More than a dozen Greater Victoria schools have tested positive for elevated levels of lead in their water.

Drinking water at 13 active schools in School District 61 were found to contain higher-than-normal amounts of lead following tests performed in May, but that number could rise.

“Unfortunately they indicated that some of our facilities post-flush showed some concerns of elevated lead levels in the water,” said district secretary-treasurer Mark Walsh. “We assume that number’s going to go just a little bit higher.”

Walsh said the district is bringing in an external company to perform secondary testing and will release a full list of affected schools and how high the lead levels are at those schools once it’s complete.

“We’re happy to see that the results are not extremely high, generally, in our sites,” he said.

To alleviate the immediate concerns of parents, he said the district is instructing custodial staff to manually perform more frequent and substantial flushes of the schools’ water systems in the short-term.

Walsh said flushing the lines regularly and for longer periods of time gets rid of the lead “for the most part.”

“In the summer, we’ve got to address the issue in a long-term way,” he said, which could include installing filters in drinking fountains with updated filtration or an automatic flushing system that would prevent levels of lead from building up.

Staff aren’t clear on where the lead contamination is coming from, saying there could be a number of sources to blame.

“It could be coming from the external pipes, it could be coming from the internal pipes or alternatively the solder of the piping in the system,” Walsh said.

Updated information on the testing can be found on the district’s website.

Some of the money to fix the lead issue is expected to come from the $25-million in savings the government recently announced it was putting back into B.C. schools.

Schools listed as having “post-flush concerns” in a preliminary report include Arbutus, Braefoot, Cedarhill, Doncaster, Hillcrest, Lake Hill, Lansdowne, Margaret Jenkins, Richmond, Shoreline, SJ Willis, South Park, Spectrum, Tolmie, Torquay and Uplands.

Read the full report here.