Kansas City Wastes $2 Billion, May Close Half Its Public Schools

Contemplate this as one of Obama's big initiatives is throwing $4.3 billion more into notoriously failing schools across the nation.

Kansas City alone was awarded $2 billion in a desegregation case. Money gone, they're left with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and recording studios, while the superintendent claims the diplomas from them "aren't worth the paper they're printed on." Now, they're contemplating closing one-half of the city's public schools because the city is broke. How much failure must taxpayers subsidize before it's enough?

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Kansas City was held up as a national example of bold thinking when it tried to integrate its schools by making them better than the suburban districts where many kids were moving. The result was one school with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and another with recording studios.

Now it's on the brink of bankruptcy and considering another bold move: closing nearly half its schools to stay afloat.

Schools officials say the cuts are necessary to keep the district from plowing through what little is left of the $2 billion it received as part of a groundbreaking desegregation case.

Buffeted for years by declining enrollment, political squabbling and a revolving door of leadership, the district's fortunes are so bleak that Superintendent John Covington has said diplomas given to many graduates "aren't worth the paper they're printed on."

Kansas City is among the most striking examples of the challenges of saving urban school districts. The city used gobs of cash to improve facilities, but boosting lagging test scores and stemming the exodus of students were more elusive. Like other big-city districts, it finds itself struggling to become more than just the last resort for large pockets of poverty in the urban core.

Comments

[Rob Crawford]

Is this one of the districts that was essentially run by a federal judge?

[Captain Joe]

Isn't the school district an independent entity, not affiliated with the city government?

[Lightwave]

Now this is something I do blame Bush for, partially.

He had the chance to dismantle the Department of Education. Instead we got No Child Left Behind, the worst piece of social legislation this country has seen in decades. It literally bankrupted America's schools in the span of a few years.

Wasn't Obama who signed that one into law, although he tripled down on it.

[TG]

Doesnt anyone realize that the teachers pensions across the board are an enormous spounge of the budget. Stop the over paying subsidies for pension and health care benefits!

[philfl63]

I have lived in Missouri and worked in KC and visited in numerous times. It is a typical city run by incompetent and corrupt coloreds who have destroyed it. This article is a waste of news. You could have just created a syllogism and left it at that.

[kansas]

The KC school district was bad long before Bush. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984466-4,00.html It was by a Federal Judge's order. But you can summarize. You can get a new garbage can, but the garbage still stinks.

[Noel]

It's worse than that.

The Federal Judge Russell Clark essentially appointed himself State Education Commissar and King of the World. He COMMANDED that taxes be doubled. No vote, no consent, no due process, no nothing. Just raw judicial power to steal and tyrannize. Other schools suffered as this arrogant liberal gold-plated his obsession.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

"44 percent of the entire state budget for elementary and secondary education was going to just the 9 percent of the state's students who lived in Kansas City and St. Louis. Missouri was spending more on desegregation than it was spending on prisons, courts, the highway patrol, and the state fire marshal combined.

To parents in the state's 529 other school districts, it seemed extraordinarily unfair that Kansas City was awash in money while their districts had to cope two years in a row with funding declines that forced them to hold bake sales and car washes to finance programs, sell hot dogs and sodas to buy school athletic uniforms, and clip soup coupons to buy computers.

To replace the money that the state sent to St. Louis and Kansas City, other districts in the state had to cancel field trips and extracurricular activities, defer maintenance, fire teachers, and freeze salaries. The decline in state revenue cost the Springfield school district $4 million--4 percent of its entire budget. As there was no slack in the budget, Springfield had to fire 19 employees; defer grouting the mortar on 100-year-old brick buildings; cancel public speaking classes; dispense with water safety courses; and beg for money to send students to the Civil War battlefield at Wilson's Creek, an annual trip that had been made for decades. In the meantime, the KCMSD was spending $50,000 a month to bring students to school in taxis, sending its fencing team to Senegal, and dispatching the district superintendent on a goodwill mission to Moscow."..........

This is what will happen with Health Control if Obama succeeds. It's already happening with national security as judges try to run things they are unequipped and unauthorized to run.

[alwaysfiredup]

phil: "coloreds"? Really?

And yes, for many years Kansas City (my hometown, btw, and shorthand for the KC school district even though the city also contains several other school districts) got a ton of money via a deseg lawsuit. But newsflash: that money is gone, long, long gone.

The deseg suit is only distantly related to why the schools need to be closed, because that suit ended 15 years ago. The quality of the schools did deteriorate immediately after losing the deseg money in the mid-nineties. As the middle and high schools are terrible and dangerous (Lincoln College Prep excepted), no KC parent worth their salt will put their kids there anymore, so district enrollment declines a lot between kindergarten and fourth or fifth grade. Also, KC has a ton of decent charter schools, particularly in more affluent parts of the city, in reaction to the long-time terrible-ness of the school district. Almost all charter schools have long waiting lists. Free options thus do exist beyond the public schools. The state awards money based on the number of enrolled students, and the district is bleeding students to both private and charter schools, so every year the KC district has to function with fewer resources (and is notoriously slow to fire administrative staff).

Additionally, with many fewer students enrolled, a lot of KC's buildings are empty. They have some decent elementary schools housed in crumbling buildings and some abysmal elementary schools in state-of-the-art facilities. They need to close schools and move successful programs to nicer facilities, it just makes sense. Then they need to figure out how to make their middle and high schools safe before they can improve the learning that goes on there.

But we've been here so many times before. A new super comes in, makes some reasonable recommendations for change, the community erupts, political pressures force cutbacks in the recommended changes, nothing improves, the board gets mad and fires the super. There's nothing terribly unusual about the KC schools, they are just another dysfunctional urban district. St. Louis isn't any better. The deseg money was a waste, but they aren't getting it any more, so it's kind of a red herring. It did prove that the difference between local and suburban schools wasn't just better facilities.

[alwaysfiredup]

*between urban and suburban schools, sorry.

[Scott]

I hope that they don't shut down all of their schools before they find Toto. He could be anywhere.