Tagged: Kansas Department of Health and Environment

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has awarded grants totaling nearly $83,000 to 27 of the state's public schools for recycling-related projects.

The department the grants were awarded for the next school year and will help pay for recycling bins, composting programs, programs for handling cafeteria waste and field trips to recycling centers. Schools from across the state won grants from $750 t0 $4500.

Nearby schools that won grants include:

Gov. Sam Brownback and others in his administration are challenging a recent national report that ranked Kansas low for public health preparedness.

The critical report was issued by the non-profit Trust for America's Health. In it, Kansas and Montana tied for last place in rankings of public health preparedness. That means the state isn't as prepared as others to respond to public health threats, such as infectious diseases, food-borne illnesses, bio-terrorism, even extreme weather events.

A new report on the nation's public health preparedness finds Kansas tied with Montana for last place.

The report from the non-profit Trust For America’s Health is based on 10 measures of readiness for a public health emergency, such as bioterror, extreme weather, and disease outbreaks. Kansas met only three of the ten standards.

This comes on the heels of another report about a month ago from the charitable group, Save The Children. It found that Kansas failed to meet all four of their measures of preparedness for disasters affecting children.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment says in its annual vital statistics report that the number of abortions declined 4.6 percent from 2010 to 2011.

That continued a trend of declining abortions that began in 1996. And the number of births dropped to 13.8 live births per 1,000 residents, the lowest number recorded since the state started tracking births in 1912.

There were 39,628 babies born in 2011 in Kansas, compared with 40,439 in 2010.