SUMMIT TWP — Students returned to Summit Township Elementary School today after classes were canceled on Tuesday and Wednesday while district officials prepared the building to operate without running water for drinking or hand washing.

Water was shut off to the sinks and water fountains in the school last Thursday and the district announced Friday that tests of the school’s water in August had shown dangerous concentrations of lead.

According to updates posted to the its website, the district on Wednesday obtained and installed portable hand washing sinks throughout the school that will be filled with outside water.

Nutrition Inc., the district’s food services contractor, met with an official from the state Department of Agriculture to outline procedures to use municipal water, not from the school’s well, for cleaning and sanitizing equipment, including tables and countertops. Food service staff will wash their hands with bottled water using a container with a continuous flow faucet and a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The food is not prepared in the building and bottled water for drinking will be given to students for free.

The well water will only remain in use in the toilets and urinals in the building.

At Monday night’s school board meeting, Superintendent Dale Lumley had announced a plan to allow students to wash their hands using well water only in classrooms and under the supervision of teachers. Last week hand sanitizers and wet wipes were provided to students and staff; Monday was a scheduled in-service day when students did not have class.

Several parents at the meeting were critical of those sanitation options, saying that they would hold their children out of school unless they had safe running water for hand washing.

Addressing hand washing and kitchen sanitation issues were made priorities of officials during the two-day closure, school board President Nina Teff said Wednesday.

“The board and the administration, we listened to what they said on Monday,” Teff said.

William Pettigrew, retired superintendent of the Mars School District and current Mars school board member, was named chairman of the Summit project team, a group of officials that will work to implement a corrective action plan for the school.

The team also will include Teff, solicitor Tom King, a representative of Gannett Fleming Engineers, interim water operator Matthew Cranmer and someone with medical expertise, she said.

Pettigrew and other officials met with a representative of the state Department of Environmental Protection who came to the school Wednesday to become familiar with the building.

Also on Wednesday, the district posted two lab reports showing the results of water tests initiated earlier this month by water operator Glenn Terwilliger, adding that “the district cannot attest to the validity of the reports in question.” Terwilliger was suspended with pay by the board Monday.

The reports show that a sample collected on Jan. 12 had 14 parts per billion of lead and multiple samples collected on Jan. 20 had lead content ranging from 2 to 11 ppb.

The samples also were tested for copper and were found to have levels ranging from 490 to 12,500 ppb.

Gannett Fleming, the engineering firm hired by the board Monday to investigate the water at the school, was in the process of taking new samples to be tested.

The DEP does not impose specific regulations for safe and unsafe levels of lead, however it says that if a school has multiple samples measuring 15 ppb or greater, it must inform the public and create an action plan to fix the problem. Samples taken from the school in August had lead concentrations ranging from 13 and 55 ppb.

Teff said officials released the new reports in the interest of being transparent, but they have yet to analyze or interpret the data.

Members of the project team also have yet to determine under what conditions the school will resume using its well water.

“I think we do need to define criteria which we will use before all the water goes back on at Summit,” Teff said.

As their work continues, the district will provide updates to the public on its website.

Details about blood testing for students and staff through a contract with Butler Health System will be made public when details are finalized, according to Wednesday’s update.