(KY3) School district leaders have already had to hand off their first task. The task? Get the leadership out. Many parts of a new law were passed on the first day of school.
Districts had to test, make corrections, retest, and post the results online before the first day of school. On Your Side checked about 130 districts in our area; only a handful had not yet posted the results online. We checked with those districts and were told they would be available soon.
El Dorado Springs told us that testing has not yet been conducted, which is a new state legal requirement.
“We were really lucky,” said Willie Howard of Clever Public Schools. “Our oldest building is from 1931, so it could have been a lot more, having only nine spaces.”
Clever had to fix fewer than a dozen problem areas, which meant lead levels exceeded the five parts per billion required by the state.
The testing costs were covered by a grant of over $140,000 from Nixa.
“It could have been the same fountain right next to each other, and one of them was lit and the other wasn’t,” said Zac Rantz of Nixa Public Schools.
Nixa had repaired more than thirty faucets.
The state’s largest school district, Springfield Public Schools, has all results online.
“We are 100% compliant with the law,” said Travis Shaw of Springfield Public Schools.
The law requires schools to inventory, sample, remediate and monitor all drinking water sources that are or have the potential to be used for drinking, food preparation, cooking or cleaning utensils.
SPS officials say that only a few wells are out of service in the entire district.
“We have some that, after remediation, for some reason did not meet that requirement. So those are not in service. We have put signs there until we fix it, but those cannot be used at all,” Shaw said.
If the reading was above five ppm, replacing the faucets usually fixed the problem. If the retest was still in the red, workers added lead filters.
Most schools hire an outside company to conduct the tests. It is not cheap, but there are subsidies available. These tests must be conducted every five years.
Of the 128 local school districts, only El Dorado Springs did not conduct water testing before the first day of school. The superintendent says the district is working to schedule the testing. Appleton City School District has done its lead testing and is in the process of posting the results and accompanying remediation plan on its website. The other 126 monitored districts are in compliance with the law.
In 26 counties, no lead levels above the legal limit (5 ppm) were measured after the first round of testing. This corresponds to a clean test. These counties are as follows:
- Ava
- Billing
- Black eye
- Bolívar – The History of Bolívar
- Bradleyville
- bunker
- Clever
- couch
- crane
- Dent-Phelps
- Fair Grove
- Gainesville
- Glenwood
- Crossroads Hill
- Laclede County
- Leesville
- Lick
- Lockwood
- Northwood
- Norwood
- Oak Hill
- Phelps County
- skyline
- Swedenborg
- Western Plains
- Wheatland
Most of the region’s counties scored above the legal limit in their first round of testing. These counties have posted remediation plans on their websites. Some of these plans include replacing pipes, installing filters, and/or simply shutting off the contaminated water source.
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