What Missouri 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.
MissouriPublishes for very few schools
Published action level, as verified in 2026: 5 ppb
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.
Missouri publishes results, but we have not yet ingested them row by row, so this page carries no counts or rates for it — only what the survey verified about the publication itself. We publish a figure once we hold the rows it is computed from, and not before. The jurisdiction’s own results are linked below.
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.
Changed since the 2021 baseline: testing required, action level, publishes results.
Our field note for Missouri, 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.
CORRECTED ON BOTH AXES 2026-08-15, verified at source. The old row said Missouri neither requires testing nor publishes; both were wrong, and the requireTesting error is the larger one. ⚠️ TESTING IS MANDATORY: the Get the Lead Out of School Drinking Water Act (RSMo 160.077, 2022) requires every school pre-K-12 to test ALL potable outlets before 2024-08-01 and annually thereafter, against a state action level of 5 ppb -- stricter than the federal 15. So Missouri is one of the states that mandates testing, filed here until now as one that does not. PUBLICATION IS REAL BUT NEGLIGIBLE: DESE publishes 80 per-school result PDFs for the 25 schools of Missouri Schools for the Severely Disabled, the school system DESE itself operates. Opened one in a browser (Autumn Hill, tested 2025-11-04): 'NOTICE OF TEST RESULTS TO AGENCY', outlets tested, count at or above 5 ppb, and a per-outlet summary table against both 0.015 mg/L and the Missouri 5 ppb standard. Those are real results on a state agency's own site. But 25 schools against Missouri's ~2,400 public schools is the Iowa shape exactly, hence negligible -- the grade exists so this cannot be scored alongside a statewide dataset. ⚠️ WHAT MISSOURI DOES NOT PUBLISH, and why the negative half of the old row was still half right: DHSS collects every school's results through a REDCap survey (redcapdcphlinux.azurewebsites.net/redcap/surveys/) which is an INTAKE form, not a public database -- and checking that a portal responds is not checking that it publishes. Nothing on the DHSS programme page carries results. RSMo 160.077 also directs the department, with DESE, to publish a biennial report of the findings ON THE DNR WEBSITE; searched dnr.mo.gov via its own site search and externally on 2026-08-15 and found no such report. Statute also requires each school to post its own results within two weeks, so Missouri's disclosure is real but decentralised across ~2,400 district sites, which is not a state-published dataset and is not counted as one here. ⚠️ health.mo.gov was rebuilt shortly before this check and the old Get-the-Lead-Out URLs 404; the live page is health.mo.gov/prevention/environmental-factors/get-lead-out-school-drinking-water. A 404 from a site migration is not evidence about disclosure.
TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Missouri." TapWaterData national school drinking-water lead testing database. Last updated 2026-08-15. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/missouri
@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
author = {TapWaterData Editorial},
title = {School drinking water lead testing: Missouri},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/missouri}},
note = {Last updated 2026-08-15. 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 .
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