Potter Valley Elementary School’s water fix finally comes together

MENDOCINO CO., 8/17/26 — For most of this year, the kids at Potter Valley’s elementary school were not allowed to drink from the water fountains. A notice went up on Feb. 9: boil the tap water first, or take the bottled water set out for kids in the cafeteria. It hung there all spring.

This summer, the school district fixed it.

Not the state, which studied the well for nine years. The Potter Valley Community Unified School District. Three weeks in June, $39,600.55 of its own money, and now the water runs through three new filters on its way to the taps.

The state has seen the work. “The system out there looks like it was correctly installed,” said Zachary Rounds, the state’s drinking water engineer for Mendocino County. His office checked the district’s plan before the first pipe was cut. The plan worked.

One step is left. The state runs its own tests before the boil notice comes down, though the district’s own readings already look good. “Our indicators look great, but they have to come and do their own tests,” Dr. LuzElena Perez, the district superintendent, said Thursday. “We are very hopeful that they will be all done with those tests prior to the first day of school.”

More a creek than a well

The school has one well and no backup. The trouble is how it was built. A well needs a deep collar of grout around its casing to keep whatever sits on the ground from sliding down the pipe and into the water. The state calls for 50 feet of sealed vertical collar, wrapped around the interior well casing. This shallow well has 20.

So rain and runoff got in.  Year after year, samples came back with coliform bacteria, which means something can get into the water, and sometimes E. coli, which is an emergency. When that happens the district has 24 hours to warn everyone drinking it.

In 2021 the state called the well what it had become: not groundwater anymore, but surface water. A creek, in the eyes of the law.

Creeks must be filtered. The school had no filter. Chlorine kills some germs but strains out nothing. The water had dangerous critters in it.

Five years of waiting?

In April 2021, the state ordered the district to treat the water or replace the well by that fall. The order was signed by Rounds. The deadline passed. So did the next three years.

The state wasn’t ignoring the school. Since 2017, the state has spent $765,815 on the school’s water, all of it on engineers and consultants: test borings, a hydrogeology survey, a well-siting study, a conference call every month for years. That money went “to provide engineering support to develop the new well,” Rounds said.

Money to build something: zero

This June, the state went further and dropped the school from its draft spending plan for next year. The words “Potter Valley” don’t appear in the document.

By then a bad January sample had put the boil notice on the wall, and even the district’s water operator, David Redding, had run out of patience. “I don’t understand why this well project has dragged on for the past three years,” he wrote to the state on Jan. 28. “I suppose there’s good reasons.”

Those emails are part of a 318-file release from the state Division of Drinking Water under the Public Records Act, requested by the Voice.

Three filters, three weeks

On May 29, Redding sent the state a different kind of email. The school board had decided to stop waiting.

The district would buy the filters itself. Three of them, in a row, each finer than the last. It would add two monitors that read the water around the clock — one for cloudiness, one for chlorine — and send the readings to the state electronically. It would replumb the school’s two 5,000-gallon tanks. Work would start in mid-June and take about three weeks.

“We are excited and looking forward to having a water system that will be in compliance and will have safe potable drinking water,” Redding wrote.

The job went in on time. By the state project team’s June 25 call, the filters were out for delivery and the plumbing was going in. The newest sample from the well had come back clean.

The filters and monitors cost $39,600.55, Perez said, and the district paid with its own money. The spending was already written into the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan — the three-year plan every California school district writes and its board adopts — under the goal of keeping school facilities safe. The money “was already in the LCAP,” Perez said.

The filters were the last piece of the plant. The aeration and chlorine equipment were already in place, Rounds explained. And the state built none of it: Rounds said he did not believe the district got state money for the job, though he could not say whether the state might pay some of it back later.

The last step

The filters clean the water. They don’t fix the well. The state is still designing a replacement well. It began the process in 2023. Nobody has drilled it, and the district’s own engineers doubt it would give much water. Perez isn’t waiting.

“There is still talk of another well,” she said, “but that’s far down the road for us. We are great with the water we have right now.”

The state’s own math backs her up. In June, when contacted by the Voice, the state water board  dug through 10 years of records and found the school’s biggest day ever used 9,518 gallons — about 6.6 gallons a minute. The two tanks the school already owns can carry that with room to spare.

So the last move belongs to the state. Its testers come, they sample, and when the water passes, the notice comes off the wall. District staff met July 31 with the California Rural Water Association to walk through what those tests require, and Perez briefed her school board Wednesday night on the work and the wait for the state’s sign-off.

When the notice comes down, the fountains come back. The clean water will have passed through three filters, each finer than the last, on its way to the first kid in line.