Lead in Kansas school drinking water

Name: School drinking water lead testing results: Kansas
Creator: TapWaterData Editorial
Published: 2026-08-09
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

What Kansas publishes about lead testing in its schools’ drinking water, what those numbers cover, and how we checked it. One row of a 51-jurisdiction survey, verified jurisdiction by jurisdiction rather than compiled from a single list.

KansasPartial

Publishing status: Publishes results
Coverage: Partial — some schools only
Data vintage: currency not established by the evidence we hold
Evidence: confirmed at sourceConfirmed at source 2026-08-09

Action level

Published action level, as verified in 2026: 15 ppb

The results below are counted against that level, which the source records as set in statute.

Action levels are not comparable between jurisdictions: across the 51 we surveyed they run from 1 ppb to 20 ppb, so a share of results above “the action level” measures the threshold as much as it measures the water. We never rank states on it. Where a jurisdiction explains how its own level was set, the verified research note at the foot of this page records the explanation verbatim.

Kansas: published results

The source publishes one row per sample taken at a fixture, so every figure below counts fixture samples. A sample is counted above the action level here when its measured value is at or above 15 ppb.

Samples collected: 11,519
Readings published: 11,519 — every one carrying a number. Kansas does not mark a reading its laboratory could not measure, so how many of these are measurements and how many are non-detects recorded at a reporting limit is not derivable from what it publishes.

11,519 readings published = 11,519 samples collected

Two-thirds of the readings Kansas publishes — 7,629 of 11,519 — are exactly 1 ppb, and no reading in the dataset is below it, in any year from 2022 to 2025. That is consistent with non-detects being recorded at a laboratory reporting limit rather than flagged as non-detects. KDHE publishes no technical documentation for the dashboard, so we do not state a limit, we do not say which readings are non-detects, and we do not compute a measured-only rate for Kansas. That inference is ours, not the state's. The share of all samples collected at or above the action level is not affected by it.

1.7% (193 of 11,519 samples collected) — fixtures at or above 15 ppb, the state's action level

25.7% (56 of 218 schools with published results) — schools at or above 15 ppb, the state's action level

The two rates above count fixture samples; this one counts schools with at least one sample at or above the level. The gap between them is itself informative, and the two units must never be mixed inside one comparison.

Sampling period: 2022-02-10 to 2025-10-17.

These figures come from a voluntary testing programme. A school missing from that data has had no test reported for it — that is not evidence its water is safe. Schools that test are self-selected, and schools that both test and report are doubly so, which makes a voluntary dataset a floor and never a prevalence estimate.

Download the raw Kansas results

Every row behind the figures above, exactly as the source published it — the verbatim result string alongside the normalised value, the non-detect flag, the state’s own action level on every row, and the sample date with no window applied.

Kansas results (CSV) · 11,519 rows · CC BY 4.0

This page names no schools. Named readings live on the lookup, where the state’s remediation note is rendered beside every one of them.

What changed since 2021

The baseline is the National Association of State Boards of Education’s 2021 survey. Every 2026 value below was re-checked for this survey; a value that did not move is a finding too.

Testing required: 2021 baseline: No · verified 2026: No
Action level: 2021 baseline: 15 · verified 2026: 15
Publishes resultschanged: 2021 baseline: Unknown · verified 2026: Yes

Changed since the 2021 baseline: publishes results.

Source and verification

What we checked: https://kansas.120wateraudit.com
Checked on: 2026-08-09 — confirmed at source
Machine readability: T2 — structured but needs extraction (dashboard or web app)
Results retrieved from: https://kansas.120wateraudit.com
Results retrieved on: 2026-08-09

Verified research note

Our field note for Kansas, published verbatim rather than summarised. Where it quotes a figure from a source, that is the source’s own number reproduced as we recorded it, not a rate we computed — everything we compute states its denominator and its unit.

RESOLVES a NASBE Unknown to Yes. Public 120Water results portal, confirmed live. EPA's Voluntary School and Child Care Lead Testing state grant-program contacts index (retrieved 2026-08-09) is the authoritative index of state RESULTS portals; it is where this URL comes from.

Cite this page

TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Kansas." TapWaterData national school drinking-water lead testing database. Last updated 2026-08-09. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/kansas

@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
  author       = {TapWaterData Editorial},
  title        = {School drinking water lead testing: Kansas},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/kansas}},
  note         = {Last updated 2026-08-09. Licensed under CC BY 4.0}
}

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence — free to republish, chart or build on with attribution. Last updated 2026-08-09.

All 51 jurisdictions — the national scorecard, the tier map, and the methodology behind every rating on this page.