Plan would close KC's Southwest High School

Kansas City Public Schools wants to close Southwest High School, a 90-year-old school with a long line of prestigious graduates.

The planned closing of the school, now called the Southwest Early College Campus, was revealed Wednesday night at a school board meeting as part of a comprehensive master plan that will affect most of the district’s schools in some way.

The plan, which needs the board’s approval, would go into effect in fall 2016. Among other things, the plan would:

▪ Expand the programs offered at the African-Centered College Preparatory Academy.

▪ Reconfigure school attendance boundaries.

▪ Reduce the distance students walk to school.

▪ Implement college and career theme-based high schools.

▪ Phase in, over two years, year-round school for four of the lowest-performing elementary schools.

District leaders say the proposed plan would make better use of school building space, strengthen community ties with neighborhood schools and bolster student achievement. The district had 14,228 students enrolled at the start of this school year. But some schools are jammed with students while others have enrollments too low to have enough students available to participate in certain extracurricular activities.

The Kansas City district has been working toward improving performance to regain full accreditation from the state of Missouri.

This “budget-neutral” master plan, said interim superintendent Al Tunis, is vastly different from the last time the district closed schools in 2010 when it shuttered 28 school buildings. That was “strategic,” he said, as those closures came without boundary changes and were mostly about saving the district from sinking in to a financial hole millions of dollars deep.

The proposed master plan focuses on ultimately raising student achievement by putting schools at the center of neighborhoods. That way, students and their parents can develop a bond with one another over the years as they move from one neighborhood school to the next.

Feeder pattern

Closing Southwest on Wornall Road reduces the district to four neighborhood high schools. Four elementary schools would feed into each of three high schools — African Centered, Central Academy and East. Six elementary schools would feed into Northeast.

Two elementary schools — Crispus Attucks and Satchel Paige — also are marked for closure.

Benjamin Banneker is the elementary school chosen for a pilot program that would add about 30 days to the school year for those students.

The feeder pattern calls for African Centered Preparatory Academy, at 3500 E. Meyer Blvd., to function as a neighborhood school that’s no longer solely focused on African-centered education.

Most of the 350 students currently at Southwest high school would move into AC Prep (formerly Southeast High School). Other students would move into Central, East or Northeast high schools.

Board members expressed most concern about two of the racially diverse elementary schools — Hale Cook and Hartman in the south end of the district — slated to feed into AC Prep.

“I just can’t believe that once the conversation is had, that those parents are going to want to send their kids to AC Prep,” said member Amy Hartsfield.

The plan calls for AC Prep to become the district’s first fully theme-oriented high school offering three college and career pathways, one of which would be African-centered education. Themes for the other pathways would be college prep and STEM, short for science technology, engineering and math.

Twenty-one other schools, including Central High, Central Middle, Northeast High and Northeast Middle, will see attendance boundaries change to some degree.

By reconfiguring boundaries, the district would ease enrollments at some schools and fill empty space at schools where enrollment is down.

But equally important, said Tunis, new boundaries set up feeder school patterns. For the most part, a student could matriculate through middle and high school with the same set of students they started with in their neighborhood elementary school.

Improving bus transportation

Transportation changes are coming, too. Bus stops would be set no more than two blocks apart, and only students who live within a half-mile from school would be walkers.

More students will ride the bus, but all would ride a shorter distance. Currently some students ride across town to school. Drawing neighborhood school boundaries would end distance travel for most students.

“It’s safer,” said Jesse Lange, a district planner. And he said school officials expect that reducing how far students would walk to school will “eliminate one barrier to getting kids to come to school and increase attendance.”

Closing Southwest

The boundary changes and closings would affect 15 percent or about 2,000 students districtwide who would have to change schools. None of the district’s signature schools or Montessori schools — Lincoln Prep, Foreign Language, Holliday and Border Star — would be affected by the reconfiguring of the boundaries.

District administrators have been discussing the plan for nearly two years and have heard suggestions from community residents.

“We listened to the community,” said Eileen Houston-Stewart, district spokeswoman. “This has been a thoughtful process. These are things that the community has asked for.”

The community made efforts to save Southwest High. The district and the Academie Lafayette charter school had been trying to reach a deal to jointly run Southwest. Those talks dissolved in March.

Southwest, a community landmark, was built on a portion of the old Armour farm in early 1925 to serve what at that time was a rapidly growing Country Club District — now referred to as Brookside.

Over the years many of Kansas City’s prominent citizens graduated from Southwest, including Lester Milgram, owner of Milgram Food Stores, in 1934; Henry Bloch, co-founder of tax preparation giant H&R Block, in 1939; and journalist and author Calvin Trillin in 1953.

District demographics changed through the years, resulting in fewer residents of the neighborhood around Southwest sending children to Kansas City Public Schools.

Five years ago, when the district sought to downsize, middle school-aged students were put in high school buildings. At the time, students from Westport High School moved into Southwest, which had been established as an early college prep school and by the 2009-2010 school year had established itself as one of the district’s more successful programs.

With Westport, unanticipated behavior problems erupted at Southwest among students.

In 2010 the school principal changed twice. The graduation rate dropped from 68.5 percent in 2012 to 51.5 percent last year. At the same time composite ACT scores dipped from just above 16 to about 15 out of a possible 36. Enrollment at the school, which has capacity for about 1,600, dwindled to its current 350 students.

The Kansas City school board is set to vote on the plan in January after the district gets community input during a series of public meetings. The first of those is scheduled for Nov. 11.

This story was originally published November 4, 2015 at 10:40 PM with the headline "Plan would close KC's Southwest High School."