An Educational Strategy to Reduce Exposure of Urban Children to Environmental Lead

In January 1995, the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania first offered the course Environmental Studies (ENVS) 404, The Urban Environment. The University of Pennsylvania traces its roots to Benjamin Franklin, who in 1740 founded a college in Philadelphia dedicated to educating young men via an educational system in which theory would be put to practical use. In January 1995, the authors enrolled 21 students in the first iteration of ENVS 404. In this chapter, the authors began the term with an intensive study of the physics, chemistry, technology, toxicology, and public health threat of the element Pb. ENVS 404 at the University of Pennsylvania has documented comprehensively the magnitude of the risk of environmental lead for a selected neighborhood in a part of West Philadelphia where reports indicated childhood blood-Pb concentrations were alarmingly high.