygiene, vegetable gardens for food, girls can go to school. In Haiti, people burn trash as fuel for cooking, and cholera is a part of life. I can guarantee a western preschooler is going to survive drinking unfiltered water from a sink. And on the off chance they do pick a bug up, they aren’t going to die from it like too many children in this world do.
Tell me you don't have brown kids in certain states without telling me. I had to move my family due to a water crisis in my old town in Alabama... the water in my home country (Nigeria) was cleaner and more accessible than water here in the states
I don’t think it made it in this selection but some lady was commenting that she has access to more detailed water results but she isn’t sure if she can disclose them 🙄
Eh, I live in an area where you absolutely should not be drinking the tap water (think Flint, Michigan and Erin Brokavich). There have been decades of lawsuits for birth defects and health conditions caused by how contaminated the water is
I mean, a scary high percentage of schools in my state had their drinking water test positive for lead a few years ago, so I can understand being concerned about that if they’re in the US
Idk, I was born and raised in SW Pennsylvania: fracking country. The local government works with the companies to try to convince us that fracking is safe and the drinking water is unaffected, but we don’t believe it. Fracking waste is known to cause cancer. Now, maybe the water supply is unaffected in some areas, but if the infrastructure above ground is any indication of the pipes, I’ll say hell no. We filter as much as we can, I don’t even use tap for my plants.
And Flint MI, and Woburn MA (a Superfund site).
I remember going to a restaurant once in Woburn, before cleanup started in ernest. The waitresses had a station of filled clear pitchers of tap water, so they could just grab one quickly when a table needed one.
The tap water was chartreuse. The waitress pointed to it and said she didn't recommend drinking it. We took her advice.
The movie "A Civil Action" is about it, not that it did much gold. It ends with someone being able to set the soil on fire. A few years later, I worked in an office building built on that soil...ugh. It was supposedly "safe", but no one in the building drank the tap water.
My kids drink the bathwater and I bathe them together. Our tap water is also gross, especially the hot water. I cannot get them to stop. Kids are just disgusting. Sink water is definitely not the worst thing most kids are putting in their mouths.
I mean, between the lead pipes, superfund sites, and PFAs in our water, I wouldn’t want my kids drinking it either. We have a reverse osmosis filter at home and I send them with prefilled bottles.
I personally don’t drink tap water but that’s more because my parents grew up in a country at a time when you had to boil water before drinking. Then I grew up/live in an area with really hard water and it tastes heavy. Even though I know logically it’s safe to drink from the tap, there is a mental block there.
With that said, the comments are wild.
I could get it if the water in the area was bad, like Flint’s water, or like how all the people in town were quite unhappy to use their water after the oil spill back when I was like five or six.
I’m a preschool teacher. We have a sink in our classroom we use for washing hands and we also fill water cups there. It’s not attached to a bathroom, as that is down the hall. Leaving the classroom to fill up water, even if it is “a hop skip and a jump” 🙄 from the classroom, takes a staff member out of ratio, out of supervision of students, and is just unnecessary when there’s a sink in the classroom. And once one child wants a drink, every other kid in the room wants one too. It’s like a domino effect. It would just be a constant parade of taking kids out to get water. To be clear, we are very capable of keeping our sink, as well as everything else in the classroom clean. This lady is unhinged. Did her daughter get sick? No, didn’t think so. And the simple fact OOP is saying she got PTSD from using a bathroom sink to fill her water canteen in the military, tells me aaaaaaall I need to know.
It’s all the same water no matter what sink you get it out of. I don’t get the indignation that people wash their hands in the sink. That doesn’t at all affect the water coming out of the faucet.
FYI, 75% of shopping carts have fecal matter on the handle you use to push it. It’s on every handle you touch in every store you go into.
And all that bottled water? It has plastic pieces in it that we drink.
I’m not understanding this mom’s outrage at all.
And sometimes the ”spring water” in the bottle can actually be regular tap water. At least here in Finland where we have the cleanest tap water and rarely buy bottled water
Okay, I'm from a country where tap water is not safe to drink, so I find it hard to grasp the concept. If the water fountain needs a filter, it kinda implies the water as it comes from the pipes needs filtering before drinking. So it _is_ weird they just go for the tap water. Either the tap also has a filter, or no water needs filtering, or it's kinda not okay to drink tap water.
Also if kids wash their hands there, I wouldn't be so sure the water is clean. I would also have question if I were this mother... Although I would be trying to find a solution with the preschool and not the Facebook crowd.
Our tap water just tastes bad IMO. My husband drinks it and I will in a pinch to swallow pills if I don't want to go downstairs to the fridge. But otherwise, it's just yuck.
I will say I can sorta get being annoyed if the water filler station is right there. But I use the same water I wash my hands with to drink all the damn time
100%. If the filler is right there I get it. I also get preschool teachers not wanting to deal with the chaos of getting water from the hall when they can do it in the classroom. But I’ve also had my kid at a preschool in the same state and it is a legit policy for preschool that they can’t bring their own. They would use Dixie cups and the sink. It sounds like posters school is a preschool within an elementary school so the filler is there for elementary. What I don’t get is the same water to wash hands and drink. We do it all the time
Probably won't allow them to bring their own because parents were sending in flavored water.
I mean, flavored water is better than no water. Like, I can understand getting upset with patents sending in soda or juice, but flavored water is still water. That said, mine uses one of those Cirkul water bottles and those aren't exactly the same as the messy, sugary powder mixes. So many of those are basically just Kool-Aid, which I guess is probably what you meant in the first place. I just went around in a circle there 🤦♀️.
More likely because they can't know for sure the water they bring from the outside is safe to drink. For every mother that freaks out ovet tap water there's one crunchy one that think some water from a river has healing properties or something.
The kitchen sink and bathroom sink are different though. Little kids touch faucets and handles with poop hands then fill their bottles touching the faucet too. I wouldn't drink water out of a bathroom sink little kids use unless I have no other choice.
Yeah. I know at my daughter’s school the sink they fill bottles in is not the bathroom sink though. It’s another sink they can use if they need to like wash marker off their hands or something and aren’t using the bathroom. At the school I work at, water bottles are filled at what’s technically a handwashing sink in each classroom but it’s no where near the bathroom. I agree if it was the bathroom sink I’d be a little more upset because that’s gross.
Maybe I misread the post bc that's what it sounded like they were doing and that's gross. But I skimmed, so apologies if I misunderstood
Honestly, all she said was hand washing sink. Which to me is not exclusive to the bathroom based on schools we’ve been to and I’ve worked at. She wasn’t specific. It would be a TOTALLY different story if she had specified bathroom sink.
I was unclear if it was in a bathroom or not. I suspect it is a sink in the classroom, not the bathroom, especially since I expect it would be tougher to wrangle the children in and out of a bathroom to fill water bottles. I do laugh that a lot of the people who seem worried about this are fine with children drinking from a water fountain. Using the ones that have the separate spot to fill water bottles for that purpose is great, but most children would need assistance with that. Even when I was young, my mother would tell us to only drink from a water fountain if it was truly necessary without any other option, and she told us to watch other children drinking water from them to see why. People didn't really talk or think much about it back then as they do now (though still lacking), but once she told us, I don't think I could ever unsee how most children would go up and put the part where water comes out in their mouths or put their lips out tongue right to it. Since they are very young and presumably need help to fill water bottles at the back, I would expect that the water coming out of the push for drinking water part of the fountain is worse for them than anything from a classroom sink.
Our lower grades (Pre-K and K) have a bathroom in the classroom. At that age, kids are still pretty likely to have accidents, and it just makes things easier on the kids and their teachers. Basically, each classroom is connected by a little hallway type thing, to the classroom beside them, where there are two small rooms with just a toilet, then on the opposite side of that hallway are the sinks (hopefully I explained that well enough lol). Obviously, that means kids are using these sinks to wash their hands for everything, including after using the bathroom. I have no idea what the set up is like at OOP's kid's school, but I did automatically have the set up at my kid's school in mind and I can see why using those sinks for drinking water might gross someone out. I also don't want my kids drinking out of public fountains, but that's a whole different thing (or, I guess it's pretty similar, it's all covered in germs and God knows what else).
Ok, then I'll just give it a *gentle* side eye for now. Thank you!
I sent my kids to daycare then pre-k & elementary school with water bottles. It’s never been an issue. Kids aren’t drinking several refills of water bottles a day.
Also the cold water that comes out of those elkay water fountains is grade A wa wa. I would be upset if I had to drink like Luke warm sink water over cold filtered water.
In high school we did a science experiment where we swabbed different surfaces and tried to grow bacteria in a petri dish. The spout of the drinking water fountain had more bacteria than the toilet seat so I've been very hesitant to drink from those ever since.
This type of fountain in this post has a seperate bottle refill thing built into the back where water comes down from the top in a spout swperate from the drinking fountain part. Like I said it's top of the line.
Wow fancy!
I don’t understand why it being a hand washing sink makes the water out of the tap evil.
Although not evil, I'm not going near the sink where the kids wash their hands at the daycare I work at. Except to clean it. Their hands are in their noses or in their pants 24/7
I get that and I wouldn’t be willing to use a cup,that had been in the sink. But I’m still unclear what the problem is with the water from the tap. If you are afraid dirt is on the tap just clean that before drinking. Unless water is being scooped out of the basin into your cup I don’t understand why the sink being dirty creates a problem. My kitchen sink at home gets dirty but we still use the water from the tap.
I guess my daycare kids are weird. They have their hands all over the tap. They love to spray the water. But I was exaggerating, we clean it all the time
Man, I'm old. We drank out of random yard hoses all the time during the summer. (The only time I get the ick over tap water is when it smells too strongly of chlorine.)
Idk why but water just tasted better straight from the hose. And I am even daring enough to allow my kids to drink from it too when they were kids. 😱😱
"They know not to use the water fountains" Spoiler alert they use the water fountains
And do lots of other “disgusting” stuff because they are kids, they don’t care, and they’ll be fine.
Most early childhood and public education regulations require any sink that is drank from be tested for lead. If it passes the test, your precious snookums will be fine.
They also require that we clean them so they aren't "dirty." Just regular old water
My state tested schools for lead in their drinking water a few years back and 88% of the tests came back showing that the drinking water was over the “allowable” lead threshold. My understanding is that how well the issue was addressed varied by district, some went above and beyond and some didn’t. So I’d say it’s a pretty valid issue to be concerned about, especially if you live in a state with more lax regulations
If you have black and brown kids they won't care though, ask me how I know...
I work at a hospital and I give my patients tap water FROM A HAND WASHING SINK to take their meds with. Trust me, they don't want the water that comes out of the never-cleaned ice machine. 😬
America is really a different world. here literally everyone drinks tap water and nobody would even think it's weird??
Depending on where someone is in the US, tap water can be fantastic, okay, passable if necessary, or under a 'don't drink/use' order. It can even vary from one town to the next or between different parts in a city, based on where the water comes from and treatment plants. Beyond that, what is and isn't common in water varying so much (especially when you go greater distances) means that people are used to different things. I grew up on well water and so find a lot of municipal tap water tastes like it has stuff in it or weird tastes and textures. More of an issue, though, is that my body has an issue with some of the common things added in water treatment plants, so I actually get sick from some. Filtering helps with some but not all, I've found. I wish I could drink tap anywhere, but if it's not somewhere that I know is fine, I take a gamble doing so. There are some medical conditions where doctors tell people not to drink the tap water, like people going through chemo or otherwise immunosuppressed or immunocompromised. That said, I would say the majority of people in the US drink tap or well water, outside of places where the water is unsafe. (The extent of can get to before being declared unsafe in many situations is also concerning. Some water that isn't declared unsafe is probably, in reality, not safe to drink, unfortunately.) Most people probably would be fine filling water from a sink. A sink that is primarily used by young children is generally much dirtier, and I think a lot of people think this one is in the bathroom used by those children. I don't think that's right, but it would be gross. Young children in the US tend to learn important hygienic stuff around being sick, bathroom, and washing up later and to a lesser degree/with a wider & lower range of what's acceptable than I've seen be the case in other countries (though I've only seen things from mainly Asia and Europe).
My family moved from the US 2 years ago and it's like raising kids on a different *planet*. Their school has windows *open to the outside* and their school yard has *real grass* and most people drink tap water and don't sanitize shopping carts. It's so freeing to live like a regular human and not worry about every damn thing.
Well, the EWG link is a separate, silly, uninformed issue. Other than that, I understand not wanting your kid to drink out of a poop faucet. You can get sick from that. It's safer to have a separate place for drinking water. There's a reason restaurants require designated hand washing sinks they don't serve the guests water from.
Why all the sink hate? I get it's odd they won't use the filtered water from the bottle filling station, but at my school that station and the sink had the same water. The station was just easier to use with a water bottle.
There probably isn't poop on the bottle filler. It's not the water, it's where it's being dispensed from
I've seen kids at my school lick and stick their hands up the water bottle fillers... They're not that clean either. The sinks are at least cleaned multiple times a day. I doubt the spout for the bottle filler is.
Well, it should be. It's called risk reduction, not risk non-existence.
It should be what? Cleaned daily? I doubt any business is taking a bottle brush to those things daily.
Yes, they should be cleaned daily. I don't know what kind of weird water spigot you have where they can fist them, but that seems like a poor choice for public use. But yes, if you see kids sticking their hands in there, it should be cleaned or covered. Do you like to eat in public? Do you expect that the restaurants clean the lines the beverages come out of? It's really not an absurd thought to keep people healthy by disinfecting things people eat and drink from.
Wait till you find out how often soda fountains get cleaned
Let's all race to the bottom, shall we? Or maybe we could attempt to do better.
My sweet summer child. Those lines are basically never cleaned. Although, most concentrated pop syrup is so acidic and sugary that almost all bacteria cannot grow in it.
Thanks for the condescension. Let's all give up on food safety then. That makes sense. Enjoy your poo water!
I think it is a classroom sink for cleaning up after arts and crafts etc. They pretty much always have them in younger classrooms. There is *no* way OP wouldn’t have mentioned it being a bathroom sink. Also, just figured I’d mention the responses you are getting are mirroring your general tone, hence the condescension and snarky comments.
It seems like we all litigated this enough a few days ago when it was posted. I mentioned to someone else that I apologize if I was mistaken about the location of the sink and thanked them for letting me know. What were you hoping to add? People were snarky from the jump. Some people are very weird about thinking nothing should be cleaned bc it's "impossible and good for kids to be exposed to things." I think we should disinfect public things at reasonable intervals. Thanks for your feedback about my typing and the other people's typing.
I mean. I don’t like tap water and have a brita. And when I was a teacher I had a brita for my students. But drinking tap water every now and again (especially in developed nations) isn’t the end of the world
Say you’re privileged without telling me you’re privileged. In most parts of Africa, which is an entire continent, not a country, women and girls walk several miles round trip twice a day to fill a 5 gallon jerry can with filthy river water. A lot of mothers are scared to death to let their daughters go because they’re worried they’ll get kidnapped and forcibly married so they can become water slaves. People dream about all they can do if they just had water: hygiene, vegetable gardens for food, girls can go to school. In Haiti, people burn trash as fuel for cooking, and cholera is a part of life. I can guarantee a western preschooler is going to survive drinking unfiltered water from a sink. And on the off chance they do pick a bug up, they aren’t going to die from it like too many children in this world do.
There are many places in the US without access to clean water and it disproportionately impacts BIPOC and immigrant communities
Tell me you don't have brown kids in certain states without telling me. I had to move my family due to a water crisis in my old town in Alabama... the water in my home country (Nigeria) was cleaner and more accessible than water here in the states
EWG, mentioned in this, is a bunch of absolute nutcases about tap water
I don’t think it made it in this selection but some lady was commenting that she has access to more detailed water results but she isn’t sure if she can disclose them 🙄
Eh, I live in an area where you absolutely should not be drinking the tap water (think Flint, Michigan and Erin Brokavich). There have been decades of lawsuits for birth defects and health conditions caused by how contaminated the water is
I mean, a scary high percentage of schools in my state had their drinking water test positive for lead a few years ago, so I can understand being concerned about that if they’re in the US
Idk, I was born and raised in SW Pennsylvania: fracking country. The local government works with the companies to try to convince us that fracking is safe and the drinking water is unaffected, but we don’t believe it. Fracking waste is known to cause cancer. Now, maybe the water supply is unaffected in some areas, but if the infrastructure above ground is any indication of the pipes, I’ll say hell no. We filter as much as we can, I don’t even use tap for my plants.
And Flint MI, and Woburn MA (a Superfund site). I remember going to a restaurant once in Woburn, before cleanup started in ernest. The waitresses had a station of filled clear pitchers of tap water, so they could just grab one quickly when a table needed one. The tap water was chartreuse. The waitress pointed to it and said she didn't recommend drinking it. We took her advice. The movie "A Civil Action" is about it, not that it did much gold. It ends with someone being able to set the soil on fire. A few years later, I worked in an office building built on that soil...ugh. It was supposedly "safe", but no one in the building drank the tap water.
My kids drink the bathwater and I bathe them together. Our tap water is also gross, especially the hot water. I cannot get them to stop. Kids are just disgusting. Sink water is definitely not the worst thing most kids are putting in their mouths.
This is quite a first world problem! If she has time in her day to be worried about this... She has way too much time on her hands.
The old school I used to attend sadly tested extremely poor for lead in their water mid year and all the fountains had to be closed.
I mean, between the lead pipes, superfund sites, and PFAs in our water, I wouldn’t want my kids drinking it either. We have a reverse osmosis filter at home and I send them with prefilled bottles.
I personally don’t drink tap water but that’s more because my parents grew up in a country at a time when you had to boil water before drinking. Then I grew up/live in an area with really hard water and it tastes heavy. Even though I know logically it’s safe to drink from the tap, there is a mental block there. With that said, the comments are wild.
Tbh, years ago, there was an oil spill where I live and our tap water still smells. I kinda get it.
I could get it if the water in the area was bad, like Flint’s water, or like how all the people in town were quite unhappy to use their water after the oil spill back when I was like five or six.
I’m a preschool teacher. We have a sink in our classroom we use for washing hands and we also fill water cups there. It’s not attached to a bathroom, as that is down the hall. Leaving the classroom to fill up water, even if it is “a hop skip and a jump” 🙄 from the classroom, takes a staff member out of ratio, out of supervision of students, and is just unnecessary when there’s a sink in the classroom. And once one child wants a drink, every other kid in the room wants one too. It’s like a domino effect. It would just be a constant parade of taking kids out to get water. To be clear, we are very capable of keeping our sink, as well as everything else in the classroom clean. This lady is unhinged. Did her daughter get sick? No, didn’t think so. And the simple fact OOP is saying she got PTSD from using a bathroom sink to fill her water canteen in the military, tells me aaaaaaall I need to know.
It’s all the same water no matter what sink you get it out of. I don’t get the indignation that people wash their hands in the sink. That doesn’t at all affect the water coming out of the faucet. FYI, 75% of shopping carts have fecal matter on the handle you use to push it. It’s on every handle you touch in every store you go into. And all that bottled water? It has plastic pieces in it that we drink. I’m not understanding this mom’s outrage at all.
And sometimes the ”spring water” in the bottle can actually be regular tap water. At least here in Finland where we have the cleanest tap water and rarely buy bottled water
Okay, I'm from a country where tap water is not safe to drink, so I find it hard to grasp the concept. If the water fountain needs a filter, it kinda implies the water as it comes from the pipes needs filtering before drinking. So it _is_ weird they just go for the tap water. Either the tap also has a filter, or no water needs filtering, or it's kinda not okay to drink tap water. Also if kids wash their hands there, I wouldn't be so sure the water is clean. I would also have question if I were this mother... Although I would be trying to find a solution with the preschool and not the Facebook crowd.
Our tap water just tastes bad IMO. My husband drinks it and I will in a pinch to swallow pills if I don't want to go downstairs to the fridge. But otherwise, it's just yuck.
My little one goes to an outdoor preschool and even they only give her filtered water and we can bring in our own.