St. Louis CofCC Blog

Seven schools that are in the municipalities of Independence and Sugar Creek, Missouri, but part of the Kansas City School District, will now become part of the Independence School District.  Voters in both districts approved the generation-in-the-making transfer on Tuesday.  It is estimated that in this one felt swoop, the KCSD will lose a third of its white students.

This is the penultimate repudiation of the notion that money in and of itself makes good schools.  These seven schools are jettisoning the KC district, and the results of court-ordered lavish spending for them in the 1980s and 1990s (the Olympic-sized pools debacle), for a school district that spends less per pupil per year.

Kansas City Star:

Under state statute, if Kansas City district voters had rejected the proposal, the issue could be turned over to a state-appointed arbitration panel. A change in state statute, passed this year, would force the panel to allow the change because the Kansas City district, which is provisionally accredited, scored at an unaccredited level in its latest annual performance report by the state.

If Kansas City had voted against the change, civil rights attorney Arthur Benson II had promised to file a federal lawsuit. He argued the change in the law would force a boundary shift that would significantly reduce the number of white students in the majority black Kansas City district. The Kansas City school board had likewise raised constitutional concerns, saying its voters would be disenfranchised.

Benson was out of state Tuesday night and could not be reached, but said last week that he likely would not file a challenge if Kansas City voted for the change.

Instead, Kansas City School District leaders are faced with the fact that a majority of its voters approved a boundary change despite a unified campaign by the school board, Superintendent Anthony Amato and Kansas City’s teachers against the switch.

It’s obvious why the KCSD School Board opposed the transfer — since the District is already teetering on the brink of disaccreditation, and if that happens, that Board loses its power, they needed those white students in the KC district to keep the test scores high enough to stave off the state wolves.  As for Mr. Benson, the civil rights industry is interested in racial mixing, and the continuous stream of money from the U.S. Justice Department to lawyers like himself.