In many ways, Kyan Dickerson is like most 4-year-olds. He begs his mom not to make him eat carrot sticks, and he can’t wait to watch new episodes of the animated show PJ Masks.

But in other ways, Kyan is different. His speech is delayed. He has trouble concentrating. And he can’t grip a pencil properly—all of which worry his mother.

“He’s supposed to be doing that now,” said Sherron Paige, Kyan’s mother. “He’s supposed to be getting ready for kindergarten.”

But his development, she explains, has been hindered by high levels of lead in his blood. She blames the New York City Housing Authority.

Paige and her son live in public housing in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. Their apartment is one of thousands that went uninspected for at least four years, when the housing authority stopped checking for lead paint.

While housing authority administrators have admitted they falsely certified that those inspections had been conducted, city officials have also downplayed the consequences of their negligence. But they have selectively chosen the numbers on which to base that claim, in the process hiding the full scope of the problem and possibly overlooking cases like Kyan's.

“Thank God, very very very few kids were affected in any way," Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference in late November. "And all of those kids are okay.”

Housing Authority Chairwoman Shola Olatoye has repeatedly stated that between 2010 and 2016, just 19 children in public housing had high levels of lead in their blood because of lead paint.

That number is just one slice of the whole truth. During that time, the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene received reports that more than 200 children in public housing had elevated blood lead levels. Health officials only linked about 10 percent of those cases to lead paint. For the rest, it says it didn’t find a cause.

Dr. Morri Markowitz, head of the lead poisoning program at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center is skeptical of those numbers. In his clinic, about 70 percent of the cases of children with lead in their blood are due to lead paint. And it’s usually inspectors from the city's health department that help him determine that. He called it "implausible" that the city has only linked 19 cases to lead paint. “There’s something that doesn’t fit right there,” he said.

At a recent City Council hearing, Herminia Palacio, the deputy mayor of health and human services, defended the health department’s inspection process, calling it “robust.” The department regularly receives blood test results from pediatricians across the city. If a child’s lead level exceeds a certain threshold, she said, health officials go to their apartment. If they find lead paint hazards, she added, they order property owners to fix them.

But of the approximately 200 children in public housing with elevated lead levels, only two-thirds got visits from health officials. The others did not have test results high enough to warrant inspection, the health department said.

Even when inspectors visit homes, there is not always a clear process to determine the source of lead exposure and to fix it. Sherron Paige experienced that firsthand.

In July, she found out Kyan had a blood lead level of 12 micrograms per deciliter—more than double the threshold the Centers for Disease Control considers to be high. The CDC says no amount of lead exposure is safe for children, and any blood lead level above 5 micrograms per deciliter should prompt public health action.

Paige left her job as a cleaner as soon as she got the news. “I had to swipe out and go home,” she said. “I couldn’t process it. Like how could my son get lead?”

But it turned out their home was the problem. At least that’s what health department officials said after inspecting her apartment. Using an X-ray device, they scanned for lead and found it in the paint. They ordered the housing authority to fix it.

But then the New York City Housing Authority did a separate test. According to Deputy Mayor Palacio, that’s standard procedure. “NYCHA, as does any other landlord in the city of New York, has the ability to request lead chips be sent to a third party lab to verify those results,” she said at the City Council hearing.

The X-ray technology used by health inspectors can give false positives by detecting lead in a metal radiator or door knob. So sending a paint chip to a lab is a more precise test, she said. And that is the final test result that determines the city’s decision.

In the case of Paige’s apartment, the housing authority’s sample came back negative. Authority officials said the apartment did not have lead paint and ruled it out as the reason for Kyan’s elevated levels.

The conflicting information was frustrating, Paige said. And she wasn't convinced by the new test result. “He spends most of his time in the house,” she told WNYC. Where else would the lead come from?

In September, Paige's lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit, claiming the housing authority’s failure to handle lead paint properly is what caused Kyan’s speech delays and motor coordination issues. Since then, the housing authority has repainted Paige’s apartment, though it’s unclear if the agency has determined there was lead paint in the home.

The housing authority and the health department declined to comment, citing the ongoing court case.

Paige’s case isn’t an isolated incident. At least three dozen other families are similarly in the dark. The health department found lead paint in their apartments, but the housing authority did not. So there’s no official cause for the high lead levels in those children.

When it can’t find the source, the health department says it asks families if they have other products that may have lead, like imported spices or pottery.

But that’s not enough, said Dr. Steven Marcus, a medical toxicologist and former head of New Jersey’s Poison Control Center. The only way to treat most lead exposure is to identify the cause and fix it, he said. Without doing that, kids are left at risk.

“They may be fulfilling statutory requirements,” he said. “But they’re not doing what is ethically imperative and that is to find the source of lead and eliminate it.”

But for nearly 190 children in public housing, the city hasn’t figured out what’s behind their elevated lead levels—ten times as many children the city says were harmed.