Like so many other public school parents, Reshonda Sanders felt confused on Thursday as she tried to comprehend why nearly half of the schools in Kansas City, including her own alma mater, are to close for good at the end of the year. As the mother of two high school students, she was well aware of the district’s struggles.
“But even so, I thought, could they be serious? Close almost 30 schools, all at once?” said Sanders, 34. “That’s devastating for us. How did it get to be this bad? What were they doing for years and years so that something like this happens just like overnight?”
In her bafflement, Sanders is not alone. In the wake of the Kansas City school board’s decision to shutter 28 of its 61 schools, many people were left scratching their heads. While school closings as a result of demographic change and tight budgets are commonplace across the country, rarely does a system lose half of itself in one sweep.
The sudden move suggests a depth of dysfunction here that is rarely associated with Kansas City, a lively heartland town with a reputation for order. But a closer look at the school board’s recent history reveals a chaotic, almost nonfunctioning body that put off making tough choices and even routine improvements for generations. Experts said that in the board’s years of inaction is a cautionary tale for school districts everywhere.
“This is extraordinary,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a research group in Washington. “The school board was dysfunctional for years. There was very poor governance for a long period of time, and it was like a revolving door with superintendents.”
Jennings also said the board was plagued with “a general unwillingness to face the facts” of the chaos it created.
Students have been leaving the Kansas City public schools in droves. Close to 18,000 students exited to suburban districts or charter schools in the last 10 years alone. The student enrollment is now 17,400 children, who are mostly black and impoverished.
And achievement levels in the schools are abysmal: Fewer than a third of elementary students in the city schools read at or above grade level. In most of the schools, fewer than a quarter of students are proficient at their grade levels.
Faced with a US$50 million deficit in its US$300 million budget, the district decided to close the schools. The plan also calls for the elimination of 700 of 3,000 jobs, including teaching positions.
Education experts praised the new schools superintendent, John Covington, who was hired in April from the Pueblo, Colorado, school district where he was also superintendent, for pushing for change. A former principal and teacher, Covington spent months researching and writing the Right-Sizing plan and managed to win a 5-4 majority from the board.
Previous superintendents had failed in similar efforts to downsize the district.
“He put a mountain of information out there with statistics, and people finally understood what was happening, even if they didn’t like it,” said Duane Kelly, who has been a school board member for 10 years and voted in favor of the closings. “It was time.”
The local teachers’ union agreed.
“We have buildings that are half empty,” said Andrea Flinders, the union president. “We recognized that schools needed to be closed, but the board wasn’t willing. This board is different.”
If the schools had fallen into bankruptcy, as was predicted before the closings, the state would have seized control, and made changes as it saw fit.
In 2006, the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington-based coalition of the nation’s largest school districts, produced an extensive analysis of what was going wrong in the Kansas City schools. It concluded that the board wasted too much time on administrative trivia, its instructional program lacked “cohesion and forward momentum” and it had “no machinery” for intervening when students fell behind.
The council included advice in the report on how the schools could fix themselves, but little if any action appeared to have been taken as a result.
At times before Wednesday night’s vote, the board’s meeting threatened to fall into chaos, with members trading insults, not following rules of order and even crying. An angry audience shouted its general disapproval.
“This is too much, too fast,” said a parent, Carmen Edwards, after the vote.
Nakisha Eubanks, a mother of three students, said: “I don’t want my kids in this district, going through all this disruption. But I can’t move, and I don’t have transportation. So, this is it.”
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