Students pick up laptops and other school supplies during orientation for Brookside Virtual Academy on Aug. 20 in Kansas City. Brian Wilson (left) said he and his wife like giving individual attention to their kids’ education at home (Vaughn Wheat/The Beacon).

Bridget Bolder sent her daughter, Mia, to kindergarten at a neighborhood public school. After all, it seemed the “normal, regular thing to do.”

But Bolder started to worry that some of her daughter’s classmates were exposing her to inappropriate topics. Early in the school year, Mia had to tell a teacher about a boy groping some of the other girls.

“I’m like, she’s a baby,” Bolder said. “Bring her home a little while longer before I throw her to the wolves.”

Brian Wilson and his wife homeschooled three of their children last year. They struggled to juggle home life, both parents’ jobs and teaching the kids.

The family briefly switched to in-person school, but Wilson said it only validated the parents’ theory that the individual attention the kids got at home had been working.

“They seemed like head and shoulders above all the other kids when it comes to learning,” he said. “My son, Aaron — he’s the youngest — he was actually helping kids in his class.”

Both families have turned to the new Brookside Virtual Academy so they could keep their kids at home and still rely on professional teachers to lead their schooling.

The academy is attached to Brookside Charter School and bills itself as Kansas City’s only virtual program where teaching happens on live, interactive video calls.

Online school isn’t widely popular. It’s been blamed for some of the learning loss that set kids back during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kansas City Public Schools closed its virtual academy for kindergarten through fifth grade this year because of shrinking enrollment, district spokesperson Shain Bergan said in an email.

But for a girl with severe social anxiety? A boy with leukemia? A young athlete with a rigorous training and travel schedule?

Leslie Correa, who helped design the KCPS program, said certain students and families need the option. So she found a home for the program at Brookside, where she’s now the virtual academy principal.

“The students that virtual works for, it works really well for,” she said. “We cannot close the door to them for having a great education.”

Who succeeds in virtual education?

For some students, the computer screen provides a layer of distance that makes them braver, Correa said. Learning from home can also reduce distracting sensory overload for some kids with autism.

For example, loud or persistent background noise, visually busy environments or other students bumping into them could overwhelm some children.

Other students might need virtual school for logistical reasons.

That could include students who are barred from in-person school for disciplinary issues, traveling athletes, kids going through intensive medical treatment like dialysis or chemotherapy, or parents who struggle with transportation.

Some families identify as homeschoolers but want professional help teaching reading and math, Correa said. Since virtual school is more concise, it leaves more flexibility in the day.

Parents’ fears can also push them toward keeping kids at home.

“Anytime that there has been a violent occurrence in one of our schools in Kansas City, I get a big uptick in enrollment,” Correa said. “They feel scared and they’re looking for an alternative.”

When virtual learning doesn’t work

To figure out if it’s a good fit, Correa starts by asking parents why they’re interested in virtual school.

“If it’s, you know, ‘I don’t have day care and I need my 12-year-old to be home to watch my kid,’ it’s kind of an alarm,” she said. “I’m not the one to judge what their decision is, but I am the one to help arm them with information.”

The virtual academy serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Because Kansas City-area charter schools can only operate within the boundaries of KCPS, its students have to be from that area.

The virtual academy doesn’t turn students away based on their reason to enroll, Correa said, but it monitors their progress. If a student isn’t thriving, she meets with a parent to make a plan, like tutoring or switching the child to in-person school.

Schools can deny virtual education if they document that it’s not in the student’s best interest.

“My goal before getting to that point is always to have the parent make that decision for themselves through very hard conversation,” Correa said. “But it does happen.”

Problems can arise when the virtual school doesn’t think it can fulfill an individualized education program, or IEP, often used to support students with disabilities.

“The parent has the option to return to in-person learning or waive the IEP, and then their student does not get that support,” Correa said. “They almost never waive the IEP.”

Students can also get removed from virtual school, and referred for truancy, if they stop signing in or engaging at all for too many days.

Correa said she’s also attentive to offering ways for virtual students to get more comfortable with in-person interaction.

Virtual school students can attend optional in-person events and participate in Brookside clubs and sports.

“If they want to kind of test the water, the opportunity is there,” she said. “If a student is saying to me, ‘I am ready to go in a building,’ then OK. But then also, if a student is saying to me, ‘I need out of the building,’ OK, I’m here. I just don’t want to disrupt their education.”

How virtual learning works 

Right before the school year started, Brookside Charter School’s STEAM lab was set up for virtual academy orientation.

Teachers and school leaders passed out laptops, hot spots for internet access and school supplies.

The supply bags include books, basics like pencils and glue, whiteboards and dry erase markers (extra for younger kids, who tend to leave the caps off), and individually packaged science kits for lessons on the solar system, geology or density.

But first, families settled in for a presentation to learn the basics.

Brookside Virtual Academy starts at 9 a.m. with a lesson on leadership.

Most days, students then launch into reading class, followed by math. Wednesdays are for science.

Students spend about two and a half hours in live virtual lessons each day, and another 90 minutes online working through a task list that includes social studies and science.

Live classes use video calls and technology that lets teachers monitor what students are looking at and control their screens.

Parents aren’t responsible for teaching their kids, but they’re expected to keep in touch and generally make sure the students are online and on task.

Connecting with families

For some parents, being extra involved in part of the draw.

Wilson, the parent of three kids in the program, said he appreciates that it cuts the school day down to essentials, allowing parents to be more strategic about where they put time into their kids’ education.

Bolder, the parent of a first grader, said she’s looking forward to more easily monitoring what her daughter is learning so she can help supplement that.

Virtual education makes it easier to connect with families, said Tina Duvall, a reading and math interventionist for kindergarten through fourth grade.

“I get to be in their home with them. It takes away a whole lot of anxiety for kids,” she said. “I thought in my years past teaching that I knew — really, really knew — my students’ families, but not like this.”

Duvall will be working with breakout groups of students, grouped by grade or ability level.

With about 100 students as of Aug. 20, two or three grades are combined under each of four virtual academy teachers. But staggered schedules and help from interventionists like Duvall will allow each grade to learn separately.

The biggest challenge, Duvall said, is not being able to sit by a student to point things out or hand them what they need.

“You just want to reach through the screen and help,” she said.

Bolder and Wilson said they have their kids in in-person activities so they can socialize. But they’re not sure if they’ll ever go to in-person school.

“There shouldn’t be such a thing as a bad school,” Wilson said. “But because there is, until we’re able to put our kids in a good school … then we feel like we’re more suited to teach our kids at home.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Kansas City Public Schools won't won’t finalize its bonding plan until November. Until then, members of the public can weigh in (Getty Images).

Superintendent Jennifer Collier understands why families weren’t inspired by the last Kansas City Public Schools building plan.

“It really just felt like … trying to convince people why they should be OK with us taking away their school,” she said.

A new plan to build at least two new schools and renovate others, reshuffle students and close some older buildings has more to offer, she said.

“Any school where the students would be moving, they would typically be moving into new sites, new buildings or highly renovated spaces,” Collier said. “We’re able to actually give our students and our staff and our families something.”

But the district is also asking more of the community — higher property taxes.

KCPS needs to persuade at least four out of every seven voters to approve a general obligation bond in April. The bond allows the district to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars, with the promise that it can raise taxes to pay back the debt.

In many districts, bonds are a routine way to build and update schools. KCPS hasn’t convinced voters to pass a bond in nearly 60 years, though it did receive an influx of money in the 1980s and ‘90s as a result of court-ordered taxing and spending related to a desegregation case. Some of its newer schools were built in that time period.

The lack of a bond has left the district behind on repairs and upgrades. KCPS says it needs $1.25 billion — about $650 million to fix deferred maintenance problems and another $600 million for upgrades. It’s seeking about half of that amount over the next 10 years.

Collier said students notice the difference when they visit other schools.

“All of that impacts the way a child views themselves,” she said. “We want our kids to know they’re important, that they’re worthy, and they have the same kind of spaces and learning environments as other children.”

The initial bond proposal was presented to the school board Aug. 14, but it won’t be finalized until November. Between now and then, residents can weigh in. Here’s what you need to know.

What is a bond? 

A bond is a way for a school district to borrow money for big building projects, ones it wouldn’t be able to afford as part of its normal yearly budget.

KCPS would pursue two types of bonds under the current proposal.

A general obligation bond requires voter approval and would result in higher property taxes.

A certificate of participation bond doesn’t require a vote and doesn’t raise taxes, but it would cover a smaller amount of money.

How much money is the district seeking? 

Overall, KCPS wants to raise $680 million for its 10-year building plan.

In the first stage of the plan, it would borrow $100 million, and ask voters to approve another $424 million bond in April 2025.

Charter schools, which can’t borrow against the ability to raise taxes on their own, might also participate. Eight of the 20 local charter schools are interested and have building needs totaling more than $168 million.

They’ll prioritize those needs, include up to $50 million worth in the bond and finalize agreements with KCPS by October. That could push the bond total to $474 million.

During the second half of the plan, KCPS would seek the remaining $156 million, including through another bond.

How much would my taxes go up? 

KCPS predicts that for a $474 million bond, someone with a home valued at $200,000 would pay an additional $231.80 per year in additional property taxes. A commercial property with the same value would pay an additional $390.40 per year.

The median home value in the district is $180,000, Deputy Superintendent Derald Davis said.

How will the money be used? 

Funds will be used in three main areas:

• Deferred maintenance, such as roof repair, electrical, HVAC and plumbing.
• Making buildings more suitable for teaching and learning.
• Moving sixth graders out of elementary schools and into middle schools.

During Phase I of the plan, the district plans to spend:

• $64.2 million on deferred maintenance and improvements in 18 schools.
• $136 million building two new schools.
• $104.8 to 135.4 million for major renovations at up to four schools.
• $48.9 million to combine four school sites into two.
• $62.4 million to relocate students to five existing school buildings.

KCPS also expects savings as some buildings close.

Some plans are still unsettled.

The proposal includes a new South Middle School to create enough space for sixth graders. KCPS is considering whether it should renovate the closed Southwest High School into a middle school or build a new school at one of two proposed sites.

The district is also considering merging two Montessori schools and making Border Star Montessori into a neighborhood school instead of expanding Hale Cook Elementary School.

Can I influence the bond plan? 

KCPS is seeking feedback on the bond plan before the board approves it in November.

“Much of this won’t be a surprise,” Collier said, but “sometimes there are things that maybe we just didn’t think of. Maybe there’s some brilliant ideas out there in our community.”

Would any schools close? 

Yes. Phillis Wheatley Elementary School, built in 1955, would close.

Its students would be split between J.A. Rogers and Wendell Phillips Elementary Schools, both built in the 1990s. The district would spend extra money renovating those schools.

That’s the only example of students being scattered to other buildings as a school completely closes — a notable difference from an earlier school closure plan.

But other buildings will close as students move into brand new or renovated buildings, special programs relocate or schools merge into shared sites.

What happens to the building when a school closes? 

KCPS can keep a school for future use, demolish it or try to sell it.

While the district has struggled to find buyers for several schools, KCPS has been recognized for its overall success at finding ways to reuse schools and involving the community in school repurposing decisions.

Some schools that closed in the past — like Satchel Paige Elementary School and Southwest High School — could get new life as part of the plan.

What new schools would be built? 

KCPS would build two new campuses centered around elementary schools.

One $68 million project at the former King/Weeks site is called the King Empowerment Campus. It would house a new K-5 King Elementary School, a family empowerment center, Richardson Early Learning Center and the Wheatley special education program.

A family empowerment center will include services such as a food pantry, clothing closet, mini laundromat, dental clinic and a site for students to receive physicals, Collier said. The King project is a top priority because the district promised a new school at that location years ago.

The district would spend the same dollar amount on a Woodland Empowerment Campus on the current Woodland site.

It would house a new K-5 Elementary School for Whittier Elementary School students, Woodland Early Learning Center, a family empowerment center and the Global Academy for students new to the U.S.

What schools would move? 

King Elementary School would move into a brand new building, vacating the former Kansas City Middle School of the Arts building on the Paseo Academy campus.

George Washington Carver Dual Language Academy would move into that building. The move would allow the program to expand and strengthen its connection to the Paseo dual language program.

Melcher Elementary School would move into the former Carver building, which is newer and in better condition. The school grew dramatically during the 2023-24 school year.

The African-Centered College Preparatory Academy would move out of its current building, which is oversized and built in the 1960s, into the former Satchel Paige Elementary School, built in 1991.

What schools would get major renovations? 

Renovations and a new addition at Central High School would allow the school to house career and technical education programs, which could also serve other districts and charter schools.

The district could then close Manual Career and Technical Center instead of doing $100 million worth of work to update the building.

KCPS’ two alternative schools, Success Academy at Knotts and Success Academy at Anderson, would merge at the Knotts location. The district would renovate the building to maintain separation between elementary and secondary students.

Northeast and Central Middle Schools would get renovations aimed at moving sixth graders in from elementary schools. Southwest High School could become a new middle school.

If funding is available, East, Southeast and Lincoln College Preparatory High Schools could also see major renovations, such as a new competition gym or a relocated cafeteria.

What if I’m not moving or getting a new school? 

KCPS is suggesting districtwide updates to keep schools “warm, safe and dry” and improve learning environments.

The district would spend between $1.3 million and $6 million on each elementary school in Phase I of the plan. Throughout the 10-year plan, they could receive between $4.5 million and $12.5 million each.

KCPS would also spend between $2.9 million and $6.1 million on each middle and high school in Phase 1. They could eventually receive between $4.8 million and $25.3 million each.

That’s not counting schools reopening, changing buildings or expecting major renovations.

Can buildings improve academics? 

Physical spaces are an integral part of how students learn, said Jordan Gordon, the school district’s chief operating officer.

Research shows a connection between certain building improvements — especially fixing infrastructure like heating and air conditioning, roofs, plumbing and furnaces — and higher achievement.

”They have (a) real impact on our students’ ability to learn and process information,” Gordon said.

What happens if the bond doesn’t pass? 

If the bond doesn’t pass, KCPS will evaluate what went wrong and prioritize projects that keep schools safe and clean, Gordon said, but will be limited by how much money it can set aside.

“We’ll continue to find ways to do the best we can,” he said. “But candidly speaking, that is not a sustainable way, a proper way, to support kids’ education.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Students are still in class in late July at Ingels Elementary School in Kansas City, part of the Hickman Mills School District. For the second year in a row, Ingels students attend school year-round, including for most of the summer (Vaughn Wheat/The Beacon).

When Natalie Brooks moved her daughters into North Kansas City Schools, she didn’t realize her neighborhood school was one of two in the district that put kids in class an extra 31 days.

She became an advocate of the program, believing it helped to skip long summer breaks where her daughters might forget what they’d learned at Crestview Elementary.

“I bragged about it for years,” she said, to “every single parent that crossed my path.”

So Brooks was “completely livid and upset” when she got a surprise email saying that Crestview would take summers off after the 2024-25 school year.

The theory of year-round school had seemed sound, and initial results were positive.

Other schools saw it, too.

In the Hickman Mills School District, test scores rose after the district moved an elementary school to year-round classes.

Charter school Gordon Parks Elementary credits its two years on an extended calendar with helping it catch up after the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the model also comes with pitfalls. For starters, it costs more. It also added to teacher burnout and faced attendance problems.

And after an encouraging start, NKC Schools saw achievement plunge at its year-round schools, accompanied by high teacher and student turnover.

In October, the school board voted to phase out the program. NKC declined an interview with The Beacon.

Parent Kyle Dennis said he’s not set on keeping the extended school year — though he originally moved to the district because of it — if someone could show him a better alternative.

But he’s not convinced the other ideas the district has floated, including teacher retention strategies, summer school and more coaching for teachers, will fix the “cratering” achievement the district described.

Some of the ideas aren’t specific yet. Others, like summer school, are similar to extending the school year but with less consistency and lower enrollment.

“I just want there to be a better option,” Dennis said. “How are you going to abandon year-round (school) and then go, ‘Oh, we’re going to do July summer school.’? It’s the same thing, except worse.”

The plan for year-round school

The idea was simple.

Students who spent more time in school would learn more and avoid the “summer slide” followed by time rehashing what they’d forgotten over break.

Parents would appreciate the extra education for their kids and the free summer child care.

Teachers would pursue the opportunity to earn a higher salary. Experienced teachers, in particular, would eye bigger pay bumps and the boost a raise would give to their retirement.

The district had tested a longer school year for students who didn’t speak English at home, said Kent Yocum, at the time instructional coach in the North Kansas City district. He was involved with that program and wrote his doctoral thesis about its success.

In mid-2015, NKC Schools expanded the program to all students at two of its lowest-performing elementary schools, Crestview and Winnwood.

The reality of year-round school

At first, that expanded program seemed to succeed, too.

A 2019 report found mixed results, said Donna Ginther, a professor of economics and director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas, who worked on the report.

Compared to similar NKC students, her research found, the year-round kids saw gains in math scores for some grades and improved English scores for one group of students.

“It wasn’t a silver bullet,” Ginther said. “The program helped, but I don’t think it was ever going to close the achievement gap.”

Ginther said she’d like to see students go through the program for a longer period, and without the interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, to truly study its success.

The district continued the program. But academic achievement started to sink back below state averages, Deputy Superintendent Chad Sutton said during an October 2023 presentation to the school board.

Other signs hinted that the program hadn’t gone as planned.

District leaders had anticipated students who attended year-round school for six years getting the equivalent of an extra year of education. But many students didn’t experience that.

In spring 2023, a little more than three dozen Winnwood and Crestview fifth graders had attended the same school since kindergarten.

Winnwood was about to be merged with another elementary school.

More families moved to other schools. Attendance was lower in the summer, partly because Missouri didn’t legally require summer attendance.

Teachers were also leaving, with a five-year average turnover rate of 24% in one school, district spokesperson Susan Hiland said. The longer school year may have contributed to burnout.

Ginther, the researcher, said high teacher turnover could undermine the positive impact of a longer school year.

Community response

NKC Schools should have spent less time looking at numbers and more time talking to families, Brooks said.

She didn’t know the district had discussed ending the schedule until the decision was announced.

Dennis, at the time Parent Teacher Association vice president for Crestview, said he got a few days’ notice at a sparsely attended PTA meeting. He got the impression that it was too late to influence the recommendation.

The board presentation implied the district had consulted parents more than it actually had, Dennis said. He said surveys he received weren’t specifically about the school calendar.

While year-round school has been in place, parents have had the chance to give feedback through various surveys, Hiland wrote. She didn’t name any specific outreach to Crestview before the decision was announced.

After the decision, administrators collected feedback through parent and staff meetings.

A Jan. 9 parent meeting at Crestview went forward even though school was snowed out that day and the following day, Dennis said.

“We were literally there because we could be in four-wheel drive vehicles,” he said. “It was a small group of people, and that was one of our points of frustration.”

Brooks attended that meeting, hoping NKC Schools would backtrack, or at least give parents a chance to vote on year-round school.

She now believes that was never on the table, and said the district wasted her time and cost her money she would have earned for her family picking up Lyft fares.

“I feel like my voice (doesn’t) matter because it hasn’t changed for any of them to say, ‘I’m sorry. We apologize. We’re going to keep the extended school year,’” she said.

The future

A task force of NKC teachers, administrators and two parents met in March to discuss backup plans for helping students.

Hiland said the district plans for an expanded, more diverse task force, including more parents and staff from additional schools. The group will review feedback and finalize recommendations for the board to approve in the fall.

Without a convincing backup plan, Dennis sees the district withdrawing one form of support from a struggling school and replacing it with weaker alternatives.

District leaders have admitted summer school isn’t adequate, Dennis said, including in a meeting recording he shared with The Beacon.

Dennis said year-round school is different in that students have the same teachers and classmates, attendance is higher and it always takes place in the student’s normal school.

But he said that even with year-round school, the district pulled back on some support during the summer. Meals are worse, staffing is lower and new technology isn’t issued.

“That whole idea that there’s a distinction between summer school and year-round (school). Of course there is,” he said. But “they’ve been treating year-round like it’s summer school.”

Results at Hickman Mills

In southern Kansas City, Ingels Elementary in the Hickman Mills district is starting its second year of year-round school.

Superintendent Yaw Obeng said he needed a strategy to turn around lagging test scores.

He replaced the principal and hired teachers interested in the school’s schedule and philosophy.

The school now has a “World of Work” theme focusing on careers. Obeng said the longer school year allows more time for field trips and guest speakers.

Test scores are up, year-round students outperform their peers who arrived after the summer, and teacher retention has improved, Obeng said.

Year-round school costs more. Obeng hopes Missouri might change the funding model, but so far, the benefits are worth the money.

“We’ve just got to lead and show that this is the way to go in education,” he said. “Let’s demonstrate, bring the data forward, bring the feedback, and then that’s how change is made.”

An experiment at Gordon Parks

Several years ago, Yocum brought his experience in North Kansas City to his new role as principal at Gordon Parks Elementary School.

Worried about pandemic learning loss, he and other school leaders decided to extend the school year.

CEO Kirsten Lipari-Braman said the charter school, which also revamped its curriculum, saw “tremendous academic growth” during those years.

Teachers usually spend the first few months acclimating kids and building relationships, she said. If you’re “getting a lot of that kind of nuts and bolts out of the way” in June and July, “you can really hit the floor running in August.”

“(But) sometimes you have to step back, and you have to rethink,” Lipari-Braman said. “Maybe we try it again a different way.”

Money posed one problem. Even during Gordon Parks’ short break between school years, some families sent kids to other summer schools. Due to a quirk of state law, those schools got all the state funding for those children, though they attended Gordon Parks most of the summer.

Another source of money, pandemic relief funding, was about to end.

Families were divided, and mostly neutral, on whether to continue the schedule. But teachers were burning out.

Yocum said the school is especially sensitive to retaining teachers because it’s small. He was surprised how little teachers were motivated by the extra pay. Instead, they were worried they couldn’t keep up the pace.

So this summer, kids and teachers are out of school.

Yocum, who recently took a job as a school improvement consultant with the Kansas City Regional Professional Development Center, said he thinks year-round school is still worthwhile.

“It really serves a purpose,” he said. “But now, if I was talking to somebody, I have some additional information that’s important in that decision-making process.”

He’d suggest they think about how to build in adequate breaks for teachers and warn them that state funding might be trickier than it appears.

In North Kansas City, Brooks said when she looks back on her own education in the 1990s, she feels robbed. She wonders if an extended school year would have helped.

“If I had that when I was a kid, I might be more successful,” she said. “But I didn’t get that. So I have to kind of live vicariously through my children and make sure …every child gets the extended school year.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A Missouri law adopted in 2022 requires that all public school elementary students get reading instruction that has proved “highly likely to be effective" (Getty Images).

If you drop into an elementary reading lesson, you might see kids learning about the long U sound, building their vocabulary or practicing how to read aloud without sounding like robots.

And if you visit Kansas City Public Schools this fall, you should see all students in the same grade learning the same thing.

After all, a push is underway in KCPS to standardize reading lessons and anchor them in evidence about how students learn best.

Around the state, schools are retraining thousands of teachers, replacing outdated reading lessons and identifying students who need extra help.

Missouri is the latest in a string of states to put money and the force of law behind an effort to teach more kids to read.

The strategy hinges on the idea that some teaching methods weren’t working very well. Kids struggled to read, though they were capable of learning. Research — often known as the “science of reading” — pointed to a better way, but wasn’t always heeded.

“Teachers that are coming into the profession just don’t have that science of reading background from universities,” said Connie Moore, director of elementary curriculum at KCPS. 

Evidence-based teacher training is “assisting those brand new teachers, even veteran teachers, that have students come with reading deficiencies or specific needs around reading,” she said. “We’re getting students to read on grade level, because that’s the ultimate goal.”

Missouri law changes

A Missouri law adopted in 2022 requires that all public school elementary students get reading instruction that has proved “highly likely to be effective.”

That means the teaching techniques must have been studied by looking at the outcome for large numbers of students, and that they include five key components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Previously, science of reading proponents say, many students weren’t getting enough phonics instruction. Most kids need to be explicitly taught about sounds, how they relate to letters and how to use that knowledge to decode words.

Meanwhile, students were learning strategies that many now see as damaging — things like using pictures and context to guess words rather than sounding them out.

What a student learned in class could be the luck of the draw, said Megan Mitchell, a K-5 English language arts curriculum coordinator at KCPS.

One teacher might spend most of their time on foundational phonics skills while another might focus on comprehension, she said. But students need systematic instruction in all five areas.

Teachers also need to know how to work with students who need extra help.

“Before, I may have heard the (student’s) error, but just didn’t really have a concrete way to understand where that was coming from,” Moore said. “What’s going on that is causing this student to make this error, and how can I work with them to correct it?”

The law is meant to push schools toward proven strategies.

Changes include standards for educating new teachers. The law also gives the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education power to recommend curriculum, offer more teacher training and closely track how well young students can read.

Students who don’t score well on reading tests are supposed to receive intensive help.

But putting new education laws into action can be harder than getting them passed, said Torree Pederson, the president and CEO of Aligned, a nonprofit coalition of business leaders pushing for education reform.

“You’re handing it off to an agency that’s already stretched and asking them to do more,” she said. “It’s not an easy task to retrain all the teachers in Missouri.”

Implementing the law

The state doesn’t have the power to mandate curriculum or teacher training, but it is nudging districts in a certain direction.

With $25 million in state dollars and $35 million in federal relief money, the state education department is willing to pay for specific intensive reading training for at least 15,000 teachers.

The training, called LETRS and pronounced “letters,” emphasizes the science of reading and the five reading components Missouri law supports. It can take up to 168 hours over the course of at least two years.

The state also offers grants to replace old curriculum with evidence-based materials. Schools that don’t qualify for the grants can use the state’s list of recommended materials as a guide.

About 11,000 teachers have at least started the training under the state’s current program. Heather Knight, the state’s literacy coordinator, said several thousand more have been trained since 2021 through other state or local programs.

The state originally targeted K-3 and preschool teachers, but opened the training up to fourth and fifth grade teachers as well.

More than 480 of the roughly 550 school districts and charter schools in Missouri are participating. But even districts that appreciate LETRS training aren’t embracing it at the same pace.

KCPS has required the training for early elementary teachers, reading specialists and others, seeing it as a way to comply with the law on evidence-based instruction, Moore said. Practically all teachers in those groups have at least started the training.

North Kansas City Public Schools took a slower, more cautious approach, said instructional coordinator Lisa Friesen.

The training is now encouraged but not required for most teachers, Friesen said. About a third of elementary teachers have registered.

Some of the lessons from LETRS have made their way into the district’s reading curriculum, which is designed in-house and updated yearly.

Momentum to change 

Mitchell, the KCPS curriculum coordinator, thinks it was about four years ago when she started to hear about the science of reading.

The news came through research for her job, but also from a science of reading Facebook group and from American Public Media podcast “Sold a Story,” which has helped influence public opinion and inform a wider audience about reading research.

Although much of the research on reading is old, there’s new momentum behind evidence-based teaching. But Missouri is far from the first to try it.

A 2013 law gets credit for the “Mississippi miracle,” where that state’s reading scores dramatically increased. All school districts saw improvement, though gains weren’t even. Several other Deep South states have seen notable gains as well. And Florida, whose 2002 reading legislation inspired Mississippi’s, has among the best reading scores.

In early 2024, Education Week reported that 37 states and the District of Columbia had passed reading legislation in the past decade, most within the past five years, and 17 of them within 2023 alone.

A January 2024 policy analysis from ExcelInEd, a nonprofit founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, shows nearly all states have adopted some reading policies. Missouri now checks most of the think tank’s boxes.

Those lists don’t include Kansas’ latest literacy law, which Gov. Laura Kelly signed in April.

New curriculum

Companies that produce curriculum and other classroom resources are taking note.

Education company Learning A-Z knew schools would be looking for materials based on the science of reading, in part because of state law changes, President Aaron Ingold said.

So the company, which had focused on supplemental resources, recently got into creating a comprehensive curriculum called Foundations A-Z. It’s on Missouri’s  list of recommended resources.

Learning A-Z has changed some of its thinking, Ingold said. It no longer includes “cueing,” an out-of-favor strategy that encourages children to look at context such as pictures and sentence structure to figure out words rather than sounding them out.

Instead, the program includes more phonics instruction and books known as “decodables” that contain words and spelling patterns students have learned.

Moore said the science of reading is an example of how research doesn’t always “trickle down to us in a timely manner.”

But with training and curriculum companies on board, and the expectation that teachers will see gains in the classroom, she thinks it’s more than a passing fad.

“I don’t think it’s something that’s going to come and go in education,” she said.

This article first appeared on Beacon: Missouri and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

DeLaSalle High School says its cell phone ban helped reclaim learning time, but it might heed student advocacy to relax the policy (Photo illustration by Vaughn Wheat/The Beacon).

Facetime calls. Blaring music. Video games.

“You name it, it was happening” during class at DeLaSalle High School, said Breona Ward, director of college and career progressions.

The difference Ward saw in her English classroom was “night and day” after a crackdown on cellphones midway through the 2022-23 school year. With students’ phones locked up, she saw fewer power struggles, disruptions and social media-fueled conflicts.

Even students’ downtime was different, Ward said. Instead of having their heads bowed, eyes fixed on phones, they talked with one another and played board games.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You see kids who normally aren’t talking to each other, they’re not in the same friend group, but they are growing bonds, and they’re actually communicating.”

But 18 months after introducing a stricter cellphone policy, the Kansas City charter school is pondering how to ease up without reverting to the same old problems.

Students are advocating to use their phones in some circumstances, such as outside of class. Executive director Sean Stalling wants to encourage their initiative.

“While I might not agree 100% with every change” students have proposed, Stalling said, “I will agree 100% that having the policy that’s co-created with students and school … will be easier to enforce and easier to implement.”

How the policy worked

DeLaSalle launched its strict approach to cellphone use in early 2023.

The school — which specializes in working with students who were behind on credits or otherwise struggled at other high schools — urgently needed to get more out of classroom time. After all, they were still catching up from the pandemic.

Some research shows negative impacts on academic performance, mental health and exercise when students use cellphones in school.

Three-quarters of public schools nationally prohibited using cellphones for nonacademic reasons during the 2020-21 school year, but enforcement of those bans is wildly uneven. A 2023 study of about 200 children ages 11 to 17 found 97% of them used cellphones in school.

Rather than just putting a cellphone ban in writing, DeLaSalle used magnetically sealed pouches made by Yondr and marketed for schools, events and workplaces. Students can carry the pouches with them, but they only open with a special unlocking station.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to work.

Students quickly discovered that the pouches are fallible, Principal Erin Wilmore said.

A Google search brings up advice on breaching the lock, sometimes without tell-tale damage.

Students’ attempts to skirt the policy have required the school to devote time to enforcement rather than relying on Yondr alone, Wilmore said.

As part of the morning routine, students go through bag checks and Wilmore or a vice principal examines every Yondr pouch. When they find a damaged pouch, they toss it.

In class, teachers who catch students using phones call administrators.

Students who violate the policy can have their phones confiscated during school, sometimes for days or weeks. Other than those consequences, the policy isn’t meant to be punitive.

“We do not want to suspend kids, restrict them and do things to them that could lead to them not being in school,” Stalling said.

Students also got around the policy by bringing tablets — too big to fit in Yondr pouches — or Apple watches, Ward said. But in general, those devices have been less disruptive than phones. For example, it’s easier to see at a glance how a student is using a tablet.

Reactions and impact

Stalling said the policy left more time for teaching.

Students beat the scores of their Kansas City Public Schools neighborhood high school peers, on average, when they took their 2023 state English exams. DeLaSalle records also show they narrowed the gap on math scores. Final scores for 2024 aren’t available yet.

Stalling said it’s notable because many DeLaSalle students previously struggled in those neighborhood schools. It’s not clear how much of the improvement is a result of the cellphone policy.

Teachers generally supported launching the cellphone policy, Stalling said, with the exception of one who already had a policy that was working well.

Wilmore, the principal, said teachers generally appreciate the clarity and the attempt to reclaim instruction time. But they also say enforcement — hailing an administrator when a kid gets busted for using a phone — can pose its own distraction.

About 95% of parents also support the policy, Stalling said. Some even help enforce it.

“We have had parents call us to say, ‘Hey, my son just called me from the bathroom, and I know he’s not supposed to have his phone,’” he said.

Some parents say they worry about safety and how they’d reach their child during a shooting or some other crisis, Ward said.

The school made exceptions for special circumstances such as students using phones to monitor medical conditions, expecting an important phone call from court or going through a family tragedy.

Students who go off campus for internships or college classes are generally allowed to keep their phones with them for safety reasons, Ward said.

She thinks phones pose their own risks. Social media drama “spills over into real life here in the building,” she said. “Behavioral incidents have (gone) down significantly because they have less access to their phones.”

Phone restrictions also prevent real-life teasing or conflict from being recorded, going viral and becoming a schoolwide incident, Stalling said.

Students, generally, aren’t so hot on the policy.

Administrators and students are negotiating potential changes, Stalling said. DeLaSalle will still keep phones out of class but could retire Yondr pouches — unless a student breaks the rules.

“Instructional time will still be sacred,” Stalling said. But “students have lunch, students have passing periods, students have out-of-the-building programs. And so there are times that the students would like to have access to their phone.”

Ideas about tweaking the policy are worth listening to, Wilmore said. But she also likes what the strict version of the cellphone ban has done.

Students now understand, she said, “that we’re not going to let phones take away from the culture of learning. … It showed them an extremity. Now, it’s putting the ball back in their court if we revise the policy.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Second graders study in a classroom on May 7 at George Melcher Elementary School. Kansas City Public Schools changed its grading policy beginning with the 2023-24 school year (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

Finish zero schoolwork, expect zero for a grade.

Not anymore in Kansas City Public Schools.

The district launched a different grading system during the most recent school year. The minimum grade on any given assignment is now 40%, even if the student didn’t do a single bit of it.

The district started to discuss changes to the grading policy — which also addresses late work and grading categories — in 2021 to make grades more objective, more equitable and less punitive.

KCPS declined an interview with The Beacon, but the district has said publicly that the new system leads to grades that better reflect students’ mastery of their schoolwork.

It has drawn a mix of praise and criticism.

“Those who do not support it say you should not get 40% for doing nothing. (If) you are an hourly employee, and you don’t come to work, you don’t get 40% of your pay,” said Jason Roberts, president of the district’s teachers union. “Those who do support it say a 40% is still an F. But it’s an F that you can recover from.”

Tricia McGhee, a KCPS parent, backs the 40% grade minimum. But she said the late work policy has been unclear and inconsistent in her daughters’ middle school.

KCPS should also have done more to engage with families before implementing changes, McGhee said.

“Conversations have been going on for three years surrounding this,” she said. “Those three years could have been used a little bit better had they been in conversation with parents.”

The KCPS grading policy’s impact on schools

High school student Zoe Wilson, then a junior at Lincoln College Prep, had the impression her teachers hated “the 40% rule.” So she polled them.

Of 46 teachers she interviewed, nearly two-thirds didn’t like the 40% grade minimum and another quarter were on the fence, she told the school board during its April 24 meeting.

Zoe said one concern is that students calculate the bare minimum of work they need to do, sometimes waiting until the end of the semester to do enough makeup work to pass a class.

When she asked about that possibility in a district meeting, she said she was told it doesn’t happen. That doesn’t ring true to her experience.

“Students refusing to make up work because it won’t hurt their grade happens daily, which is a loss in education,” she said.

Roberts estimated about 60% of teachers favor the grading policy and 40% oppose it.

He doesn’t take a side but would have liked to see greater community engagement and formal board approval. The revisions were developed by a committee of teachers and administrators and approved by the union.

The district later sent parents information and surveys about the policy changes, but McGhee said that engagement should have come before the policy was in place.

“Decision-making can lack other perspectives when you’re just leaning on academic experts and not families or parents,” she said.

In addition to the 40% rule — which applies to non-Montessori students, grades two to 12 — the policy specifies that middle and high school students can get no more than 70% credit for late work and gives them a deadline to complete it.

McGhee said that’s one place where she thinks the district’s communication fell short.

She saw teachers interpret the late work policy in differing ways. Some teachers accepted work later than others. Some reminded families about late work deadlines, but McGhee didn’t receive reminders from the district or school.

Deadlines are based around quarter and semester end dates, which aren’t obvious to families because they don’t always line up with school breaks.

“The policy is not being applied across the district equitably, or even within the same building,” McGhee said.

The 40% rule has helped cushion the impact of that confusion, McGhee said, and nudge grades toward better representing what her daughters know.

One daughter, for example, regularly gets A’s on exams and projects but can fall behind on homework.

“That’ll tank her grade in a class that she’s actually excelling in skillswise,” she said.

How the 40% rule works or doesn’t work

Imagine a student who skips the semester’s first assignment and gets a 0% grade.

If all assignments are worth the same, it would take two perfect scores to get her grade above failing and nine perfect scores to eke out the lowest possible A.

Now imagine the student gets 40% for the missed assignment. With just one perfect score, she’s at a low C and with five she has a low A.

Proponents of the 40% minimum say that better reflects the kind of work she typically does and keeps her motivated.

“That can be discouraging to a student to say, ‘Hey, look at the progress I’ve made, and I still haven’t improved my grade,’” Deputy Superintendent Derald Davis said during a presentation about the grading policy to the KCPS District Advisory Committee.

The new system also makes more sense mathematically because it doesn’t devote nearly 60% of the scale to F grades, the district argued during the presentation.

The newly adopted system is an idea that has been around for decades.

In a 2004 article that is still sparking discussion, education researcher and writer Douglas Reeves called a zero on a standard grading scale a “mathematical inaccuracy” and disproportionate punishment.

But just because a scale is even mathematically doesn’t mean it’s the most fair or appropriate for a specific context, said Daniel Buck, a policy associate at the Thomas Fordham Institute. He wrote a 2022 critique of Reeves’ piece after seeing districts adopt minimum grades.

During his seven years as a classroom teacher, Buck said, he found himself becoming stricter and more convinced that high standards push students to excel. He thinks the traditional grading scale “tips toward excellence.”

While he believes some alternative grading systems are worth exploring, he said they need more study.

“We kind of skipped over the experimentation phase and went straight to the universal adoption phase,” he said. “I’m pretty sure if we had stuck with the experimental phase, we’d find out that it didn’t work very well.”

Reeves still defends his original article, but now he’s focused on teaching students to take feedback well. He thinks averaging grades in a way that penalizes students for early mistakes defeats that purpose.

Instead, he’d like to see grades based on a few major assignments that go through required revisions, with students expected to improve their work and evaluated on the final result.

“This 40% or zero is the wrong argument,” Reeves said. “The appropriate argument to have is how do we evaluate students based on how they finish?”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Missouri Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick speaks to reporters Jan. 23 about a critical report of the Secretary of State's office (Jason Hancock/Missouri Independent).

Independence School District Superintendent Dale Herl feels targeted by the state for moving to a four-day school week.

On Wednesday, Missouri Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick announced a plan to audit the district.

Independence schools aren’t accused of wrongdoing, and no one asked for an audit.

Rather, it’s Fitzpatrick’s first foray into conducting more routine audits of some of the state’s 518 school districts, something he promised during his campaign and inauguration.

Fitzpatrick initially said he wanted to investigate schools teaching about sexuality, gender or “critical race theory” — which has become a catchall term for race- or diversity-related concepts that parents or politicians may find objectionable. So far, he hasn’t emphasized that in the Independence audit.

“The combination of them being a large district that has a four-day week that’s in the Kansas City area was a big factor” in choosing to audit Independence, he said.

The auditor’s office has held expanded power to audit school districts for more than a decade, but has rarely used it. Fitzpatrick’s decision to flex that power comes as a bill further expanding the auditor’s authority to investigate other government bodies without an invitation awaits Gov. Mike Parson’s signature.

The formal announcement of the audit to the school board on May 14 came shortly after Parson signed legislation to require school districts in charter counties and cities over 30,000 in population to seek voter approval if they want a four-day school week.

Independence switched to a Tuesday-through-Friday schedule for the 2023-24 school year to better recruit teachers and other staff. Herl said it’s already been successful.

The law doesn’t affect most of the more than 150 districts in the state that, like Independence, switched to a four-day week, because most of them are rural.

But it requires Independence, by far the largest district in the state to go to a four-day week, to win voter approval or return to a five-day week.

The new law and the audit announcement come as Independence is wrapping up its first school year on the four-day schedule.

“It does feel like we were certainly targeted because we are (on) a four-day school week,” Herl said.

Making audits routine

The state auditor’s job is to check state agencies, circuit courts and local governments for waste, fraud and inefficiencies.

School districts are required to have regular financial audits, conducted by an independent auditor. But audits from the state typically look beyond finances and don’t follow a set schedule.

While the auditor has had expanded power to audit school districts since 2008, school audits have most frequently happened when citizens collect signatures to petition for an audit or in response to specific concerns.

Of six school district and charter school audits completed since 2019, half sprang from citizen petitions, two were requested by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and one was requested by a charter school’s board.

Older audit reports don’t always state why they were initiated, but Fitzpatrick said auditors have conducted an average of one to two school district audits a year since 2008.

The Beacon confirmed those numbers are accurate based on online audit reports when you leave out follow-up reports, charter school audits and higher education audits.

K-12 education is one of the state’s biggest expenses. Fitzpatrick said, “we spent almost none of our audit resources auditing the recipient of those funds.”

He wants routine audits of school districts to become more common and has been adding staff for that work.

“We are going to use more of our discretionary audit resources to do audits of school districts,” Fitzpatrick said. “The role that school districts play in preparing the next generation of Missourians for the workforce is incredibly important.”

Fitzpatrick’s office is also auditing the Kingston K-14 school district in Washington County because of a citizen petition and the Francis Howell school district in St. Charles County because of concerns with “management and efficiency issues,” particularly with recent building projects.

Both districts are on the eastern side of the state, which influenced the decision to add a Kansas City-area district to the mix, Fitzpatrick said.

Costs and benefits

Herl said he expects the audit report will be clean and that it could include useful suggestions.

But the audit is also a burden.

When auditors ask for documents, Herl said, “we need to stop what we’re doing as far as payroll or ending our fiscal year out to make sure that we’re complying with their requests.”

The process is “very cumbersome for our staff,” but “something we’ll gladly do,” Herl said. “If there are things that we could do better, we certainly want to know that.”

Neither Herl nor Fitzpatrick could estimate how many staff hours the audit will take.

Fitzpatrick’s office takes on any direct costs to pay for the audits. He estimated it could use $70,000 to $80,000 worth of staff time from his office.

“That would be what they would be paid regardless of whether we’re (auditing) Independence or some other district or some other entity,” he said.

The report could be public by late 2024 or early 2025, Fitzpatrick said.

If the audit reveals the district is well-run, “that should be something that the community should be happy about, and should instill confidence in the people in charge of the district,” he said.

When auditors get involved, schools are more likely to follow the rules and function in a more austere way, said Dustin Hornbeck, an assistant professor of leadership and policy studies at the University of Memphis.

Hornbeck has studied the expanding role of some state auditors in education, particularly as they’re called on to hold charter schools accountable.

While audits’ impact can be positive, Hornbeck said they’re also conducted by political, partisan officials in states like Missouri where the auditor is elected.

The ability to do performance audits at will could lead districts to wonder whether the auditor is trying to send a message with the timing of an audit, he said.

“It’s fascinating and kind of startling to think that the auditor just gets to pick and choose at random whomever they decide they want to audit,” he said. “You could use it as a political ax to grind or to go after political adversaries.”

In Independence, audit staff are figuring out how to approach an audit without a specific problem area in mind. They’re talking with school board members, surveying upper-level staff and distributing contact information so community members can leave tips.

Questions so far have focused on the four-day school week and finances, Herl said.

There will be some emphasis on curriculum as well, Fitzpatrick said.

Todd Schuler, a Missouri audit manager who presented to the school board, said the final audit report won’t mention any topic unless there’s a recommendation related to it. It won’t rule on whether the four-day week is good or bad, but might examine how the decision was made.

“It’s a bit unusual,” Schuler told the school board. “This is pretty rare that we don’t go out with at least some known issues or concerns.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A large first grade class heads outdoors on May 7 at George Melcher Elementary School in Kansas City, Missouri. The school has seen rapid enrollment growth this year (Zach Bauman/The Beacon)/

The line of children filing down the hallway of George Melcher Elementary School in Kansas City seemed endless.

“This is one first grade class,” Principal LaKeisha Paul said.

“How many kids do you have?” she called to the teacher. The answer was 32.

It’s hard to keep track. New students have continued to pour into Melcher throughout the school year.

The kindergarten-through-sixth grade school went from 298 students in early September to 413 in mid-April, a nearly 39% increase.

Growth didn’t stop there. On May 7, Paul said the school had seen 95 new students since April 1. Eight more had arrived that day.

“Right now, we’re just trying to get them in, let them know that they’re safe, feed them lunch and start planning for next year,” she said.

About 18 months ago, Melcher was on a list of 10 schools that the district considered closing, hoping to spend more money on academics and activities rather than buildings. Declining enrollment — and projections that the area’s population would drop — figured prominently.

Now, Melcher strains to fit in an ever-growing number of students.

The school offers a stark example of growing enrollment across the district throughout the 2023-24 school year, especially in several schools the district had considered shuttering.

A nearly 80% increase in the number of new students arriving from other countries compared to last year fueled much of the growth.

Adding about 970 K-12 students — a 7% increase — between September and mid-April has upended the conversation in the district, Deputy Superintendent Derald Davis said.

“It lessens the chance that we need to consider any consolidations,” he said. “If schools are filling up and bursting at the seams, we’ll actually have to have a different conversation around possibly opening up another school.

Challenges for schools

When new students arrive in Melcher, the school has to address their medical and mental health concerns as well as squeezing them into classrooms and adding more children for teachers, counselors and administrators to look after, Paul said.

That can be especially true if the family is brand-new to the U.S.

“We had a little boy, just got here, speaks no English, missing his parents, and he had an abscessed tooth,” she said. “(The) fourth grader cried for days and days with the nurse’s office just trying to get him into a dentist because they’d come with no insurance. It’s like a whole ordeal. … We’re just kind of making it work right now.”

The school has leaned on district language resources to communicate with new families in Spanish, Arabic and Swahili. One family spoke a language rare enough that the school had to specially download it into Google Translate, Paul said.

Class sizes are another concern.

Missouri sets standards, from up to 25 per class for kindergarten through second grade to as many as 33 for high school. KCPS tries to aim lower, especially for schools that haven’t historically performed well, Davis said.

But when extra students show up partway through the year, schools have to surpass the caps or find workarounds.

The state limits represent “a strong suggestion,” Paul said. But when new students keep arriving, “what do you do at the end of the year? You can’t just hire a teacher.”

Davis said the district has made overflow plans, where some students are sent outside their neighborhood to a school with more room.

At Melcher, Paul no longer has an instructional coach — someone who mentors teachers to improve their work. She made that person a second grade teacher to split two huge classes into three smaller ones.

Next year, Davis said, the district will be able to plan for hiring enough teachers.

He said KCPS is expecting to see more growth based on current trends, predictions of how many refugee children will arrive and plans to make the district more appealing to families, such as improving transportation and fixing air conditioning problems.

While the growth is an overall positive sign that families trust the district with their children, it puts stress on teachers, said Jason Roberts, president of KCPS’ teachers union.

“I am thankful that we did not close 10 schools, because we have nowhere to put the children now,” he said. “In the midst of a teacher shortage, there aren’t people to fill classrooms, which means classrooms are already large, and they’re getting larger. And I think that’s the deficit that we have to fix. We have to be prepared for a solid influx of kids every year.”

Benefits for KCPS

KCPS has made it clear that improving enrollment is central to the district’s success, especially if the public doesn’t want it to close schools.

Having more students in each building is more financially efficient, allows for programs such as sports teams that work better in larger schools and could justify keeping more schools open.

Enrollment has been a struggle.

Competition with charter schools — public schools that are free to attend but operate independently of the district — helped shrink KCPS. The district had more than 36,000 students in the mid-1990s but less than 15,000 before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like most districts, KCPS saw a drop in enrollment in 2020 — about 5% — as some families opted for private school or homeschooling, delayed enrolling young children or fell off the radar.

During the 2021-22 school year, charter school enrollment exceeded the district’s.

In early 2022, the district regained full accreditation from the state for the first time in a decade.  Small increases in fall enrollment followed in 2022 and 2023, but not enough to bring the district back to pre-pandemic levels.

That suddenly changed with the 7% K-12 enrollment growth during the school year that’s wrapping up now. When including pre-kindergarten students, enrollment increased by nearly 1,250, or about 9%.

In addition to fending off school closures, enrollment growth feels like a vote of confidence, Davis said. The district plans to ask voters to approve a bond to fund building improvements, something that hasn’t happened in nearly 60 years.

“We want to be the premiere destination for a quality education in Kansas City,” Davis said.

Why KCPS enrollment is growing

For years, it seemed the number of children in the area was declining, said Ike Graham, president of the Vineyard Neighborhood Association.

With talk of KCPS closing Melcher and the Missouri State Board of Education shutting down Genesis School, he worried that pattern would continue.

“If I still had a family with kids,” Graham said, “I’d move where the school is.”

Recently, Graham said he’s seeing quite a few people move into the neighborhood, though it wasn’t obvious to him that the number of children specifically had increased.

Some are returning to the city from the suburbs or are drawn by affordable housing, such as new duplexes, Graham and neighborhood association secretary Virginia Flowers said.

Paul, the Melcher principal, said the school’s growth could be driven by rental prices and the draw of community.

“A lot of our Hispanic families are moving because they already have family in the area,” Paul said.

Melcher is tucked away in a residential neighborhood of small, ranch-style homes, about a block away from 39th Street and about half a mile from where it intersects with Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard.

It serves the neighborhoods of Vineyard, Vineyard Estates, Dunbar, Knoches Park, East Side and Palestine West/Oak Park Northeast.

Some students transfer from charter schools, but most families are coming from other districts, states and countries, Paul said.

KCPS shared data that show how students enrolled at the end of the 2022-23 school year ended up in the district. Then it compares that to how current students, or those who graduated this year, got there.

The largest group of new students moved in from elsewhere in Missouri. But the biggest change from last year was the number of students coming in from outside the U.S.

That group went from 400 students last year to 717 students this school year, about a 79% increase.

KCPS also saw about 160 more students move in from within the state compared to last year. Increases in students transferring from out of state, private school and homeschooling were smaller.

It’s not clear from the data what proportion of students from in-state come from charter schools, elsewhere in the metro or other regions of Missouri.

Area school districts, including North Kansas City, Hickman Mills, Center, Shawnee Mission, Olathe and Kansas City, Kansas, said enrollment had been steady or shared data showing only small percentage changes during the school year. The Independence district did not respond.

Davis said KCPS’ public engagement, such as conversations about proposed school closures and the district’s long-term plan, have improved awareness about what the district has to offer and led to more local families choosing KCPS.

But there’s no noticeable trend of families leaving local charter schools en masse, said Leslie Kohlmeyer, executive director of Show Me KC Schools.

Her nonprofit helps families navigate their education options including charter and private schools and runs School App KC, an application used by most area charter schools and several private schools and pre-K programs. The number of families using that application has stayed steady.

“Probably both (traditional public and charter) sectors are increasing in numbers and not one pulling from the other,” she said.

Kohlmeyer has noticed some families taking a strong stance in favor of KCPS.

“Millennials and Gen Z are very dedicated to public education, which for them doesn’t include charters,” she said.

Which KCPS schools are growing in enrollment

The schools that grew most during the school year were generally located in the east-central or northeast areas of the district.

Like Melcher, many of them were also on a school closure list before the district reversed course.

That includes Faxon Elementary School, which covers the Santa Fe and Squier Park neighborhoods and grew by nearly one-third during the school year. Wheatley, James and Whittier elementary schools and Central High School grew 10% to 20%.

Other schools that grew at a similar rate — but hadn’t been at risk of closure — include Trailwoods, Garfield and J.A. Rogers elementary schools, Northeast and Central middle schools and East High School.

Some of KCPS’ small special programs, such as Evening Academy and alternative schools, grew by a dramatic percentage, and the district’s virtual academy saw a 29% increase.

Kohlmeyer, whose nonprofit is located in the historic northeast to better serve immigrant families, also said she’s noticed more of those families finding affordable housing farther south.

The district’s southernmost schools, Hartman and Hale Cook elementaries in Waldo, didn’t see the most dramatic growth, but Davis said that’s in part because they were already full at the beginning of the year.

While the district’s high schools generally have space to spare, Davis said full elementary schools could require the district to reopen a school.

“We are pretty much full on the southern end of town,” he said. “So if our northern schools and those in the central part of town began to show those same sort of numbers, we may be there fairly quickly.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Students leave Raytown High School at the end of a school day in April. After the school saw an unusual number of fights and gun incidents, students spoke out about their need to feel safer in school (Maria Benevento/The Beacon).

In early February, Raytown High School sophomore Harper York crossed the street to pick up some M&Ms from a Casey’s store before her next rehearsal.

Suddenly, she turned around from the checkout and saw a “mob fight” had broken out.

When the chaos died down and she got over her initial shock, Harper made a break for it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast across the parking lot in my life,” she said. “And before I cross the street, I look back and another (fight) is starting. … I can hear police sirens and ambulances, and people are on the ground, and people are crying. And it’s just like: Is this who we are?”

While the gas station fight was the biggest Harper had seen, physical altercations in or near school had become common.

Even bystanders weren’t safe. A few days later, junior Chase Dernier ended up near a fight that turned into a large-scale shoving match. He got slammed into a wall, hitting his head hard enough to make it ache for days.

“A lot of us, we were scared to go to school. We were scared to leave our class to go to the next class,” Chase said. “We thought we were going to get caught up in a mob fight.”

The last straw came when school officials confiscated three firearms from students in a two-week period.

Chase and Harper recruited classmates and other district residents to call leadership, attend the February school board meeting and sign up for public comment. They pushed for changes such as longer suspensions for students who fight and adding metal detectors to school.

Since that public pressure, students say Raytown High School has made effective changes, such as hall sweeps targeting students who aren’t in class. They’ve also seen signs that the district is seriously considering other measures such as installing weapons detectors.

Superintendent Penelope Martin-Knox said fully solving the problems of frequent fights and guns entering school requires combing through all the ideas to find what will actually work.

Schools throughout the country have been grappling with the ways traditional discipline and security tactics can cause long-term harm to students who make mistakes, exacerbate racial disparities and make school feel a little like jail.

Martin-Knox has also watched other districts seize on solutions that fail, such as when weapons make it past metal detectors.

“I don’t want to give people a false sense of hope,” she said. “I just need to make sure that what we do is going to be as effective as it possibly can be.”

What’s happening at Raytown High School

Reiko Groves first appeared in front of the school board to perform a song from Raytown High School’s spring musical, “Six,” which reimagines Henry VIII’s wives as pop icons.

Reiko wishes she could have focused on her performance alone.

Instead, still in costume, the high school junior returned to the front of the audience and addressed the board as herself: a teenager worried about guns and violence.

“I go from performing for this great show that I was so proud of, to now I have to go speak about how, even though I love the (school) building, I don’t feel safe in it,” she said later. “I have to go fight for … almost my ability to perform (and) make sure everybody’s safe while performing.”

After students’ basic physical safety is secure, Reiko said, “we can focus on the well-being of our students to find solutions to not only survive, but thrive in Raytown schools.”

Students say the school climate hasn’t always been like this. But during the fall semester, violence started to feel like an everyday thing.

Incidents reached a peak in December, according to district data reported to the board. Students were in school for less than three weeks that month. But during that time, there were 50 suspensions for fighting and school officials confiscated three firearms.

Harper said she started begging her parents to let her stay home from school, even though it meant she would miss beloved activities like theater rehearsals. Chase, normally proud of his high attendance, was skipping school to lie in bed, feeling “mentally drained.”

They weren’t aware of the firearms found in December until later, but they did hear about three additional guns found during a two-week period in late January and early February.

The weapons weren’t fired or brandished, Martin-Knox said. School officials found them by searching students after suspicions were raised: a bullet found on a hallway floor, a phone call about a social media post.

The students said they weren’t planning to use the guns at school, Martin-Knox said.

“I heard the reasonings of, ‘You don’t know where I have to walk when I go home. You don’t know what happens when I get off the bus. I have to go to a relative’s house in a different community somewhere. And I just need to safeguard myself,’” she said.

But bringing a gun to school is a “nonnegotiable” that comes with legal consequences and the student’s permanent removal from in-person school, Martin-Knox said.

Consequences for fights can vary, but some students have argued they should be harsher.

“They think they’re trying to help the students,” Chase said. “But in reality, by lowering the suspension rates, it’s not holding students accountable.”

A rumor that suspensions for fighting have been uniformly reduced to three days from nine days isn’t true, Martin-Knox said. But she has emphasized to principals that they have discretion to set suspension lengths based on the circumstances.

In recent years, some schools have made a concerted effort to reduce discipline tactics that can harm students’ education or life prospects, such as removing them from school or involving law enforcement. That’s especially in light of evidence that they can disproportionately target students of color and those with disabilities.

Martin-Knox said schools also need to figure out how to help students understand and take responsibility for their actions when they return from suspension.

“Because otherwise,” she said, “I’m going to send you back out there, (and) you’re going to do it again.”

High tech vs. low tech solutions 

Schools nationwide are seeing more verbal and physical aggression from students since the return to in-person school after the pandemic, said Kenneth Trump, a school safety consultant.

Administrators face pressure to solve those issues, he said, especially when there are high-profile incidents involving weapons.

“It puts school leaders at great risk of what I call ‘do something, do anything, do it now and do it fast’ type of policy and practice rather than having a comprehensive assessment done of their safety,” he said. “We’re seeing many cases where that includes turning to physical security measures, security hardware products and technology.”

Those solutions don’t always work as promised, Trump said, especially when they aren’t executed perfectly.

Locally, Kansas City Public Schools faced a lawsuit when a knife used in a fatal stabbing made it through a metal detector.

“Your high school coach and a teacher’s aide and the principal working the screening at the front doors, (who) probably got an hour of training, total, on a new product they spent millions of dollars for in your district, is not going to be comparable to the TSA,” he said.

And when those staff members are pulled from other areas of the school, they lose opportunities to interact, head off conflicts before they escalate and build relationships with students who might be willing to tell a trusted adult about a weapons plot.

“One of the best, strongest security measures in a school is a visible, actively supervising adult,” he said.

That has borne out at Raytown High School, according to several students who credited a reduction in fights to regular hall sweeps — where students late to class are locked out, rounded up and warned or disciplined —  and increased patrolling by security staff and administrators.

Some of the security measures can be double-edged swords.

Reiko says she understands why the school no longer holds assemblies — they were leading to fights — but is sad to miss out on the experiences.

The hallway sweeps can be anxiety-inducing, and she’s been stopped and questioned more often while on legitimate errands for her classes.

But she also appreciates the reduction in fights and being able to go to the bathroom without finding all the stalls filled by students skipping class.

“Probably the hardest part about this is finding that balance between … making sure it is truly a safe environment, but also not making it feel like it’s a prison or giving punishment that’s too harsh,” she said.

Weapons detection

Students said they’d appreciate weapons detectors in schools despite potential drawbacks, such as feeding into racist stereotypes and perceptions that the school is dangerous.

“As a Black student in the school district, I care more about our Black bodies than our reputation in the schools in the surrounding area,” Reiko told the board. “And being brutally honest, ‘they’ will think we are ghetto no matter what we do.”

Martin-Knox isn’t ruling out metal detectors in schools, but she says she needs to think through what schools would need to make them work, such as locking and putting sensors on additional doors and windows.

“I’m not going to invest district money, taxpayer money, or even grant money on something just to say I’ve done it,” she said.

The district has already begun increasing security measures for sporting events, which can bring large numbers of unknown people onto school grounds, Martin-Knox said.

At its March meeting, the board approved purchase of a weapons detection system that it hopes will streamline the security scans, spending $300,000 in Department of Elementary and Secondary Education safety grant funding and more than $22,000 in other district funds.

The system can be set to target dense metal shapes that might be a firearm, said Josh Hustad, director of facility operations, allowing people to pass through more quickly without taking small items out of their pockets and bags.

Raytown has spoken with other districts who have used the system, such as Wichita, to learn how it works and what pitfalls to expect, Hustad said.

For example, they’ve heard a laptop, a folded umbrella, or “two Red Bull cans side by side” could set it off, he said.

The three students who spoke with The Beacon said they were invited to join a student committee on school safety and participated in a test of the detectors at the school entrance.

Chase and Harper appreciated that they were unobtrusive and only required them to remove laptops from bags.

Chase said students speculate that moving the portable detectors from sports games to school entrances could be an easy next step once the devices are in schools’ possession.

Next steps at Raytown High School

After major incidents, Martin-Knox said she always visits the affected school, talks to students and works on refining safety plans.

In addition to the student committee, the district recently launched a school safety task force that will make recommendations.

Chase hopes for more safety measures such as clear backpacks — which he’s heard are on backorder but will arrive next year — and weapons detectors in schools, he said.

In general, he feels seen, heard and supported by Martin-Knox and Raytown High School’s principal and assistant principals, but would like to see school board members take action on policy and spend more time in schools.

Students also wish they hadn’t had to speak out before they started seeing concrete changes.

“They obviously want us to be safe,” Chase said of leadership. “I think they could have done things in a more proactive manner. But that change is happening now.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Law enforcement responds to a shooting at Union Station during the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl LVIII victory parade on February 14, 2024 in Kansas City, Missouri. Several people were shot and two people were detained after a rally celebrating the Chiefs Super Bowl victory (Jamie Squire/Getty Images).

For starters, experts suggest, get the kids back into school. Routines matter in the raw aftermath of trauma.

Child health experts say the shooting that killed a mother and wounded several children at the close of Kansas City’s celebration of the Chiefs’ latest championship likely left kids traumatized. Whether they were near Union Station or, for some, just hearing the news.

Schools quickly made social workers and counselors available Thursday and put out advice to parents on how to help children return to a sense of normalcy and safety.

Some children, the experts say, need to talk about their concerns. That, the experts say, needs to be balanced against dwelling too much on what happened or trying to force conversations that could go wrong.

Wednesday’s violence came after clinicians saw a troubling mental health hangover from the pandemic.

“Rates of anxiety and depression doubled for young people,” said Dr. Shayla Sullivant, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with Children’s Mercy Hospital. “Now we have more kids that have experienced trauma.”

Multiple school districts told The Beacon that they’re turning to what’s familiar — like going right back to school — to help restore calm after a calamity.

When disaster strikes, “it comes from a place that we didn’t expect, and we don’t know how to deal with that,” said David Smith, a spokesperson for the Shawnee Mission School District. “Being able to connect people, kids, to the familiar, to the routine, can be helpful and give them a comfort that the world is returning to the world that they know and (where) they feel safe.”

Adults matter, too. Parents and teachers, Smith said, need to recognize and seek support for their own distress “in order for us to be there for our kids.”

The shooting marked a “community-level trauma,” said Damon Daniel, president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, even in a city that saw a record 182 homicides last year.

“We live in a city where we’re not strangers to violence,” he said.

His group worked with prosecutors and other organizations to offer counseling on Thursday at the Kansas City United Church of Christ in Brookside. He said it’s time to talk with professionals and not to lean on isolation, substance abuse or more violence to cope.

“It’s a very complex problem. It’s not one solution,” Daniel said. “There’s no silver bullet to this.”

For starters, public places might never feel the same to some people after the Union Station shooting. Chris Williams, a counselor with Heartland Therapy Connection, said teenagers and young adults might be particularly damaged by the trauma.

“There are no public places they can look at and be, like, ‘I’m safe here,’” he said. “More and more children are on guard, looking out.”

He said survivors can experience extreme post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, such as paranoia or fear of loud noises, and will look to adults for assurance.

“We’re losing that ability to tell them it’s gonna be OK,” Williams said. “There are no safe spaces.”

After Kansas City mass shooting, Missouri Democrats demand stricter gun laws

Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Jennifer Collier emailed parents urging them to address the trauma directly.

“While our instinct may be to shield them from the harsh realities of the world,” she wrote, “it’s essential to proactively address their concerns, especially with our older students who are more likely to seek information independently.”

The district was still sorting out Thursday how many students were close to the shooting even as it suggested parents limit their children’s exposure to news coverage.

Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools also enlisted counselors and social workers and told parents that their kids need someone to turn to.

“People deal with pain and tragedy differently,” district spokesperson Edwin Birch said. “The main thing is just being available.”

At Wichita’s USD 259, the largest school district in Kansas, administrators strove to return to the routine.

“Children are pretty quick to move on to the next thing,” said Stephanie Anderson, who works in the district’s counseling services. “They don’t dwell on stuff like this, unless they hear adults dwelling on it.”

That, she said, needs to be paired with candor.

“(Don’t) sugarcoat it or don’t create fear,” Anderson said.

She and other experts suggest parents look for routines breaking down in the aftermath of the Super Bowl parade. Is your child having trouble sleeping? Has their appetite dwindled? Are they crankier than usual?

An adult’s ear can prove especially helpful, said Tori Cordiano, a clinical psychologist specializing in children and adolescents at Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

She said trusted adults — family, mental health professionals, school staff — need to be available. Cordiano said younger children may prefer to process their emotions about the parade shooting through art, and older children will need someone to confide in.

“When they have those places to talk,” Cordiano said, “it can help them cope.”

The more comfortable kids feel to talk, she said, the better to keep them grounded and feeling safe.

“When we shut it down,” she said, “it makes it too big or scary.”

Yet exposure to gun violence leaves some psyches damaged for a lifetime. Starsky Wilson, president of the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund, said gun violence can heighten children’s risk of abusing drugs and alcohol or weigh them down with depression and anxiety.

“The normalization of gun violence in society can desensitize children to the impact of violence and contribute to a sense of helplessness or resignation about the problem,” he said in an email to The Beacon.

Wilson said, in turn, that can make it harder to feel secure, form relationships or thrive in school.

“When exposed to violence,” he wrote, “school-aged children tend to exhibit lower academic grades and increased absenteeism.”

This story was compiled by Scott Canon based on staff reporting. Suzanne King contributed.

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A union organizer said SEIU Local 1 is struggling to resolve problems with pay, time off and training (Getty Images).

In a matter of months, the union representing maintenance, custodial and cafeteria workers at Kansas City Public Schools went from a cordial relationship with the district to filing seven class-action grievances.

The grievances include allegations that the district hasn’t delivered all raises laid out in the latest labor contract, has disciplined workers for using leave they’re entitled to and didn’t give them orientation they were promised, said Rose Welch, the lead organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 1 in Kansas City. 

Some of the grievances affect all 350 to 400 members of the union at KCPS, Welch said. Other complaints focus on a smaller group of workers but could have wider implications, such as a chilling effect against using leave.

Normally, problems that come up can be solved through a less formal grievance process. But lately, Welch said, the union escalated the disputes to formal class-action grievances.

After failing to resolve the pay issue more informally, the union is invoking a state law that lets any workers shorted on pay get damages equal to twice the amount they’re owed, Welch said. If the grievances aren’t resolved, the next step would be binding and costly arbitration.

KCPS spokesperson Shain Bergan said the district can’t comment on the union’s grievances.

Meanwhile, unresolved grievances can create frustration for workers who ensure school buildings are running safely and students are fed, KCPS union members and organizers said during public comment at a mid-November school board meeting.

“You have to think about your bills, or think about the transportation breaking down,” Jermaine Sails, an internal organizer for the Missouri Division of SEIU Local 1, said in an interview after giving public comment. “The thing that keeps you going every day is a job because you got students that count on you, but you can’t count on the district to do their part.”

Union grievance process

Misunderstandings and mistakes are normal in a workplace, Welch said, and the union can usually resolve them informally.

For example, a worker might ask the union for support if their supervisor denies time off they believe they’re entitled to. The union would refer to the contract to judge the claim.

If a worker believes their salary wasn’t updated correctly, Welch said, the district is obligated to give SEIU the information it needs to investigate.

Then “we can either walk people through why it’s correct or we can show that it’s not correct to get it corrected,” she said.

Generally, when SEIU has raised issues, KCPS has accepted the union’s requests or proposed another reasonable solution, Welch said.

But since a human resources director who worked well with the KCPS union was promoted out of that role, Welch said, the district has been more reluctant to solve problems and share information.

KCPS union contract

This summer, SEIU Local 1 workers at Kansas City Public Schools ratified an agreement that gave them wage increases of at least 75 cents per hour and the right to a two-hour paid back-to-school orientation.

The pay increases were supposed to go into effect July 1, but were delayed, Welch said.

KCPS has said pay was fully updated as of Sept. 30, but won’t provide the union with the full information it needs to verify that claim, she said. At least 60 people have let the union know that they think their pay is still incorrect.

“It could be that there’s only 20 or 30 people remaining who still need their pay corrected,” Welch said. “It could be that there’s 300 people who still need their pay corrected. And there’s no way for us to know until we get the information that we’ve asked for.”

The union also believes that a lack of supervisor training is behind a trend of workers being disciplined for taking leave they’re allowed under their contract, Welch said, something at least 40 employees have reported.

After several meetings attempting to resolve the issue, the union hadn’t seen evidence that administrators provided that training, Welch said. It filed grievances related to employee discipline and supervisor training.

Other grievances are related to the back-to-school orientation that all members of the bargaining unit were supposed to get, the union receiving bulletin board space in all buildings and compliance with the grievance process itself, Welch said.

The union has started to send some grievances to the superintendent and to meet with school board members, “all of whom so far have assured us that it is not the district’s intention to change our relationship for the worse,” Welch said. “This is most likely some road bumps in a long-term good relationship.”

She had hoped that the union’s message during public comment at the November school board meeting would be “thanks for listening.”

But when the meeting came, the grievances hadn’t been resolved. Union members also spoke about workplace problems such as understaffing and lack of training.

In an interview, Jerry Stinnett, a union steward and KCPS preventive maintenance worker, said he wants the union to hold the district accountable for workplace problems, including an ineffective system for assigning maintenance work orders.

“We have a union structure now that allows us to bring (problems) to the front strongly,” he said. “Those who are not doing right will find themselves in a situation to explain why.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Kansas City Public Schools announced that the district had concluded there wasn't community support for adding armed officers to elementary schools (Chase Castor/The Beacon).

Applause broke out at a Kansas City Public Schools advisory committee meeting on Wednesday when an employee announced the district was moving away from a proposal to add armed officers to elementary schools.

In the end, district administrators heard too much opposition to putting more guns on school grounds — even in the holsters of people in uniform.

Shana Long, the district’s chief legal officer and a member of its Moving Forward Together safety committee, said the decision showed the district listens to parents.

“We want to make sure that you all believe and trust us when we say we’re listening to you,” she said. “This isn’t just us coming to you with a predetermined solution and then just telling you about it.”

Long also said that the district had considered hiring its own officers to carry firearms — not contracting a private security firm.

The decision comes as the district tries to show it’s involving the community, particularly parents, in decisions that affect schools.

District officials were already reeling when their proposal to close 10 schools caught the public off guard last fall and provoked angry opposition even though they had sought feedback in advance.

After scaling back the school closures — it only closed two — KCPS launched its Moving Forward Together effort to improve engagement.

When administrators, motivated by mass school shootings like the one in Uvalde, Texas, started to talk about adding armed officers to elementary schools, they brought the idea to the Moving Forward Together safety committee. After that, they took it to a broader group of parents.

Ashley Johnson, a parent, community organizer and District Advisory Committee vice chair, said the risk of mass shootings doesn’t top the list of concerns for many parents. Rather, she said they’re more concerned about meeting students’ basic needs for stable housing and food security.

“The feedback that we got … was really robust,” she said. “If we have issues involving gun violence, it’s not at a mass shooting level.”

She hopes the decision means the district can now focus on solutions to real problems.

Pros and cons 

Decisions about school safety should factor in data rather than emotions, personal worldviews or wishful thinking, Vaughn Baker, president of security company Strategos International, said during a presentation at a KCPS discussion session.

But some parents who spoke at the recorded meeting or submitted comments to an online platform questioned whether, in presenting statistics about the timing of deaths during mass shootings, Baker had made a data-based case that armed officers would help keep students safe.

Parents came prepared with statistics from scholarly articles that cast doubts on whether armed guards would help during a mass shooting and expressed concerns that their daily presence might hurt students.

A smaller number disagreed, saying they thought armed officers would make schools safer and that students would understand they were protectors.

Melvin Livingston, an associate professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, said in an interview that schools are in a tough spot because they have to weigh potential harms — such as evidence that police officers assigned to schools increase expulsions and criminal referrals — against uncertain benefits.

Livingston’s research didn’t reach a conclusion on the impact of officers during shootings.

“If there’s an effect either way, it’s not strong enough that it shows up in the data,” he said. That means the range of plausible estimates, he said, “goes anywhere from ‘yeah, this could help’ to ‘this could hurt.’”

Benjamin Brown, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, said research on arming officers in elementary schools is particularly scarce because it’s not as common as stationing officers in high schools or middle schools.

“Ordinarily, the school police are not there just to deter an outside threat,” he said.

Those attacks, he said, are just too rare to measure officers’ impact on safety.

And even when officers are instructed to stay out of normal student discipline, they can have mission creep, said Denise Gottfredson, a professor emeritus from the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland.

“They’re trained to recognize certain behaviors as potentially illegal,” she said, and administrators can come to rely on them. In response to what used to be seen as “normal kid behavior” deserving a less formal response from the school, “kids end up being expelled or arrested or both.”

Gottfredson isn’t aware of any studies focused on the specific impacts in elementary schools but said there’s been a push to add police officers to elementary schools since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.

KCPS already has a security force, with sworn officers hired directly by the district and licensed through the Kansas City Police Department. Some of those officers are unarmed and based in specific school buildings while others are armed patrol officers. Separately, several armed KCPD officers are assigned to the school district.

All KCPS middle schools and high schools already have armed officers, said Derald Davis, deputy superintendent, and he knows of other local districts that have added them to elementary schools: North Kansas City and Fort Osage.

Johnson, the DAC vice chair, said she appreciated that the district consulted with the community before following those districts.

“It all came with actually listening to the parents, listening to the community members and stakeholders, that this is not what we want,” she said.

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A sign at the Kansas City Public Schools’ International Welcome Center, pictured Sept. 17, 2021. About 40% of the district’s students speak another language at home, spanning more than 50 languages (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

After students pulled her fifth-grade daughter’s hair, hit and groped her, Wendy Rodas asked to talk with higher-ups in the Center School District.

The Spanish-speaking mother hoped the meeting would help resolve the bullying. But technical difficulties with the district’s phone interpretation service nearly derailed the conversation.

If she hadn’t brought along bilingual staff members from Revolución Educativa, a Latino education advocacy group, Rodas said the meeting would have been completely ineffective.

That marked the latest in a string of frustrations with school-provided interpretation that prompted Rodas to rely on her older son to help her communicate during meetings about her two school-aged children, now in second and sixth grades.

The Center district tries to be as responsive as possible to parent concerns and requests, but “interpretation is a challenge,” said Rick Chambers, director of communications.

“We’re a small district and we don’t have the financial resources to have full-time interpreters on staff,” he said. “We do rely on outside parties for that.”

Even though federal law mandates that schools offer interpreters and other services to overcome language gaps — both for schoolkids and their parents — families report they regularly come across barriers.

They say those barriers leave them more vulnerable to bullying and less safe, and they complicate school discipline and special education when English isn’t the primary language spoken at home.

“I’ve never had a parent call me just to say, ‘I asked for an interpreter and they said no,’” said Tricia McGhee, a Revolución Educativa parent advocate. “(But later) it comes up that they were denied language access, or that they don’t know that they had a right to it in the first place.”

School administrators sometimes don’t understand what makes for effective interpretation or struggle to find money to pay for it, said Katharine Allen, an interpreter, consultant and textbook author.

But competent interpretation, she said, can help avoid lawsuits and improve graduation rates, grades and special education outcomes.

“In the end,” Allen said, interpretation services save “everybody a lot of money” and reduce disparities.

Paying for interpretation in school 

About a quarter of the students in Kansas City Public Schools are learning English as a second language, said Allyson Hile. She headed the district’s language services and cultural equity department and is now its director of organizational development. Hile said 40% of children in the district speak another language at home, spanning more than 50 languages.

While federal Title III grants for English language learners provide some tax dollars, Hile said more Missouri districts are competing for those grants, dividing up the state’s available funds. And the grants were never meant to fully fund language access.

That means schools have to pull money from state and local taxpayers to cover language services for parents and guardians.

Those budgets can be tight. The Kansas City district has closed two schools in the last year — and reversed course on a plan to shutter eight more — because of its shrinking student population. With fewer students, it gets fewer state tax dollars.

In North Kansas City, English language learner coordinator Lezlie Paden said her department sometimes exceeds its budget for interpretation because of unexpected growth in the number of families needing services. Since interpretation is a federal requirement, the district has to shift money in its budget to pay the cost.

Paden wants to give teachers more training to bridge language barriers, hire more on-call interpreters, pay those interpreters more and expand adult English classes. But the money isn’t there.

In the Independence School District, Fairmount Elementary principal Nicholas Younts uses three-way phone calls to communicate with families of the 30% of his students who speak Spanish at home.

But since delays sometimes happen before one of the district’s half-dozen interpreters is available, Younts said it can’t yet “provide the same opportunities immediately to all of our families.”

Younts said having a bilingual teacher join the school this year has been helpful. If money were no object, he’d like an in-house interpreter just for his school.

The current centralized interpreting system in Independence is designed to be streamlined and consistent for families, said the district’s lead interpreter, Julie Moreira-Fruits. But the workload is high. Each interpreter serves about 300 Spanish-speaking students.

“We could hire more and also look at more support for other languages,” she said. “Right now, we’re doing well by supporting and outsourcing those needs as they arise. But it is a challenge.”

Beyond money

Money isn’t the only barrier to meeting language needs.

When the first members of an immigrant or refugee group arrive, districts can struggle to find an interpreter fluent in both that language and English, Hile said. Those interpreters also need to understand the jargon-filled plans created to help a child needing special education or the security requirements of high-stakes standardized testing.

In Independence, Moreira-Fruits said staff in her department all have some form of interpreter training and have sometimes relied on collaboration with other districts or medical and legal interpreter training to refine their skills.

KCPS recently hired a language access manager to train teachers and other staff on how to use district tools and request interpretation. It looks for interpreters who know where families seek out information, whether through a Congolese church or a Facebook page catering to an ethnic community.

North Kansas City also seeks on-call interpreters with connections, such as those who are already familiar with the district, and starts them with simple assignments, Paden said. The district relies on outside agencies to provide trained interpreters for formal situations like special education meetings or disciplinary hearings.

Some districts also use contractors who work over the phone, automatic website translation and TalkingPoints, a text-based service that allows two-way communication between families and the school.

Filling the gaps

McGhee of Revolución Educativa said gaps remain for families who don’t speak English.

McGhee runs into technology glitches and limitations, parents encouraged to go without an interpreter for less formal conversations, and a lack of interpreters at public meetings unless they’re requested in advance. She said KCPS has been scheduling interpreters for public meetings.

She once volunteered to interpret for eight families during parent-teacher conferences at Lincoln College Prep Middle School after a mother told her she would rather have her child interpret than use a phone service.

McGhee said phone-based services come with problems. Sometimes it’s the technology. Other times, she said, school staff don’t understand how to help the interpreter keep up. That results in the interpreter giving a bare-bones summary, such as “your kid is doing well.”

“I just think about all the parents that didn’t get the opportunity to hear a teacher say what a joy or what a blessing it was to have their kid in school,” McGhee said.

Two professional organizations for education interpreting have sprung up in the past three years and are working on completing codes of ethics and designing certification tests, an area where the field lags behind other types of interpreting.

In fields like medical care, poor interpretation can be fatal and quickly obvious. When it comes to school, the effects of poor interpreting can take years to show up — perhaps when it’s too late to save a child’s academic career.

For example, bilingual children end up diagnosed with specific learning disabilities or speech impairments at a higher rate than their peers, said Ana Soler, chairperson of the National Association of Educational Translators and Interpreters of Spoken Languages. They don’t land in gifted education programs as frequently as other students.

“There must be some kind of communication breakdown” causing the gifted education disparity, she said. “Families may not receive information in their language, they may not know the process, they may think that it’s an extra class that they need to pay for.”

Allen, a founding member of the American Association of Interpreters and Translators in Education, said the fear of lawsuits and a growing school interpretation infrastructure have brought momentum for change.

“The tipping point looks like schools trying to do a better job communicating with their families, legislation requiring it, the legal system coming into play, the interpreting profession bringing in more resources,” she said. “You see it tip, and then it becomes a national sort of momentum behind it.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Principal Kathleen Snipes briefly fills in for a second grade teacher at Faxon Elementary School on Feb. 1 in Kansas City (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

The state has collected more than 73,000 survey responses that reflect details such as who is substitute teaching in Missouri public schools, what they’re paid and where they work.

The data, released Wednesday by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, may not offer a clear reason why some school districts struggle to recruit substitute teachers, though more people are applying for certification.

But it could provide some clues.

For example, have state law changes enacted last year affected the applicant pool?

Last year, the Missouri legislature reduced the number of college credit hours required to be a substitute teacher from 60 — typical to earn an associate degree — to 36. Substitute teachers can also become certified without college credit hours by taking a 20-hour training course.

The changes raised concerns the state would see “a bunch of younger substitutes,” said Paul Katnik, assistant commissioner in DESE’s office of educator quality. “That’s not what’s happening.”

Instead, the majority of survey entries are from substitutes 50 or older, and 88% are from people in their 30s or older. Less than 1% are from substitutes younger than 20.

And most substitute teachers exceed the education requirements. The survey data indicates many have much more than 36 hours of college credit — equivalent to two or three full-time semesters. More than two-thirds of the surveys were from substitutes with a four-year degree or higher, while 16% of the responses note the respondent had less than a two-year degree.

Missouri, along with other states, has struggled to recruit substitute teachers. Locally, the staffing shortage has been so severe that some schools canceled classes last year.

In January 2022, Keith Elliott, a spokesperson for Kelly Education, said the staffing company could send substitute teachers to fill only about 60% to 70% of vacancies in the nine Kansas City-area districts it serves. By May of this year, that rate had improved to around 90%, even with more teacher absences, but the company would like to fill at least 95%.

Another positive sign: More people are applying for substitute teacher certification. Those applications jumped to 18,000 in 2022 after averaging 12,000 during the three previous years, Katnik said. The pace of applications has kept up this year, but certified substitute teachers don’t automatically accept open positions in schools.

Could substitute teachers’ pay offer more clues about the reasons for the gap between certification applications and accepting open positions?

A typical substitute teacher in the state makes $75 to $125 per day. The lower end of that range would be less than the state’s $12 minimum wage if teachers work seven-hour days. Much less often, about 9% of the time, they make more than $150 per day. Pay varies by school district, region or whether the assignment is short-term or long-term.

“So when you’re asking, ‘Why don’t people want to sub?’ maybe that might be it,” Katnik said of substitute teacher pay. “I don’t know if you’ve ever substitute taught, but it’s pretty challenging work. I don’t know if you would do it for 100 bucks a day.”

The substitute teachers who take on that challenging work gave positive responses about the support they received to do it. Of the survey responses submitted, 97% said they received at least “adequate” support from school staff. Most of them, nearly two-thirds, responded that they receive “abundant” support.

Officials are still trying to understand why shortages persist and are pondering ways to get certified substitute teachers into classrooms.

“Is it just that they don’t want to substitute teach?” Katnik asked. “Or is it that the needs of the school districts are so much higher than we’ve seen in the past?”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Kevin Foster, executive director of Genesis School, waves to a classroom of students on May 16 in Kansas City. The K-8 charter school won’t reopen in the fall unless a court intervenes in its sponsor’s decision to shut it down (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

Teachers and staff at Genesis School in Kansas City have tried to maintain a normal school year despite an unusual situation: They don’t know whether students will return in the fall.

That’s because the K-8 charter school’s sponsor, the Missouri Charter Public School Commission, wants to shut it down over its academic performance. The State Board of Education backed that decision after Genesis appealed.

Genesis argues that recent data shows it has improved. School leaders also say the commission didn’t follow the process outlined in its contract with Genesis when it moved to close the school.

Genesis has asked a court to overrule its sponsor and the state board, Executive Director Kevin Foster said, and expects it might receive a decision about a week after its June 9 trial date.

While Foster believes the school’s case is strong, he’s still preparing for both outcomes.

Officials have informed families about other schools their students could attend. School leaders are learning about what it would take to “wind down a school,” Foster said, and discussing how Genesis could serve the neighborhood in another format. The organization existed as a nonprofit before it became a charter school.

Other Kansas City schools, and the communities they serve, are also making plans for school closures as the 2022-23 academic year wraps up. In January, the Kansas City Public Schools board voted to close two neighborhood elementary schools, Longfellow and Troost, at the end of the school year, citing declining enrollment districtwide that has left KCPS’ budget spread thin on too many aging school buildings. A private school, Urban Christian Academy, also plans to close its doors after a show of support for LGBTQ+ students caused funders to withdraw.

A school closure may mark the end of an era, but it leaves a gap with lasting impacts. Where do students go? What happens to the building? How does a neighborhood recover from the loss?

The impact of a school closure on students and families 

With Longfellow Elementary closing, Beth Coleman’s son and daughter will attend a new school this fall. For Coleman’s son, who will start fourth grade at Primitivo Garcia Elementary, it will be his third school in three years. That’s particularly sad, Coleman said, because her son and her younger daughter, who will start first grade, have had positive experiences at Longfellow. She told The Beacon in January that her son was happier after he transferred from a Kansas City charter school that wasn’t meeting his academic needs.

“This was their first year at Longfellow, and they really loved it there,” she said recently. “And so for it to only be a year, it’s actually pretty upsetting to them.”

To support families like Coleman’s, Kansas City Public Schools has been offering school tours, enrollment nights and an informational webpage, district spokesperson Shain Bergan said in a statement. He declined an interview with The Beacon.

In addition to newly assigned neighborhood schools, the district waived the standard transfer application process for several nearby schools if families enrolled before mid-March, and encouraged families to consider its signature schools, which have a specific focus area such as college prep or arts and are open to families throughout the district.

A side effect of those extra choices is that groups of friends may not stay together as families select different schools.

Enrolling at a different school than his friends has been hard on her son, Coleman said. To help children acclimate, she suggested Primitivo Garcia could host events, facilitate icebreaker activities or build extra time into the school day for kids to socialize and make new friends.

At Genesis, Foster is also thinking about what families will do if the school closes.

Genesis, which is attached to the Thornberry Unit of Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City, offers free before- and after-school care as well as embedded mental health services. Genesis specializes in helping students who struggled at other schools.

Foster said he was sure to distribute information about the charter school lottery process in time for families to have a chance at entering the most competitive schools. Families can enroll in charter schools with open seats or KCPS neighborhood schools at any time, but Foster worries that some families will struggle to find a good fit at another school if Genesis closes.

The leader of Urban Christian Academy also emphasized its tight-knit and comprehensive approach to supporting families. The school is particularly grieving the “loss of community,” Executive Director Kalie Callaway-George said earlier this year.

“UCA really has existed as a support system for many of our scholars and their families,” she said. Resources to help with bills, clothing or food likely exist in other schools, but “because we’re a small community, we’re just able to do that in a really personalized way.”

The impact on neighborhoods

School closures in Kansas City aren’t new.

Judith Boyd has seen dozens of KCPS schools close since she began her more than 40-year teaching career in the district. “Every neighborhood has suffered the loss of a school. Some neighborhoods like ours have suffered more than one,” she said.

Boyd, now a member of the Blue Hills Neighborhood Association board, said she used to stop by a house after school or during lunch if she needed to talk to a family. “You get to know other people in your neighborhood, other parents, you subscribe to a common culture of success and focus and vision,” she said. But some of the schools that built that sense of community no longer exist.

Charter schools, which can draw students from all over the district, and the remaining more scattered neighborhood schools also have a sense of community and culture, Boyd said. But she isn’t sure how that shared culture extends outside the building when families don’t live nearby.

From her home, longtime Blue Hills resident Linda Brown can see children walking to Troost Elementary. “It’s funny because when you see them cutting up, I step out into the yard and will say stuff to them,” she said. If the children talk back, she’ll remind them that she knows where their mother lives.

“Those are the things that you miss with the neighborhood school and kids walking to and from school,” she said.

The physical vacancy a closed school leaves can also harm a neighborhood if it isn’t filled, said Brown, who is president of the Blue Hills Neighborhood Association. Empty buildings can attract crime and be dangerous for curious children, she said.

KCPS typically attempts to repurpose vacant buildings or sell them. Some sites have been turned into apartment complexes or co-working spaces. But other closed schools such as Pershing School in Blue Hills have been vacant for a long time.

“It lends to the blight in the neighborhood,” Boyd said. “It also makes people wonder, are they important? Is anything ever going to happen here? You know, are we going to benefit from what happens here?”

That’s why Boyd and Brown are relieved that the district plans to continue using the Troost site. It may be used for professional development or as a temporary school site for students whose buildings are being renovated.

“Not only is the spirit of the neighborhood not as broken as it could have been, but the real estate in the neighborhood… it’s not going to get worse,” Boyd said. “There is some loss and some sadness, but it could have been so much worse than it is.”

Boyd taught at Troost Elementary for 20 years until her retirement in 2013, then returned as a reading interventionist and volunteer. She said she hopes the district works to preserve the school’s history.

She remembers children proudly singing a song about school namesake Dr. Benoist Troost at assemblies, though she acknowledges Troost, who enslaved people, is controversial.

“Some of the most powerful and best teachers in the district at one time at the elementary level went right through Troost Elementary,” Boyd said.

Foster said the Genesis building won’t remain vacant if the school closes.

“We have a facility, and there’s a deep commitment to serve at-risk kids,” he said. “We might serve as a nonprofit educational service provider.”

But the school’s closure will still leave a void, he said, referring to a map that shows many Genesis students’ homes are clustered around the school and not near other charter schools. Genesis is open to students districtwide, but 84% of those enrolled live within three miles of the school, and 75% live within two miles of it.

People who cared about the ecosystem of available schools would ask, “How do we get that building, and how do we get those kids?” Foster said. “But no one’s calling.”

This article first appeared on The Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

People hold signs opposing school closures at a Kansas City Public Schools school board meeting Nov. 16. The board discussed public feedback at the meeting but did not vote on school closure recommendations (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon. 

Gregg Lombardi estimates the Lykins neighborhood in northeast Kansas City is on track to win the battle against blight by next year.

The Lykins Neighborhood Association and Neighborhood Legal Support of Kansas City, both of which Lombardi directs, have been working to support residents and make abandoned homes livable again. Home values have increased and crime is down, he said.

The project has also been incorporating affordable and workforce housing into the neighborhood mix.

But now, Lykins residents and several groups supporting them worry their community could be dealt a major blow: the closing of Whittier Elementary School.

The school at 1012 Bales Ave. serves as an important neighborhood resource and point of unity and has provided quality education for a diverse immigrant population, several said during public comment at a Kansas City Public Schools board meeting Nov. 16.

Northeast residents have also rallied around James Elementary School at 5810 Scarritt Ave., another school that receives high marks on key performance measures, and Northeast High School, both recommended for closure.

They’re pushing the district to rethink its proposal or delay a school board vote currently planned for December.

If Whittier closes, “You can end up with empty houses and situations in which it’s likely that crime would rise,” Lombardi told The Kansas City Beacon.

“The flip side of that is that there is a real risk right now, with all the gentrification that’s going on in the northeast, that when low-income families leave the neighborhood to go to a charter school or to be closer to their (new) school, then it’s going to be wealthy families coming in pushing up property prices, pushing people out of the neighborhood.”

‘Doubling down on disinvestment’ 

There’s no question that the Whittier Elementary School building needs work, said Chris Steinauer, a teacher who focuses on STEM and career tech education. He has also lived in the northeast since 2017.

“We have holes in the walls,” he said. “My room has a part of the wall that is literally crumbling. If you rub up against it then part of the wall comes with you. There’s issues with heating and cooling. There have been historically issues with mold.”

According to the school district’s Blueprint 2030 website and the district’s past comments, maintenance hasn’t been completed at many buildings because of funding shortfalls.

Those shortfalls have in large part happened because KCPS has struggled since 1967 to pass a bond issue — a common way school districts borrow money to fund building projects.

But Steinauer doesn’t see the building’s condition as a reason to close the school. He sees it as evidence that the school and neighborhood haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, a trend he thinks would be exacerbated by closing the school.

Mark Logan, a member of the Lykins Neighborhood Association, sees KCPS’ emphasis on deferred maintenance as inequitable.

“The schools that they’ve chosen to defer the most maintenance in historically are the ones that are located in poor, immigrant, Black communities, right?” he said.

“So now they’re saying, ‘Oh, well, there’s too much deferred maintenance needed on these buildings, so those are also the ones we’re going to close.’ Now, that may not be intentional, but it’s not accidental. It’s the same factors at work. It’s the same systemic inequities.”

Logan said a major component of anti-racist thought is that it’s necessary to intentionally combat racism.

“No one’s sitting there rubbing their hands together gleefully planning how to do harm, but the result of the plan is still harmful,” he said.

Population trends in northeast Kansas City

In addition to building conditions and deferred maintenance costs, KCPS named academic performance and enrollment — including current enrollment, past trends and future projections — as factors for the recommendations.

A district fact sheet shows that Whittier Elementary has 346 students this year, about 87% of its 400-student capacity. James has significantly fewer, hitting nearly 63% of its smaller capacity. Enrollment for both schools is lower today than in 2018.

Lombardi said the Lykins association would like KCPS to reexamine its data for Whittier in light of recent changes. The school had nearly 450 students as recently as 2020, only dropping below capacity during the pandemic.

Both Lombardi and Steinauer said the 2022 numbers don’t even capture the current enrollment, which they say has continued to grow since the school year began.

Lombardi also said the 2019 data the district included in its profiles doesn’t reflect the dramatic changes in Lykins over several years of work to combat blight.

“Lykins has some of the highest increases in both the cost of property and rental rates in the whole city,” Lombardi added. “And we also have our violent crime rates that have gone down 42% in the last year. None of that is consistent and in fact, that’s completely inconsistent with the idea that this is a struggling neighborhood that’s shrinking. It’s a growing neighborhood.”

The push to keep Whittier and James open

Opposition to KCPS’ plan initially focused on Central High School — which as of Nov. 18 was the only school to have its own dedicated section in an online Blueprint 2030 Q&A.

But a movement to protect several schools in the northeast part of the district has also taken shape.

An event at James Elementary, which included Spanish interpreting services by a district employee at the front of the room, had the third-highest attendance of any community chat, behind the Central High School and Southeast Community Center meetings, according to district data presented Nov. 16.

A busload of northeast residents attended the Nov. 16 school board meeting, many with signs supporting James and Whittier.

Most of the people who gave public comments were affiliated with the Lykins neighborhood, historic northeast area, Whittier or Northeast High School.

They argued that the schools are high-performing, loved by students and families and practiced at serving specific demographics.

Whittier in particular has honed its resources for its many small immigrant communities, which could be devastated by being split into four different schools, said Kelly Allen, a special projects manager for the Lykins neighborhood.

“This cultural competency idea (a district priority) is not supported by fragmenting communities,” she said.

Transportation has also become a point of anxiety.

For some families, “their daily routine relies on kids being able to just walk to the school,” said Ricardo Flores, a programming manager for the Lykins Neighborhood Resource Center.  “Changing that for a school that has been around for a long time, it’s highly disruptive.”

Several parents at the James meeting said they don’t want to put their students on buses because of safety and reliability concerns.

Allen said she was surprised by the strength of the perception that buses are dangerous, but thinks it may be exacerbated by language barriers.

“I put my kid on a bus,” she said. “But I speak the same language as the bus driver.”

The path forward 

During public board meetings and conversations with the media, school district leaders have emphasized that proactive measures are needed to prevent the district from heading toward an eventual crisis that could require even more drastic changes.

The district has seen drastically declining enrollment over the decades and runs a high number of buildings for its size, making it hard to devote enough funding to academics and other programs that might make KCPS more appealing to families.

As early as 2019, Kansas City Public Schools has been preparing for its next long-term plan by analyzing district resources and inefficiencies, then seeking community input.

On Oct. 12, the district named 10 specific schools recommended to close.

Since then, much of the feedback at four “community chats” The Kansas City Beacon attended and subsequent board meetings has been critical, though only a small percentage of district parents, students and residents participated.

The district has said the board is likely to vote on the proposals in December. The next regular board meeting — and the only one remaining this year — is Dec. 14. The board would have the power to schedule special meetings before then for further discussion, or to postpone the vote to a later date.

Approximately two months isn’t enough time to gather feedback and adjust the plan, some have told district leaders and The Beacon.

“It’s been a really long time since we’ve been able to say that we have that (full accreditation) to promote as an asset in our public school system,” Allen said. “Why not at least give us a chance to fill seats, which is a continued revenue source, unlike closing a school?”

Steinauer, who spoke at the school board meeting Nov. 16, said he thought some members seemed receptive to concerns based on their comments and questions.

The board heard a summary of community feedback at the meeting, but the administration did not recommend any specific adjustments to the plan.

People who made public comments “really spoke from the heart and there was also a lot of logic, a lot of commentary about how this doesn’t have to be what it is, that there are other options within the Blueprint 2030 framework,” Steinauer said.

“I’m hopeful that the board heard the public and that it will adjust what it does. And I think that if it doesn’t then it shows everybody in Kansas City who the district leadership is serving.”

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

Faxon Elementary School in Kansas City, pictured Feb. 1, would be slated for closure in fall 2026 under a proposal presented to the Kansas City Public Schools board Oct. 12 (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon. 

Kansas City Public Schools is proposing a far-reaching reorganization that would close 10 schools, build or expand others and — leaders say — free up funds for academic goals.

But the district knows that the plan could tank without community support.

Disgruntled families could leave. Voters could reject bonds needed to fund building maintenance, upgrades and new construction.

So KCPS is highlighting that it’s willing to listen to concerns and potentially adjust the recommendations — the result of a long-term planning initiative known as Blueprint 2030 — before a board vote, likely in December.

Leaders also are taking pains to distance their proposed consolidation from an unpopular district “rightsizing” initiative 12 years ago, saying the new plan is proactive and focused on improving student experiences.

“The only way it’s going to happen: if we decide to do it together,” interim Superintendent Jennifer Collier said during a passionate appeal for support at the Oct. 12 board meeting.

“If we don’t, guess what? It’s going to flop. I can tell you that already. Because that’s what’s happened in the past. We’ve got to decide that we’re going to be a different KCPS, we’re going to be a different city. We’re going to put kids first, not just say we put them first.”

Academics and school closures

The recommendations were announced Oct. 12 to a room with only a scattering of vacant chairs.

As they sat down, some audience members immediately began reviewing copies of presentation slides and reacting to the timeline for proposed school closures and changes.

People responded with groans, murmurs and applause as administrators and consultants unrolled the plan and commented on the future of the district.

Before discussing plans for school buildings, district leaders summarized their extensive process of background research and community input and touted improvements the plan would allow by freeing up funds currently used to maintain aging buildings.

New academic offerings would include project-based learning; field trips for all students; science, technology, engineering, art and math labs; college and career pathways; marching bands in all high schools; and world languages and instrumental music starting in elementary school.

Not all KCPS students have had access to those advantages, which are available at many neighboring districts, board member Marvia Jones said.

“I understand the concern that the community is definitely going to be impacted by these changes,” Jones said. “And this is emotional, it’s not just a physical change. I would also posit, though, that we are already being shortchanged … we are already lacking many opportunities and experiences for our children.”

The additions would phase in over the next three school years, with plans for evaluation and adjustment.

But improved financial efficiency through school closures is integral to the plan.

“I’m not going to say it’s impossible (to implement the academic vision without closing schools) if we had a lot of donors and funders,” Collier said. But “when you look at the number of buildings we currently have open and you look at the funding that we have, you have to think about how we can best utilize what it is that we currently have.”

As enrollment declined over the past decades, KCPS was left with many buildings that have too few students to support a wide variety of courses and activities. For example, last year Southeast High School’s football team had to end a season early for lack of players.

The district’s proposal strikes a middle ground among the scenarios KCPS initially shared with the public. It calls for eight elementary schools to close, as well as Central and Northeast high schools. The district would continue to use four of those buildings.

An additional middle school would open in a new or remodeled building in the south, allowing room for the district to move most sixth graders out of elementary school.

KCPS would also build two elementary schools to replace some existing ones, while the current King Elementary School would become Paseo Middle School. The building plan also includes some expansions and renovations.

To fund the building changes and improvements, the district is hoping voters will approve two bonds, one in April 2024 and another in 2027.

A bond allows a district to borrow money, often to fund building projects. Voters haven’t approved a bond for KCPS since 1967.

The incorporation of multiple bonds into the plan raised questions from some board members about backup plans and the need for a strong plan to build support.

“This district deserves to have this community re-up and increase their investment in our schools and in our kids,” board chair Nate Hogan said.

“I just want us to be really thoughtful about how we go about that, so when we go for it we’re not just maybe getting across the finish line but we’re crushing it, because this community has a very clear idea of what that means for our kids, our district and our city.”

Community reaction 

Opportunities for input on the plan start Monday with a series of in-person and virtual meetings that extends through Nov. 9.

The district is providing meals, child care and interpretation services in Spanish, Somali, Swahili and Burmese at all in-person meetings, except for a Nov. 5 meeting specifically for Spanish speakers.

Michael Ali, a former KCPS student with grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the district, said he plans to voice his concerns about the proposed closure of Central High School.

“I’m going to every one of (the meetings) if I have to until they hear me,” he said.

Ali said he attended the initial board meeting because he worried —correctly — that Central would be slated for closure.

“I played football there. I went to that school. I just didn’t graduate,” he said. “I still love the school. I love the teachers.”

Ali said it doesn’t make sense for the district to close a large building that is only a few decades old.

“If they’re gonna bring some schools together they should bring East up to Central and then they can bring another school up to Central … it’s that big,” Ali said.

He said he doesn’t think improving buildings will help students and would prefer the district to focus on teacher quality, especially by raising salaries.

During the board meeting, it appeared other community members were also concerned about Central.

When a presenter said Central students would most likely move to Southeast High School under the plan, some groaned audibly.

During later discussion, Hogan acknowledged the reaction and suggested — to nods and murmurs of agreement — it was partly because of the distance between the two buildings.

Collier said the transition plan would account for cultural differences between the two schools.

“What we don’t want to do is just place the Central students at Southeast without considering the things that are important to them, the pride that they have in their school,” Collier said during a press conference the day after the meeting at which the plan was announced. “We want to make sure that they’re able to bring some of that along with them and then to incorporate that into that school so that it almost becomes a new culture.”

She noted that Central was a newer building but said it hadn’t aged well and that it had low enrollment, largely due to a small number of students living in the area.

The district plans to still make use of the building, including its athletic facilities.

According to a presentation at the board meeting, factors for closing schools were performance on state academic evaluations, enrollment numbers and trends, building condition and costs of deferred maintenance. All of the schools KCPS is proposing to close have lost enrollment over the past five years, and nearly all are predicted to continue that trend.

During the press conference, Collier said the district will take objections seriously, especially if they’re accompanied by a viable alternative. Leaders are open to modifying recommendations before a final vote, she said.

‘A very sensitive word’ 

The Blueprint 2030 process may be especially fraught because of lingering bad feelings over the district’s last major round of school closures, marketed as “rightsizing,” which closed nearly half of the district’s schools, displaced numerous students and left holes in some neighborhoods.

During the meeting, board member Kandace Buckner corrected a presenter’s word choice.

Rightsizing “is a very sensitive word as we went through this about 10 years ago,” she said. “…This is not rightsizing.”

Buckner said she’s already received emails, phone calls and texts asking how the district’s new plan will be different from the past.

Board member Jennifer Wolfsie said she views the “rightsizing” as a move made not from a sense of academic vision, but to stave off a fiscal crisis and a state takeover after years of board inaction.

The current initiative is more proactive, she said.

“If we don’t make a decision … and push things down the road, we could be putting our students and future boards back into the situation that we were having to face in 2010,” Wolfsie said.

Collier said during the board meeting that the district and community need to look to the future to support students.

“I cannot answer for the past,” she said. “All I can do now is look forward and ask everybody else to join us as we look forward, to join us and give us your thoughts. Share your thinking, share your concerns. But at the end of that we also have to know and understand that a decision will need to be made … If we really care and we want to see something different, let’s do it together.”

An entrance to the closed Askew Elementary School is pictured during a building tour July 1. Kansas City Public Schools is accepting bids from prospective buyers on a first-come, first-served basis (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by The Kansas City Beacon. 

Askew Elementary School has been vacant for more than a decade.

The inside shows signs of the nearly 100-year-old building’s age and long disuse. Walls are peeling, debris litters the floor and some classroom ceiling panels have fallen.

To enter the former school for a July 1 building tour, visitors signed waivers accepting responsibility for the risk of injury or death. Several district security officers accompanied the tour and visitors were advised they could leave in case of an allergic reaction to mold.

That didn’t deter several prospective buyers who came to assess whether they could bring the 58,000-square-foot building in eastern Kansas City back to life.

Kenneth Ford, executive director of the Descendant Freedmen Alliance of Kansas City, said he envisioned the space as a Freedmen cultural center. Freedmen refers to people of mixed African and Native American heritage.

“It’s got a lot of potential,” said Ford, who has been touring other school buildings in addition to Askew. “We’re trying to utilize existing properties that are already in the city,” he explained, hoping to turn an “eyesore” into an asset for the community.

If Ford or another buyer is able to revitalize the building, Askew will join the ranks of 20 former KCPS schools that have been transformed under the district’s repurposing plan or have been sold to buyers with specific plans to use them.

They’ve been reimagined as affordable or market-rate housing, co-working spaces, charter schools or mixed-use developments that include retail space.

As the district anticipates another round of closures under its Blueprint 2030 long-term planning process, it’s continuing a strategy that has served it for about a decade, after a “right-sizing” initiative caused a wave of school closures. 

The process heavily weighs community input, and KCPS has recently begun to prioritize affordable housing projects.

Here’s how KCPS evaluates project proposals and what it would take to renovate a former school.

Gathering input from the community 

Shannon Jaax, the former director of planning and real estate for KCPS who now works on repurposing as a contractor, said KCPS often asks for community feedback when a building goes on the market so potential buyers can have a sense of what plans might gain support.

After it receives one or more proposals, a district committee reviews them and assesses whether they’re viable. The district also holds a public hearing to gather neighborhood input. Jaax said between 20 and 100 people typically attend and others send written feedback.

More recently, the district has also started to establish “benefits agreements” with buyers that detail how they will support the community, such as allowing a neighborhood association to meet in the auditorium or working with KCPS students through internships or career fair visits.

Another recent change is that the district notes on its listings that it will prioritize projects that include affordable housing accessible to students and staff.

Neighbors’ feedback can have a serious impact on whether a project is accepted or whether it first needs adjustments.

Hope City KC, a charitable organization and church based on 24th Street, made an offer on the Askew building in 2017. 

According to meeting notes on the KCPS website, the project plan included faith-based substance abuse programs, housing for interns and a food pantry.

It received mixed feedback from neighbors. Some residents asked about security plans and whether the ministry would attract crime to the neighborhood.

As KCPS worked with Hope City to adjust the proposal, the church instead purchased the building it was already renting.

Jaax said KCPS is still open to receiving a revised proposal from Hope City and reached out to everyone who had expressed interest in the past. Lisa Stribling, one of the founders and directors of Hope City, joined the recent Askew building tour.

Successful plans can be heavily informed by neighborhood wishes.

Mark Moberly, partner and director of real estate development for Sunflower Development Group, said that when his organization looked into repurposing the Blenheim school it contacted the Tri-Blenheim Neighborhood Association early in the process. The development group focuses on renovating historic buildings.

Neighbors were reluctant to add affordable housing to the neighborhood, but the building repurposing wasn’t viable as market-rate housing, Moberly said.

Further discussions revealed that neighbors did want somewhere affordable for aging residents to live without leaving the area.

In late 2018, Moberly’s group completed development of the school as Blenheim School Apartments, an affordable senior housing complex.

Moberly said the apartments are doing well and rarely have vacancies, as residents tend to stay for a long time.

“Maybe they’re ready to give up their single-family home and the responsibilities that come with that, but still stay in the neighborhood,” he said. Many tenants are active in local churches or have doctors’ offices and family nearby.

“It’s where they grew up. In fact, we’ve got a resident or two that went to school or taught at the Blenheim Elementary School.”

In most cases, KCPS has been able to find a use for older school buildings.

According to the district’s repurposing page, 20 former schools have been sold while two more are under contract or memorandums of understanding.

Elle Moxley, a KCPS spokesperson, said proceeds from sales go to the district and have typically been used to fund capital projects.

KCPS is either using or holding in reserve five other buildings, while another five were demolished.

Jaax said that of the repurposed buildings, only one is not being used according to the original plan for nonprofit offices and a community center. It was instead sold to a charter school. Also, some projects are not yet complete as buyers sort out funding, adjust plans or work on construction.

Askew is among five buildings the district is currently marketing to prospective buyers. That includes two new sites with bids due in September. The other three, including Askew, have long been on the market and are accepting bids on a first-come, first-served basis.

Challenges and benefits of renovating schools

How much does it cost to buy a school?

Jaax said there’s quite a bit of variation, ranging from about $100,000 to $2 million.

KCPS is working on having the on-the-market schools appraised, but is also willing to work with potential buyers.

“The purchase price is not what’s gonna stop the project from going,” Jaax said. “It’s the cost of renovating one of these buildings. I mean, they are no small undertaking.”

Jaax estimated it costs at least $7 million to renovate a building but could easily reach $10 million or more depending on plans. It’s cheaper to use a building as a school than it is to convert it into apartments, for example.

E.F. “Chip” Walsh is a partner with Sustainable Development Partners, which has repurposed several former KCPS schools, sometimes working with other developers. Walsh also owns and operates development consulting firm Mercier Street.

Sustainable Development Partners turned Swinney Elementary School west of the Country Club Plaza into luxury housing and Westport Middle School into co-working space.

Walsh said it’s currently converting Westport High School into market-rate housing and 20,000 feet of commercial space, with a goal of finishing in the second half of 2023.

He said repurposing school buildings as housing rather than constructing new apartments is more environmentally sustainable.

“You can remove blight, you can put something back on the tax roll … but you’re also taking something that’s not being used, and you’re finding a use for it,” he said.

But sustainable doesn’t necessarily mean cheaper.

Buildings may not be designed for central heating and cooling, and may have hazards such as asbestos and lead paint. Fitting apartments into the existing layout of the building is less efficient and requires more creativity than simply repeating a small number of apartment layouts, as many new buildings do.

“You take what some might perceive as a challenge or a weakness, and you try to make that a characteristic,” Walsh said. “So it adds to what I think of as the quirkiness of the property, but that can increase your costs.”

Financing a repurposing project

Historic and low-income housing tax credits can make up some of the cost difference, but they add their own set of challenges.

When projects rely on historic tax credits, they have to preserve the character of the building.

In the case of the Swinney school, the state wouldn’t rule on whether the project could receive historic tax credits until after developers demolished an addition to reveal whether it had compromised the original architecture, Jaax said.

Moberly, with Sunflower Development Group, said limitations on changing the layout of historic buildings make it hard to put enough apartment units in some buildings.

“We’ll put an apartment on the stage of an auditorium that’s no longer going to be used, or convert the gym into units,” he said. “But for the most part, the number of classrooms drives the unit count and the corridors have to be maintained as-is.”

To make a project viable, there have to be enough apartments to compensate for fixed costs like the building purchase price, utilities for common spaces, maintenance of green spaces and having a staff person present, Moberly said, and developers may need to seek multiple sources of support.

Blenheim, which has 52 units, relied on HOME funds — federal affordable housing grants to state and local governments — through both the Missouri Housing Development Commission and the city of Kansas City in addition to both historic and low-income housing tax credits, he said.

Despite the complicated factors that go into funding a school repurposing project, Moberly said renovating historic buildings was still worthwhile.

“They’re so cool. I mean, we’ve got units with chalkboards,” he said. Some apartment units have original coat lockers used in classrooms and the outside of the school kept its appearance.

Even buildings like Askew that have been tougher to sell still have value, Jaax said.

She said Askew’s rambling layout and its location in a low-traffic residential neighborhood far from bus stops may have deterred buyers.

But she pointed to the building’s unique architecture — a KCPS building profile describes its style as having “gothic elements” — and its multiple entrances that could allow flexibility for different uses.

“That hasn’t been sufficient to get a reuse to move forward yet,” she said. “But, I mean, it’s got good bones. It just needs someone with vision and resources. That’s hard.”

The William Jewell College campus is pictured April 22. Researchers at the college have determined that enslaved people contributed to building Jewell Hall (Zach Bauman/The Beacon).

This story was originally published by The Kansas City Beacon. 

William Jewell College brands itself as “The Critical Thinking College.”

Three “key questions” are central to the curriculum of the Liberty, Missouri, institution: What is real? What can we know? How should we live?

But as a student- and faculty-led group called the Slavery, Memory and Justice Project applied critical thinking skills to a study of the college’s slaveholding founders, members have felt marginalized in discussions about the truth of William Jewell’s past.

Instead, the administration formed its own research group, the Racial Reconciliation Commission, which critics say is laying a flawed foundation for conversations about the school’s future.

In front of a large audience at the college’s April 22 Duke Colloquium, history professor Christopher Wilkins said members of the justice project — which also includes alumni — had hoped the college would endorse their work, amplify it and follow their suggestions on “best practices.”

Instead, Wilkins said, the college has undermined academic freedom by suggesting people outside its own commission don’t have equal standing to pursue the truth without having their work overruled by an official version of the college’s history.

After an Aug. 24 Kansas City Beacon report on the slavery research sparked discussions about change on campus, President Elizabeth MacLeod Walls emailed faculty and staff to assert that “it is the sole responsibility of the Commission to determine what is true and then to make recommendations to me and the Board on how we then should live and act on this campus.”

“The argument there is that only the college administration has the authority to say what is true about its history,” Wilkins said of the email.

Rodney Smith, William Jewell’s vice president for access and engagement, said that on the contrary, the administration welcomes the SMJP’s work and encouraged its members to join the commission.

He said the commission is open to feedback and considers its initial report a working document.

“I care about this,” Smith said. “We care about this work as an institution, or else we wouldn’t be doing it. … At the end of the day, I think the SMJP and RRC are after the same things.”

The truth about slavery and William Jewell

The three official histories of William Jewell College mention iterations of the word “slavery” only five times.

But researchers with both groups discovered the college’s ties to slavery run deep.

Many of the trustees who founded and funded the college, including Dr. William Jewell himself, enslaved people.

The discoveries come at a time when colleges and universities around the U.S. and beyond have been investigating their historical ties to slavery. More than 90 joined the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) Consortium to collaborate and share best practices.

In late April, Harvard University published a 134-page report and pledged $100 million to a “legacy of slavery fund.”

Based on other colleges’ work, SMJP members determined a study of slavery should take at least two years and result in a 100-plus-page report.

Though it has published and presented some initial findings, a comprehensive SMJP report is planned for December, about two and a half years after the project began. Twenty-two people have worked on the project and an additional eight students recently joined, Wilkins said.

As the SMJP launched, Wilkins tried to connect with college researchers who were also investigating slavery.

“We essentially proposed to continue the work that students and I were already doing, but hoped the administration would provide us with official standing which would make the college look good when our high-quality work was eventually published,” Wilkins said during his talk.

He also reached out with suggested actions including:

• Joining the USS Consortium. Smith said he has been in contact with the group, but the college has not joined.
• Creating a center for the study of slavery. Wilkins asked to use a room in Jewell Hall but offered to personally raise funds to cover costs. Administrators told him Jewell wasn’t ready, he said.
• Holding a faculty forum on slavery research. Wilkins said he was told that would be “discourteous to administration,” though Pharamond Guice, director of the Academic Achievement Center, invited him to speak to 50-60 people through the staff council.

The Racial Reconciliation Commission

When William Jewell unveiled its plan to address slavery research, Wilkins’ concerns grew. The RRC intended to study the college’s entire history, from 1849 to the present, in one year.

“The RRCs timeline did not strike us as viable,” Wilkins said. “We were also concerned that given the group’s official identity, students would be expected to hand over their research … and the administration would ultimately make decisions on what would be written regardless of what the students said.”

Smith, the vice president for access and engagement, said he turned down some suggestions because he didn’t want to be “prescriptive” for commission members and “wanted us to do it the William Jewell way,” rather than mimicking other colleges.

Early in its process, the commission lengthened the original timeline for the project, but it still moved more quickly on the slavery component than SMJP recommended.

An RRC report of 33 pages, including appendices, was published Jan. 17, about nine months after the commission was created. It covers 1848-1879 and lists Andrew Pratt, dean emeritus of the chapel and lead researcher for the RRC, as its author.

Smith told The Beacon that the commission works by “consensus,” with members discussing issues and coming to agreement.

In addition to Smith, The Beacon requested to speak to Pratt and MacLeod Walls. Cara Dahlor, marketing and public relations director for William Jewell, referred all questions to Smith.

Hayley Michael, an SMJP member who served on the commission until she resigned in the wake of the RRC report, agreed Smith didn’t dictate the commission’s decisions but said she wasn’t sure whether  “consensus” described its process.

“Even though all members had the chance to speak up, not everyone’s voice held the same influence or authority,” she said.

Michael said commission members received an initial draft of the report by email and discussed it during a meeting that only five to seven of the members attended. An April 2021 announcement of the commission lists 16 members and four advisers including Wilkins — who said his inclusion is an error because he declined to participate.

Michael said she attended the meeting and pointed out factual errors and misrepresentations in the document. She also argued it focused too much on the founders rather than the people they enslaved, and asked that publication be delayed.

The RRC didn’t delay the report, and Michael didn’t get to review a second draft before publication.

“In some cases, what he (Pratt) changed for the second version was worse than the first version,” she said.

Smith said the commission considers the report to be largely a “working” or “draft document” and welcomes input from the community.

“We are willing to amend and adjust and include other people’s perspective in this work,” he said. Smith did not name any specific changes the commission is planning to make after receiving feedback.

Michael said she met with Smith when she decided to resign to explain her frustrations about the report and how she felt “student voices were ignored, including my own.”

She said the discussion went well and that Smith has always been “civil” and “constructive” in their interactions. When she left Smith told her he was disappointed because he had been planning to ask her to take a leadership role in the next section covering Jewell during and after the Civil War, Michael said.

The RRC report on slavery at William Jewell

Steve Harris was disappointed the first time he read the RRC report and angry the second time, he wrote to Smith, the RRC and the William Jewell College Black Alumni Association.

Harris graduated from Wiliam Jewell in 1987 and worked in Jewell’s education department for two years. He recently served on the Jewell Radical Inclusivity Alumni Council, but said he doesn’t know whether the group is still active.

In his 12-page memo, plus appendices, Harris argued the report ignored vital context, included unsupported opinions and skipped important factual information that is easy to access online.

The lack of care taken with the report is “just another item on the pile of daily injustices that tell students of color that they are not as important to the institution as white students,” Harris told The Beacon.

Harris thinks the report highlights a “white male point of view” and minimizes the college’s connection to slavery — for example, by not including relevant census data from before 1850 that is included in preliminary SMJP reports, and by omitting some of the founders’ pro-slavery actions.

He told The Beacon that’s particularly concerning because the report is supposed to provide a factual foundation for analysis and eventually action. “If you started with bad product, you will continue to have bad product,” he said.

After he submitted the memo, Harris said Smith reached out by email to thank him and invited him to speak at a commission meeting. But when Harris warned Smith that he would call for Pratt’s resignation, the conversation ended.

Smith told The Beacon that Harris’ response is “precisely what we wanted from the commission … That’s what we do on college campuses, we engage in intellectual discourse and yeah, we may not agree all the time on everything, but at the end of the day, we are after the truth.”

Atmosphere for students of color

William Jewell needs to understand how the discrepancy between its words and actions regarding diversity contribute to making students of color feel “not welcomed” on a regular basis, Harris said.

He said issues during his time at the school include Greek life largely excluding Black students and one fraternity flying the Confederate flag. He also wants Jewell to hire more faculty of color.

Tavarus Pennington, an SMJP member and senior English and communications major, told The Beacon there’s still a culture of minimizing racial justice issues on campus and “tokenizing” people of color. He presented at the April 22 forum, focusing on Jewell’s future.

Pennington, who is featured on the college’s home page and its core curriculum page as of May 3, said students of color, especially those active in campus organizations, often get invited to participate in the college’s diversity initiatives but question whether anything changes.

“That sort of becomes a struggle for a lot of students, because they’re sort of being turned to to answer for the problems of the campus,” he said.

One straightforward proposal for change is removing names of specific slaveholders from awards, programs or buildings. In August, Harris told The Beacon there was already enough information about Alexander Doniphan’s vocal support of slavery to make those decisions.

The RRC has yet to issue any recommendations about the naming decisions under the control of the administration.

But the college’s Student Senate has already decided to remove Doniphan’s name from a senior award.

Pennington, who is part of the Student Senate, said name changes are ultimately “performative.” But the college shouldn’t rush to more substantial action steps, he added.

“There needs to be a lot of time for discovery and critical reflection, and we’re in the midst of that,” he said. “And so the only, I guess, prescription for the way to move forward is more in step with vulnerability and allowing ourselves to discover the truth of the matter.”

Harris agreed William Jewell’s first focus should be getting the history right. But when the RRC does move on to analysis, he wants to discourage it from weighing founders’ accomplishments against their connections to slavery.

“There are some bad acts that cannot be overcome by any good they (the founders) may have done,” Harris wrote.

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

Several Missouri legislators are working to prevent schools from issuing mask or vaccine mandates (File photo by Getty Images).

This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon.

During the past year, concerns about COVID policies, critical race theory and controversial books have highlighted tensions in public education.

In addition, the pandemic has exacerbated teacher shortages and increased calls for “school choice” for families — which could include charter schools, virtual schools or state support for attending private schools.

The Missouri legislature has taken note.

As of Thursday, a subject index of prefiled 2022 bills in the Missouri House shows “elementary and secondary education” is the most popular topic, with 84 bills filed. Crimes and punishment comes in second with 69 bills.

The Missouri Senate doesn’t sort prefiled bills by topic, but a Beacon analysis found more than 40 bills related to K-12 education filed by mid-December.

Any given bill might not be heard by a committee, much less be debated by the full legislature or signed into law. Lawmakers can also amend bills at several points in the process.

But this list gives a sense of how Missouri representatives and senators are seeking to address some of the most timely K-12 education issues.

Critical race theory and ‘divisive concepts’ 

At least a dozen bills seek to regulate the teaching of controversial topics, including racism, sexism and LGBTQ-related content.

Several bills, such as Republican Rep. Hardy Billington’s HB 1457, would prohibit schools from teaching The 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative focusing on how slavery and the contributions of Black Americans are central to understanding U.S. history. Billington is from Poplar Bluff.

Other proposals, a few of which also apply to public colleges and universities, frame themselves as banning “divisive” or “discriminatory” lessons.

The bills, many of which use similar language, list a litany of concepts that schools would not be allowed to teach, such as that the U.S. is fundamentally racist or sexist, that people are responsible for actions committed in the past by those of the same race or sex, or that people are unconsciously biased solely because of their race or sex.

One example, HB 1767, is sponsored by Rep. Chris Sander, a Republican from Lone Jack. Under that bill, schools  couldn’t promote the concept that “The rule of law does not exist, but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.”

Some bills, such as Sen. Rick Brattin’s SB 694, explicitly forbid schools from teaching critical race theory or related concepts. Brattin is a Republican from Harrisonville.

Critical race theory is an academic concept usually taught at the graduate school level, but it has become a catchall term for any race- or diversity-related concepts that parents or politicians find objectionable.

A proposal by Rep. Chuck Basye, a Rocheport Republican, would allow parents more control over lessons on sexual orientation (HB 1752). His proposal would require schools to notify parents of plans to teach such content and allow them to pull their children out of class if they object. Current law requires a similar process before sex education lessons.

School curriculum

Some bills would allow or require districts to add content or entire courses on specific topics, such as:

• 9/11 (HB 1625)
• Computer science (SB 659)
• Responsible use of social media (HB 1585)
• Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament (SB 684)
• Native American and Black history (HB 1776)
• Criminal justice (HB 1821)
• The Holocaust (HB 1832)
• LGBTQ contributions to society (HB 1845)
• Civil rights (HB 1933)
• Insurance licensing (HB 1719)

Other proposals would add more scrutiny to school curriculum.

Rep. Dan Shaul, a Republican from Imperial, proposed legislation (HB 1908) that would require school boards to review the curriculum each year in at least one public hearing.

And while Missouri law already allows anyone to inspect public school curriculum, a proposal by Rep. John Wiemann of O’Fallon (HB 1834) would ensure school districts’ residents can do so at no charge within 45 days of making a request. Wiemann is a Republican.

COVID restrictions

Several legislators are working to prevent schools from issuing mask or vaccine mandates.

Sen. Andrew Koenig, a Republican from Manchester, proposed SB 646 to forbid public schools from requiring face coverings or COVID vaccination for students. Under the bill, schools could require students to test or quarantine only if they have already tested positive for COVID-19 or have symptoms.

A proposal from Rep. Nick Schroer, an O’Fallon Republican, also applies to higher education and forbids vaccine requirements for employees and students. The bill is HB 1475.

Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, is seeking to include “conscientious” objection as an exception to all school vaccine requirements in his HB 1665. Parents can already receive exemptions for their children for religious or medical reasons.

Parental rights

Lawmakers from both parties have filed versions of a “Parents’ Bill of Rights.”

Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, a Democrat from Independence, includes parents’ rights to direct health decisions, access health and mental health records, access educational materials and curriculum, consent to recordings or collection of biometric information, and be informed of investigations.

The proposal, SB 653, also specifies that districts should make information available about clubs and activities, school choice opportunities, vaccines, and how to receive specialized education.

Similar proposals by Republicans cover many of the same topics, sometimes in greater detail or with additional rights.

For example, Brattin’s SB 776 is one of several that says parents have the right to object to course materials and to ensure the school doesn’t teach that material to their children. It also says parents have the right to visit their children during school.

Expanding school choice

Improving “school choice” — typically framed as expanding charter schools and making it easier for parents to choose homeschooling, virtual school or private school — has been a contentious issue in the legislature in past years.

School choice proponents are once again attempting to expand parents’ options, which opponents often argue may harm traditional public schools.

Multiple bills, including SB 648, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden, a Republican from Columbia, would give parents the power to decide whether their children can enroll in Missouri’s virtual course access program. Currently, school districts have the final decision.

Sen. Bill Eigel, a Republican from Weldon Spring, filed SB 650 to expand charter schools to anywhere in the state’s charter counties (which include Jackson County and three St. Louis-area counties) as well as cities larger than 30,000. The bill summary lists 15 proposals from the past three years that are similar to Eigel’s.

With rare exceptions, charter schools are currently allowed only in the Kansas City and St. Louis school districts.

Other proposals, such as Rep. Doug Richey’s HB 1552, would adjust how charter schools are funded. Richey is a Republican from Excelsior Springs.

Under legislation sponsored by Rep. Brad Pollitt, a Republican from Sedalia, students could attend public school outside their district under certain circumstances (HB 1814).

Finally, Schroer, the St. Charles Republican, filed HB 1916 to offer a refundable tax credit to parents who pay tuition at a private school or at a public school outside their district.

School boards oversight 

Several bills would give parents more control over school board members.

Multiple proposals, such as Sen. Mike Cierpiot’s SB 657, would establish a procedure for voters to recall school board members. Cierpiot is a Republican from Lee’s Summit.

A proposal by Basye, the Rocheport Republican, would allow registered voters to petition to place items on the school board agenda (HB 1750).

School attendance

Rep. Jeff Porter, a Republican from Montgomery City, filed legislation to reduce public benefits for families if their children have poor school attendance (HB 1493).

Other legislation expands the age range for children to attend school.

Currently, students do not have to attend school until age 7. The age students can leave school varies based on employment and credits completed.

A proposal by Ian Mackey, a Democrat from St. Louis, would change the starting age to 5 (HB 1942).

Ann Kelley, a Republican from Lamar, filed a bill (HB 1802) that would also change the starting age to 5 and require students to attend school until age 18, unless they complete high school earlier. The superintendent could still excuse students as young as 14 from attending school full time if they are employed.

Addressing teacher shortages

As schools deal with teacher shortages, some proposals are aimed at filling slots in high-demand areas.

A proposal by Rep. Ed Lewis would let schools adjust their salary plans to provide incentives for teachers in hard-to-staff subjects or schools (HB 1770). Lewis is a Republican from Moberly.

Currently, schools must have a single “salary schedule” that applies to all teachers.

Teachers are also allowed to return from retirement for up to two years without affecting their benefits, as long as there is a shortage of certified teachers in the district.

A proposal from Rep. Rusty Black, a Republican from Chillicothe, would expand the time frame to four years (HB 1881).

Suspensions and expulsions

Mackey, the St. Louis Democrat, filed a bill that would require extensive record-keeping on school discipline that takes students out of the classroom, such as suspensions or expulsions.

His proposal, HB 1899, would also forbid schools from expelling students in kindergarten through third grade in most circumstances.

The Kansas City Beacon is an online news outlet focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

The iconic columns of the University of Missouri-Columbia campus (University of Missouri photo).

This story was originally published by the Kansas City Beacon.

Expanding state financial aid programs, banning COVID-19 vaccine requirements on campus, and restricting lessons about racism and sexism are just some of the topics of higher education laws being proposed in the Missouri legislature.

The next legislative session starts Jan. 5, but representatives and senators  are already filing the proposed laws that they will debate during the first months of 2022.

There’s no guarantee that any of these bills will be heard in a committee, much less discussed by the full House or Senate or signed into law by Gov. Mike Parson. Legislation can also be amended, sometimes dramatically, at several stages in the process.

But we’ve compiled a list of some of the higher education proposals that have already been filed so you can get a sense of what’s on legislators’ minds.

If you have strong opinions on these issues, you can contact your representative or senator.

Expanding Missouri’s A+ Scholarship Program impact

When considering the sheer number of bills, how students pay for college in Missouri is one of the most popular higher education topics.

Legislators from both parties want to tweak the way the A+ Scholarship Program is administered. The program provides free community college to Missouri high school graduates who complete 50 hours of mentoring younger students and meet other requirements.

Rep. Brenda Shields, a Republican from St. Joseph, filed legislation (HB 1723) that would allow A+ students who graduated with an associate degree or equivalent without using more than $10,000 of A+ funds to use the remaining dollars toward earning a bachelor’s degree.

For example, a student from the Kansas City area who is eligible for the “in-district” tuition rate at Metropolitan Community College would pay $6,960 in tuition for the 60 credit hours needed for an associate degree, plus fees, and so might have funding left over.

Rep. Kevin Windham, a Democrat from Hillsdale in St. Louis County, filed several bills allowing students to receive multiple types of financial aid at the same time.

For example, currently a student could complete the volunteer work for A+ but not receive any funds from the program because they later receive a Federal Pell Grant covering their education costs.

Windham’s legislation (HB 1786) would either provide students some funding on top of federal awards or (HB 1790) apply A+ dollars to education costs before other state, private and federal funding.

Expanding Access Missouri scholarships

The Access Missouri Financial Assistance Program is available to students whose family can contribute $12,000 or less annually, as determined by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Windham is also proposing expanding Access Missouri’s impact.

Windham filed legislation that would remove requirements for Access Missouri scholarships to be reduced (HB 1784) by the amount of any A+ scholarships received, expand the number of semesters (HB 1788) a student can receive Access Missouri money and increase award amounts (HB 1787) for the program.

Windham also wants to require the state to report data on the demographics (HB 1785) of state scholarship recipients and to prohibit colleges and universities from withholding transcripts (HB 1789) because of unpaid tuition bills.

Bills on nontraditional college students and loans

Other financial aid legislation includes a bill sponsored by Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Springfield Republican, to extend the Fast Track Workforce Incentive Grant program for nontraditional students and allow it to cover apprenticeship costs (SB 672).

Sen. Bill White, a Republican from Joplin, filed a bill to expand state loan programs (SB 757) for health care students by increasing both the maximum loan amounts and professions eligible.

Finally, Rep. Alan Gray, a Democrat from Black Jack in St. Louis County, wants to require the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to propose a pilot program called Pay Forward, Pay Back (HB 1822). 

The program would provide free college tuition to students in exchange for a binding agreement that they pay back a percentage of their salary for a specific number of years.

Race and gender 

Rep. Ann Kelley, a Republican from Lamar, proposed legislation that would prohibit any public school, including a college or university, from requiring “gender or sexual diversity training or counseling.” Required trainings could not include race or sex stereotyping or bias.

The proposal also would prohibit college and university employees (HB 1484) from including a number of concepts in their courses, including:

• That one race or sex is superior or morally better.
• That people are unconsciously racist or biased by virtue of their race or sex.
• That the concepts of “meritocracy” or “strong work ethic” are racist or sexist or were created to oppress another race.
• That people should feel psychological distress, such as discomfort, anguish or guilt, because of their race or gender.

Sen. Mike Moon, an Ash Grove Republican, is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit students who were assigned male at birth from participating in school sports teams for women or girls (SB 781). This would preclude transgender women from playing on women’s or girls’ sports teams.

The bill would apply to colleges and universities as well as to middle and high schools and would include private schools that compete against public ones.

COVID-19 vaccination requirements

Rep. Nick Schroer, a Republican from O’Fallon, submitted a proposal that would prohibit any university that receives public funding from requiring COVID-19 vaccination or “gene therapy” (HB 1475) as a condition of admission, employment or being physically present at activities or facilities.

The University of Missouri System, which covers four campuses including the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Missouri-Columbia, recently stopped enforcing a federal vaccine rule that covered faculty, staff and student employees. It still requires vaccines for health care workers and students who have contact with patients.

Guns on college property

Those with the proper permits could bring concealed weapons onto public college and university campuses under this proposal by Rep. Chuck Basye, a Republican from Rocheport.

Currently, UM System regulations prohibit carrying firearms on campus in most cases. The policy was recently updated and does not prohibit guns stored in vehicles.

The legislation would allow higher education institutions to implement some policies related to firearms, but not if they generally prohibit carrying, operating or storing concealed firearms on campus. Colleges and universities couldn’t impose taxes, fees or contractual provisions (HB 1751) that disallow or discourage lawful firearms.

Higher education governance

The UM System Board of Curators and other public university governing bodies could add voting student members (HB 1795) under a bill proposed by Windham, the Hillsdale Democrat.

Currently, a nonvoting student representative serves on the Board of Curators. Students at UM System universities would get to vote whether to begin having student curators or to retain the system of having nonvoting representatives.

Student curators would be appointed by the governor like other curators and would have the same powers and responsibilities.

Abortion tax 

Rep. Mike Haffner, a Republican from Pleasant Hill, is sponsoring a bill (HB 1874) that would tax the endowment of any university that is affiliated with an abortion facility, offers medical residencies or fellowships that provide training on performing abortions, or supports facilities where abortions are performed when the life of the mother isn’t in danger.

Freedom of the press for students

Students would have the right to freedom of speech and of the press (HB 1668) in school-sponsored media under a proposal sponsored by Rep. Phil Christofanelli, a Republican from St. Peters.

The proposal would apply to public colleges and universities as well as high schools.

Colleges and universities could still encourage students to use “professional standards of English and journalism.”

Colleges couldn’t discipline students for exercising freedom of expression unless they publish material that is libelous or slanderous, violates the law, violates privacy, is an incitement to commit a crime, or is likely to disrupt the operation of the institution.

Media advisors cannot be fired or disciplined for refusing to violate students’ rights. Schools and employees also can’t be held liable for school publications unless they actively participated in creating the content.

Currently, student journalists do not have freedom of the press in school-sponsored media, according to a 1988 Supreme Court case involving a Missouri school district and students from Hazelwood South High School.

Advanced Placement course credit

A proposal by Rep. Chris Brown, a Kansas City Republican, would require public colleges and universities to give course credit (HB 1683) to students who score a 3 or higher on Advanced Placement tests.

Several Missouri legislators are working to prevent schools from issuing mask or vaccine mandates (File photo by Getty Images).

This story was first published by The Kansas City Beacon.

As local school systems are dealing with a teacher shortage, a new report ranks Missouri and Kansas in the bottom half of the pack nationally when it comes to state educator retirement programs.

But a teachers union representative and the director of Missouri’s retirement program say Missouri’s ranking is unfair because the state’s program is strong where it counts — rewarding long-term service.

The report puts Missouri in the top 10 for benefitting teachers who stay in the profession for decades.

“Our pension system in the state is solid as a rock, and I think it’s universally seen as one of the best things we have going for retaining and recruiting teachers,” said Mark Jones, communications director for the Missouri National Education Association.

Overall, the Aug. 31 report from national nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners ranked Missouri 35th and Kansas 30th. Nationally, South Dakota, Tennessee and Washington got the highest overall scores.

The report considers states’ teacher retirement systems from the point of view of taxpayers and teachers who stay for various lengths of time.

Its methodology argues it’s important to consider the systems from multiple perspectives because teachers who don’t stay until retirement, or who move to a new state, deserve consideration as well.

In that light, Kansas ranks in the top 10 when it comes to retirement benefits for short-term teachers — those who stay less than 10 years. Short-term teachers are best served by plans that allow them to take benefits with them when they leave or don’t require high contributions to the program, the report says.

But union members and retirees who taught long term in Kansas are advocating for improvements to the program, which doesn’t provide the recommended income level for retirees to maintain their standard of living.

“I knew that just one thing (income source) wasn’t going to be enough,” Ruthe Goff, who taught for 30 years in the Shawnee Mission School District, said of her retirement in 2017. “And I’m learning even more being involved (in advocacy) as a retiree.”

‘Career educator’

Though Missouri ranks low in the report for short-term retirement benefits, Dearld Snider, executive director of Missouri’s teacher retirement system, said he doesn’t envision the program shifting to cater to short-term teachers.

Currently, teachers who leave after a few years can get their retirement contributions returned to them with interest, and it only takes five years of employment to earn a pension.

But, using a formula that increases retirement benefits as wages and years of teaching increase, the system gives the best rewards to those who stay for decades, Snider said.

“Sometimes we do have people say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, it’s not as good if you leave after three, four, five, seven years?’ And I say, ‘Yes, that is by design,’” Snider said. “This type of retirement security is really for that career educator. I oftentimes say, ‘So when is it a sin to reward those people who stay and serve your community and serve your children?’”

Union members are happy with that focus and believe the program works well for retired teachers, said Jones of the Missouri teachers union. He criticized the way Bellwether weighed its various factors to come up with a low ranking for Missouri.

“To me, it seems a little disingenuous when you say the system is great for people who actually retire from it, but we’re gonna find a way to make it seem like somehow it’s in trouble,” he said.

Kansas City Public Schools uses a separate retirement system, which was not accounted for in the Bellwether report.

Missouri’s Public School Retirement System — used by the other Missouri districts in the Kansas City metro area — is a defined benefit plan, meaning retirees receive a guaranteed payment determined by a formula based on salary and years worked.

Most Missouri teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security, so their retirement benefits are meant to cover for that.

The Bellwether report says the retirement system replaces about 75% of wages, which was within the 60%-80% range the report estimated plans should cover.

The program is funded through teacher salary contributions of 14.5% that are matched by the school district.

Since funding for the retirement system comes directly from school districts rather than the state’s general revenue, legislators aren’t tempted to shortchange the program when money gets tight, as happens in some other states.

“We’ve been fortunate that they’re (Missouri’s pension systems) not underfunded by the government,” Snider said. “And that’s certainly the case with our school districts and with our members; they have always paid the exact amount that’s been asked of them since 1946.”

Recruitment, retention and competition

Forsyth, Jones and Snider said they weren’t aware of a clear pattern of Kansas City-area teachers being drawn to either side of the state line for the retirement system. They agreed prospective or early career teachers might not think about retirement when making plans.

While Missouri’s retirement system is strong, “I don’t think any normal person thinks at that granular level,” Jones said.

Instead, teachers likely focus on salary, working conditions or whether a retirement system will still exist when they need it, he said. But teachers can be motivated to stay as they begin to understand the system.

In Missouri, data shows retention rates improve the longer teachers stay.

Missouri’s system helps teachers feel they can “have a retirement that allows me to live without fear of poverty, that allows me to retire with dignity and recognizes, to some degree, the service that I’ve rendered, which is spending my lifetime working with students and children to help them become lifelong learners and leaders,” Jones said.

Jones said if Missouri wants to reduce teacher shortages, it should maintain its strong retirement system and focus on raising starting teacher salaries. The National Education Association ranks Missouri 50th in the nation for average starting salary.

“Other states are literally putting billboards in our state saying, ‘Hey, tired of what you’re getting paid in Missouri? Come across the state line,’” he said. “One of the ways that we can retain and attract and keep educators is the fact that our retirement system is arguably one of the best in the nation.”