KCPS faces a hard call — closing some schools will improve the quality of education
No doubt it’s upsetting for folks to hear that their old high school or elementary school is closing. But shuttering some Kansas City Public School district schools is really the only way for the district to prevail.
That’s a good first step, it can’t be the only move. And the decisions this urban public school district makes over the next couple of years will be critical to its survival.
There simply are too many facilities and not enough kids. Students aren’t evenly distributed in the 33 elementary, middle and high schools. And that needs to happen.
It’s not OK that some high schools, for example, don’t even have enough kids to field an athletic team, put together a debate team, or form a band, while other schools in the district do.
Some schools don’t have enough students to offer a full slate of language courses. And if languages are important, then all the schools should be offering the same to their students.
KCPS has seven high schools. For a district with a little more than 14,000 students, there probably should only be three, maybe four, max. So yes, the district has to shrink to grow.
The growth that’s needed is to give students in all schools a full educational experience. That’s what students in the surrounding public school districts — such as Independence, Blue Springs, Olathe and North Kansas City — are getting. Kansas City’s students deserve that.
“... We can’t continue to do things the same way we’ve been doing it because if what we were doing was working, we wouldn’t be in this situation… ,” Superintendent Mark Bedell told The Star this week.
Closing the schools alone though won’t be enough to transform a district that for years has been plagued by dwindling enrollment, low student test scores and graduation rates.
Remember 2011? Then superintendent John Covington closed 28 of 61 schools across the district, and walked away. A decade later, here we are.
While district administrators boast that enrollment — down from about 16,000 in 2011 — has stabilized, and the graduation rate is better, KCPS has not been able to regain the full state accreditation it lost ten years ago.
Strides have been made since Bedell arrived in 2016. The Council of Great City Schools said in February that over the last five years KCPS “has made substantial progress,” and called it worthy of state accreditation. The district has come close. The pandemic disrupted momentum.
KCPS must become more than just smaller. For starters it must make sure kids come to school. Low attendance has consistently brought down overall district scores in the state’s yearly progress reports. It has to make sure the best teachers are in the right places and improve student achievement levels.
There are plans being made for more extracurricular and academic programs. No matter what programs are offered, if students are not learning, KCPS does not regain accreditation and it does not shake the reputation it’s carried for years — fair or not — as failing.
A lot of kids in Kansas City depend on district schools. Most of them are Black (54%) and brown (more than 30%) and the children of refugees. All KCPS students qualify for free and reduced price lunch, a federal measure of household income levels. More than 35 different languages are spoken by students in the district.
In some ways KCPS is well-equipped to serve students from those communities — KCPS has one of the highest percentages of teachers of color in the state. Teachers look like their students. National research suggests that students of color who have teachers of color may do better on tests and be less likely to have disciplinary issues.
Yes, since the first public charter schools opened in Kansas City in 2000 KCPS enrollment fell by roughly half and even with closures a decade ago students are still spread too thin across the district. But charters can’t be blamed for what happens next for the district, for its students, and public education in this city. That’s got to be a city-wide responsibility.
The district will host a series of virtual and in-person public meetings this month and accept input on what the district should look like in terms of size, extra curricular and academic offerings and more in the future. It’s up to district leadership to make sure those things happen and the community has to hold them accountable.
With a looming threat — ramped up under the Trump Administration — to dismantle public education in this country, now is the time for KCPS to dig deep and get the job of educating our children done right. Closing schools, consolidating resources and raising the academic expectations for students, are the critical and right moves.
