City officials say public school classrooms home to the youngest students have been annually inspected for chipping lead paint — but records for the last five years say otherwise.

The city is required to visually inspect classrooms in schools built before 1985 and housing students ages 6 and under. But records show that inspections were not recorded each year in the vast majority of those classrooms between 2015 and 2019.

The records, first reported by WNYC/Gothamist, were released by City Comptroller Scott Stringer's office. Stringer requested them from the Department of Education, which has failed to provide the data in response to public records requests from news organizations, including NY1.

"I'm outraged as a parent, but also as comptroller. The fact that I had to get this information — which, by the way, is incomplete and raises more questions than it answers — is one of the great scandals of this administration and of the Department of Education," Stringer said.

The records include data sets showing that scores of classrooms did not log inspections for every year between 2015 and 2019, some of them eventually testing positive for lead in 2019 when the city launched systematic inspections and released the results publicly for the first time.

The city also released thousands of pages of handwritten classroom inspections compiled as part of those 2019 inspections when exposed lead paint was found in more than 1,800 classrooms, leading many to question why that paint hadn't been found in earlier years. Exposure to lead can cause learning disabilities.

City Hall spokeswoman Jane Meyer says schools are not a "principal risk" of lead exposure.

"Nonetheless, we take lead exposure extremely seriously and although incomplete database records are not proof that the work did not occur, we recognized the need to improve our record keeping this summer and changed our protocols," Meyer said.

Officials also say some classrooms may not have been serving students under six in the years they were not tested.

The city now inspects those classrooms three times a year, and has expanded its testing to common areas in schools.

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