Photo by Erin Bloodgood
Shy McElroy
Shy McElroy
As a child, Shy McElroy fondly remembers playing in the field outside her childhood home on 11th and Burleigh. All the kids on the block would come play in the dirt or in the winter, they would make snow angels and snowmen. When she had her son, Nathan, he would play in that same field.
It wasn’t until her son was five years old that she realized he was being poisoned by the lead paint littering that field. She remembers the landlord who owned the house on the other side of the field painting his siding with white paint multiple times. That paint—as well as paint inside her house—was lead-based and a serious health risk.
“My son used always reach up on the windowsill and pull himself up and when I would come home from work, he would be like, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’” McElroy smiles when she recalls that memory, but her mood quickly shifts when she remembers him putting his hands in his mouth after being covered in lead dust from the windowsill.
When McElroy first brought her son home from the hospital, his medical tests showed lead levels in his blood, but she had no idea what that meant and no one, including her doctors, explained it to her. “There were so many things that could have happened to prevent it from getting worse,” she said. “It was not an emergency for my child. It was treated as if he could drink more orange juice and he would be okay.”
Cognitive Impairment
It wasn’t until her son was five that she realized how this was impacting his cognitive abilities and behavior in school. By that point, the lead in his blood was significantly higher and his preschool teacher was suggesting he repeat that year of school.
McElroy never wants to see a lack of education, resources, and most importantly, a lack of urgency be the reason parents don’t take immediate action to protect their child from being lead poisoned.
In 2018, she began working with the Coalition on Lead Emergency (COLE) when a group of community members came together to address the lead crisis in Milwaukee. She now leads the working group called COLE Parents Lead (along with Deanna Branch and Maria Beltran), which educates and engages parents whose kids are lead poisoned.
When parents first come to COLE looking for help, the group offers a two-day training session to teach parents about lead exposures in paint, water and soil, how good nutrition can help fight lead poisoning, and the health impacts of lead. They also teach the parents how to have a conversation with other people who may not know about the risks of lead.
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Then they pay parents to help run food drives for the public where they offer nutritious food to the community, hand out their lead-safety kits, and offer lead testing. McElroy says that many of these families have never been tested for lead and roughly 95% of them are finding out for the first time that they have been lead poisoned.
When she started working with COLE, McElroy says there were eight families involved, but now there are over 200 families engaged in the work, and the group has helped over 600 families. Those families meet every month to decide next steps and how they can organize to have more of an impact, such as speaking at public hearings, doing house calls to help families install water filters, and building a trusted relationship with the health department.
COLE has gained serious momentum in the last five years to address this health emergency and they are not slowing down. “The only way that we build a better future is to stop the problem now. If we spend money now to fix the problem, we’ll save money in the future on cleaning it up,” McElroy says. She’s fighting every day to prevent the next generation of kids from being lead poisoned and wants parents to know she is here to support them.
Learn more about the Coalition on Lead Emergency at coalitiononleademergency.org.
