As KC school district ponders big moves, Southwest students are at the forefront

Listen to us, say these Southwest Early College Campus juniors.

Everything happening to the Kansas City Public Schools reflects in their faces — the district’s sharpest pains from the past, its hardest decisions ahead and all that it is poised to become.

“Let me tell you what it is…,” says Nyla Brown, 16.

She and her junior classmates were there in the fall of 2010 when the turmoil at a suddenly overloaded Southwest marked the worst of a tough, district-wide consolidation and a descent into Kansas City’s loss of accreditation in 2012.

They persevered in the district’s rebound.

Those students have played their roles as much as anyone as the now-provisionally accredited district predicts a state performance score this summer that would make it a candidate for full accreditation.

“We know we are capable of going in the classroom and learning,” Brown says, “just like any other school.”

The Southwest teens also sit dead-center in the community-wrenching decisions hanging over the district as it ponders a master plan.

Potential school closings or consolidations figure in the mix. Southwest, for instance, is only 23 percent full.

The district’s revival in the eyes of its community and the state school board gives it chances for partnerships with charter schools it didn’t have before.

The most controversial plan on the table — giving control of Southwest to the charter Academie Lafayette — at one point threatened to relocate these juniors for their senior year.

The students recognize the tension in race and socioeconomic class that’s risen as the more-affluent charter school looks to take control of what long ago became a school of mostly black students bused into one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.

That idea is on hold. The students will return to Southwest this fall. But the teens fully appreciate how hard such decisions can be for a district clawing at a chance — finally — to grow again.

“You’re not dealing with problems by moving kids around,” 17-year-old L.C. Burton said.

There is a worthy “legacy,” he said, in what Southwest students have endured on the road to this critical time in the district.

“This school,” he said, “built our character.”

The district’s leadership agrees the community can learn from its students. They are listening, Superintendent Steve Green said, because everyone’s character gets tested.

Changes in the works stir varied reactions along divisions of race, geography and between the district and charter schools.

“What are we prepared to do as a district and a community?” Green said. What are “the creative solutions?”

Critical goals

Consider two numbers: 79 percent and 20,136.

The first is the percentage of possible points the district expects to earn when Missouri publishes state report cards in August.

That would put the district securely above the 70 percent threshold necessary to be considered for full accreditation.

The second number is the target enrollment, pre-kindergarten through high school, the district and its consultants have set for 2025.

That would be a 30 percent increase over today’s 15,489.

Nothing ranks more important to the district’s growth, according to its consultants and community members, than raising that state report card score and being fully accredited for the first time under the accountability system Missouri started in the early 1990s.

But getting to that 20,136 enrollment will also require some fixing and innovation, say the parents, students and community members participating in the master planning.

“The overwhelming response is that we’re moving in the right direction,” said Al Tunis, chief financial officer. “But…”

Then come the concerns, he said. The district needs to improve its bus transportation — make it more convenient compared with the competing charter schools. The enrollment process has to feel more comfortable. Customer service must improve.

“We need to stop being our own worst enemy,” Tunis said.

And students and parents want more program opportunities in the high schools. Greater diversity in course offerings. Full extracurricular activities.

But that leads to hard conversations about the number of students enrolled in many of the schools.

Several of the high schools have small enrollments that make it difficult to provide the variety of courses and activities students expect, said Shannon Jaax, who directs the district’s building repurposing effort.

District consultant MGT of America Inc. has laid out some scenarios that would save the district several million dollars through some school closings and consolidations.

It’s doubtful the district could expect any boost in enrollment to come soon enough to justify keeping all of its high schools open. But partnerships that the district couldn’t have made in its more troubled past now open new options.

The district is looking to collaborate with charter schools and universities and community groups.

“We are a viable partner,” Green said, “in economic development, workforce retention and urban revitalization.”

Earlier this year, the state school board approved Kansas City’s request that the district be qualified as a charter school sponsor.

Until now, only state universities sponsored charter schools in Kansas City.

First up, the district is in discussions to sponsor a charter school for the Urban Neighborhood Initiative — one of the Big Five ideas of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

Charter schools — independent public schools with their own school boards — now enroll more than 10,200 children within the Kansas City school district boundary.

The district has felt like a bystander too long, Green said.

“It’s a charter-rich environment in Kansas City,” he said, “and we want to be in.”

Lingering anxiety

Chrishianna Jackson doesn’t want to have to pay any more for the district’s mistakes.

The 17-year-old Southwest junior wonders what might have been had the district not consolidated high schools into Southwest’s early college programming four years ago.

“We could’ve been on top,” she said. “All of us might have (college scholarship) full rides.”

It bothers the students, said classmate Howard Rice, 16, to know that politics and fears cloud the way the city is dealing with the schools.

“It has everything to do with race,” Rice said.

They look at the past, Burton said, and it seems “all these problems happened just to save some money.”

They feel like survivors.

Jackson plans to study psychology and sociology in college and go into social work. Brown wants to study counseling. Burton sees himself going through college into real estate. Rice plans to pursue a nursing degree.

Jackson is thinking about her little brother, a seventh-grader at Northeast Middle School. The district and the community need to make the right moves this time, she said, for him.

This story was originally published April 19, 2015 at 5:56 PM with the headline "As KC school district ponders big moves, Southwest students are at the forefront."