Kansas City, Mo., school board faces key decision on closing schools, avoiding bankruptcy

Kansas City, Mo., school board to vote on closures

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Parents, students and community leaders were making one last bid Wednesday night to persuade Kansas City school board members not to close nearly half the district’s schools in an effort to avoid bankruptcy.

The board was expected to vote on a proposal to close 29 out of 61 schools to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall.

Teachers at six other low-performing schools would be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district would sell its downtown central office.

The district also would cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs — including 285 teachers.

Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks told board members the cuts would harm the poorest part of the city and jeopardize development.

“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment,” she said to applause from a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people. “And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district. It is shameful and sinful.”

Laura Loyacono, 45, the parent of a 13-year-old girl and 16-year-old boy, served on a committee that helped draft the closure proposal.

“It’s not an easy thing,” Loyacono said. “We knew going into that we would have a significant number of schools because of the budget issues and because the resources have been so diluted and so spread out that I think some of the program quality has really suffered. Some of the really good programs we have really suffered.”

Despite the need, she said nobody likes to see schools closed.

“It’s a tough day,” Loyacono said.

Superintendent John Covington has spent the past month making the case to sometimes angry groups of parents and students that the closures are necessary.

Covington has stressed that the district’s buildings are only half-full as its population has plummeted amid political squabbling and chronically abysmal test scores. The district’s enrollment of fewer than 18,000 students is about half of what the schools had a decade ago and just a quarter of its peak in the late 1960s.

Many students have left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs.

Fewer students means less money from the state. For the past few years, the district has been plowing through the large reserves it built up when money from a $2 billion court-ordered desegregation plan was flooding its coffers.

School administrators have said that without radical cuts, the district could be in the red by 2011.

Further stressing the budget, the district will lose $23.5 million in the upcoming academic year that it had received from the state for educating students who attended seven schools that have switched to a better-performing neighboring district.

The school district isn’t the only one serving students in Kansas; several smaller districts operate in the city’s boundaries. But few if any have generated as much negative publicity as the higher-profile Kansas City district.

While there has been a national rise in the closing of public schools as districts cope with a recession that has eaten away at academic budgets, the potential closures in Kansas City are striking in scope.

Detroit closed 29 schools before classes began this fall, but that still left the district with 172 schools. Many big districts are closing only one or two schools.

Even parents who saw the need for closures didn’t want to see their schools affected.

Parent Krystal Brown, who held a sign reading “Vote No to Close Our Buildings,” said her first-grade son and third-grade daughter attend a three-campus school with an African-focused curriculum that is scheduled to be consolidated into a single building. She noted the schools fare well in comparison to other district schools and said they should be used “as an example.”

Loren Reed, 42, and his wife, Cassandra, 41, also saw the need for closures. Still, they were considering sending their twin 10-year-old daughters to a publicly funded charter school if the closures were approved.

“We are hearing other parents are talking about doing the same thing,” Cassandra Reed said.