Academie Lafayette and Kansas City Public Schools drop plans for Southwest high school

Academie Lafayette and Kansas City Public Schools have mutually called off what would have marked a dramatic partnership to let the charter school run an International Baccalaureate high school for the district.

The impasse, declared in a joint news conference Tuesday, came when the district and the charter agreed they could not solve how to serve district students currently at Southwest Early College Campus.

“We’re starting a brand new program and we want to start fresh,” said Marvin Lyman, the vice president of the Academie Lafayette board. “You can’t do that with two programs in the building.”

Both Lyman and Kansas City Superintendent Steve Green said the charter and the district want to create a “language-rich” high school, but concerns over the fate of current Southwest students compelled them to suspend talks about that school.

“The students were at the center of our concern,” Green said.

Lyman said the charter and the district are still searching for ways to collaborate.

“Some issues need to get resolved,” he said. “In the meantime, we will be looking at alternative locations” to operate a high school.

On Tuesday night, Mayor Sly James issued a statement saying he was saddened by developments.

“This was an attempt to add quality schools seats so that our children would have more access to top quality educational options,” James said. “I hope that all the adults involved in the process will be able to renew this attempt to do all that is possible to ensure a quality education for every child.”

In June 2014, the district and the charter school announced a proposal that would give the charter academic control of Southwest, 6512 Wornall Road.

In the plan, Academie Lafayette was to operate an International Baccalaureate high school that would enroll both charter students and district students.

Talks with the community have been sensitive — with implications along racial and economic divisions of the city.

Academie Lafayette currently has a pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade program at two schools and has long been looking for ways to expand the programming for its families beyond middle school grades.

The school district has also had an interest in creating a globally themed high school to extend the reach of its popular magnet schools, Foreign Language Academy and Carver Dual Language Elementary School.

Kansas City’s southwest corridor has the lowest participation rate of families choosing the school district.

In seeking a joint enrollment plan for Southwest, Academie Lafayette would be pursuing a racially and economically diverse high school. Although students would have been coming from the charter and the district, the plan was to blend them as one student body.

However, districts or charters typically open a high school with ninth-grade students only and then add a grade as the first class advances. That meant the district would need to relocate the older students at Southwest or find a way to create a second school within Southwest.

That raised issues of how the charter could make $1 million to $2 million in renovations at the school, Lyman said. It would have been difficult to make renovations for both the incoming school and the existing school, he said.

Both populations of students, Lyman said, “deserve the investment that is made in their school.”

The original plan proposed that Academie Lafayette graduates would automatically advance to the high school, while district students and other students living in the district boundaries would have to pass tests to enroll. That raised another concern, Green said.

The district was working on an alternative enrollment process including other measures, such as teacher recommendations, rather than a test.

Going forward, the charter will be looking for other opportunities and other potential partners, charter board president Chad Phillips said. The charter had once been involved in plans for vacant Westport High School, but the costs were too high then, Phillips said, and are likely too high now.

The district is in the middle of a master planning process with the community. Green said the future of the district’s buildings, including Southwest, will depend largely on that work.

District leaders also will be looking for partners to share Southwest’s grand old building, he said.

“We will continue to explore.”

This story was originally published March 10, 2015 at 2:21 PM with the headline "Academie Lafayette and Kansas City Public Schools drop plans for Southwest high school."