News & Issues
Stories from around the Kansas City Metro area on a variety of topics.
Kansas City’s cup of tea
There are four cups sitting in front of Tyler Beckett, in a small warehouse just north of the river in Kansas City. Beckett uses a spoon to sip the first sample. “It’s got that nice beautiful smokiness to it.” he says about his first taste. He takes a sip of the second sample. It’s more…
Plentiful access to water fuels prosperity in rural Republic County community
In mid-fall, trucks full of corn and soybeans rumble through the north-central Kansas town of Courtland on their way to the grain elevator at the south end of Main Street. While neighboring counties struggle to survive, the western half of Republic County, including Courtland, population 273, isn’t doing too bad. Technology and insurance companies support the…
Superintendent carousel turns as students return to class
The start of school typically brings with it a crop of new students and staffers.
Yet classes are resuming this year in the Kansas City area amidst a remarkable run of new superintendents in Missouri-side school districts, according to the Cooperating School Districts of Greater Kansas City, a consortium that stretches across several counties and represents more than 185,000 students.
Turning from the tap
Natalie Horton doesn’t drink the tap water in Hiawatha. Neither does her 2-year-old son Silas. She already thought the water smelled and tasted funny. About a year ago, she read a Facebook post from a friend that said the water in Hiawatha wasn’t safe to drink. “I heard we had nitrates in our water, so now I buy…
Most water in Kansas safe to drink
The good news about the public water supply in Kansas is that almost all of it is safe to drink. About 96 percent of Kansans receive water from public water supplies that meet or exceed all state and federal regulations for clean water, said Mike Tate, director of the Bureau of Water for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. “The vast, vast majority of…