Environmental Law Institute, 2015.
In January 2015, the Environmental Law Institute published Reducing Environmental Exposures in Child Care Facilities: A Review of State Policy. The report, prepared jointly by ELI and the Children’s Environmental Health Network, discusses state policies addressing exposure to indoor air contaminants in licensed child care facilities. This paper focuses on another important environmental health issue for child care facilities: drinking water quality.
A variety of national policies and program initiatives aim to ensure that children who spend time in child care facilities drink water throughout the day.1 Ensuring the quality of drinking water at child care facilities is important to children’s healthy development and helps advance the broad goals of early care and education programs. This paper provides an overview of how existing state laws and regulations across the United States address drinking water quality in the licensed child care context, with a particular emphasis on drinking water from private wells.
