9,000 hot dogs, 3 new recruiters: In a crowded field, KC schools pump up marketing
Children’s laughter and hip-hop sounds filled the sweltering morning air along Troost Avenue last Saturday as families lined up for about a quarter mile, waiting to enter Kansas City Public Schools’ annual back to school fair.
It would end up the largest in district history — 6,000 people. Credit the district’s beefed up marketing efforts, part of a hard push to attract more students. The district, for the first time, has even hired a small team of full-time recruiters, all to boost enrollment as competition against charter, private and parochial schools grows more fierce.
For Kansas City Public Schools, success is all about the numbers — enrollment numbers, funding numbers, performance numbers.
With school starting Monday, district leaders say they are hoping the turnout at their fourth annual fair signals a good year ahead.
Every family on that Saturday claimed a sack of free fruits and vegetables as they learned about district programs and had the chance to enroll. By the time the four-hour end-of-summer fest was over, attendees had eaten more than 9,000 hot dogs and went home with more than 2,200 sack lunches.
“There shouldn’t be a child hungry, without a pencil, a notepad, a book, a backpack, a school or a principal in Kansas City because we had everything you need for back to school here,” said Veronica Carter, a food service worker who tended to the steady stream of parents and their children in a park next to the district’s offices.
The KCPS plan was that the “one-stop-shop” would make readying children for classes easy for parents and that an outdoor fair full of music, games and giveaways in a neighborhood might attract some who otherwise might not enroll their child in a district school.
KCPS leaders approached this year’s event with a give-it-all-you-got focus, involving education advocacy groups, children’s health care providers, social service and community groups, because with the district facing more competition for students than ever and state accreditation on the line, there is much at stake.
The new three-member recruiting team is charged with enrolling new students in district programs, including preschool, and promoting signature schools, such as Lincoln College Preparatory Academy and the Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts.
“The education landscape has dictated that it is a necessity, with the number of school choices people now have,” said Garrett Webster, director of enrollment at KCPS. Webster leads the recruiters and is one himself.
He and the others are products of the public school district.
“I live in the 64130 ZIP code with the highest murder rate in the city,” Webster said. “The kids we serve and the families we want to serve, those are my neighbors. I see them in the grocery store. I see them at church. When I talk to them about what the Kansas City school district has to offer, it’s not just a job for me, it’s a mission.”
Webster tells a story about his senior year at Southeast High School, when the principal came into his classroom and made him fill out a packet of papers. He had no idea what he was signing, but did what he was told. Weeks later, over the school intercom, she announced the recipients of a $10,000 college scholarship. Webster was one.
“Had it not been for my school principal I would never have gone to college,” he said. Recruiting for KCPS is a payback. “The students we are helping to enroll, I went to school with their parents.”
That was before charter schools claimed nearly half the KCPS students population.
Decades ago, the district lost thousands of students to the suburbs. But those who didn’t move out most likely attended a KCPS school.
“KCPS was the only public choice for families, so if their children weren’t attending a private or parochial school they were in a district school,” Webster said.
That all changed in 1999.
“In 1999 when the first charters came in they took up to 12% of the students,” Webster said. “In 2019 charter-school children are 47% of the students living in the district.”
Now, he said, it’s a KCPS goal to “bring those students back to the district,” to add to the 15,568 students currently enrolled. At its peak, in the late 1960s, Kansas City was serving some 75,000 students. In 1999 enrollment was roughly 32,000 By 2010 it was down to less than 18,000 and the district was forced to shut 26 schools. District leaders don’t expect enrollment to ever reach those historic levels but they want to flip the downward trajectory.
That isn’t going to be easy with 23 public charters operating in the city, including the new Kansas City Girls Preparatory Academy, the city’s first single-gender charter, opening this year at 5000 E. 17th St., off Van Brunt Boulevard.
And an all-boys public charter, Monarch Collegiate Prep Academy, is under consideration.
Without sufficient enrollment, a public school does not survive. Students translate to dollars because the state funds public schools on a per pupil basis. Charter schools are public schools operated by an independent school board, but they, too, rely on state dollars.
Counting district and charter schools, the landscape is jam-packed with 82 public elementary, middle and high schools in an area populated with about 26,000 school-age children.
When enrollment declines, so does school funding and the ability to provide some of the very programs that attract students and parents — sports, music, theater, electives.
“What enrollment will look like remains to be seen,”Superintendent Mark Bedell told The Star, two weeks before students were to start back.
A clear picture won’t emerge for a few more weeks. But recruiters the district hired were certain their efforts are working. And expectations are so high that district leaders made “It’s Our Time” the theme of Thursday’s convocation for teachers and staff.
“We are building relationships,” Webster said, recalling a grandmother of two whom he led to the district’s African-Centered College Preparatory Academy.
After a tour of the school, which the grandmother hadn’t known existed, “She was very excited,” Webster said. “She got to view the school up close.” She learned about its bus transportation, before- and after-school care programs and that breakfast and lunch are served every day. “What recruiters really do is help the parents understand what they really want, what they really need and help them find the school that fits for them.”
KCPS recruiters are showing up at community events and churches all across the city, talking to as many undecided parents as they can about academic offerings in KCPS and will continue the push during the school year.
Even Bedell has gotten into the act. He said he personally spoke with three families at the fair who had their children enrolled in charter schools. Bedell convinced them, he said, to try KCPS instead.
The stiff competition is not lost on Tony Kline, superintendent of University Academy, one of Kansas City’s most academically successful charters.
“When you have a geographic area that is not growing in kid-age population and you have more supply than you have students, like we have here, it creates a winners and losers situation,” he said. His K-12 school does recruiting as well, he said, but only for kindergartners — a pool he said is shrinking.
University Academy is fortunate, he said, that “we are one of the schools that has more student applicants than we have seats.”
He says the competition is a good thing.
“I believe the free market has a lot of positives,” he said. “If we have to compete we have to do well every day. And if we get lazy or do a bad job, those wait lists go away.
“We are all very aware that, for example, if one school gets robotics, you better get robotics.”
While his main competition has been with the “big suburban district high schools,” he said KCPS has really stepped up its game.
“I commend Dr. Bedell. He recognized that this is a competition and he is competing.” As for the charters that have not made much effort to compete, “I think that in a five or 10 year period we are going to see a lot of schools closing,” Kline said.
For the Kansas City district, which is only provisionally accredited by the state, it helps that in February it received annual performance scores at the full accreditation level for the second time in three years. The district landed an 82.9% rating, earning 99.5 points out of a possible 120. Regaining full accreditation generally takes hitting at least 70% two consecutive years. If scores are high enough this year, KCPS expects to get accreditation back.
The district has had a history of low performance overall and with student standardized tests.
“But this is not the district of old,” Bedell has said when talking about efforts to turn things around and boost enrollment, even if it means luring students from the charters.
Not everyone needs convincing. “I love the schools,” said Destiny Garcia, who brought her daughter and nephew to the back-to-school fair. “I think it is very important for the community to get out and see what Kansas City schools have going on. I think it prepares the students for the real world.”
Marilyn Nichols said that’s why she’s keeping her three children in district schools.
“I feel like this is the best place for my kids,” said Nichols, who was signing her son up to attend Paseo Academy. “It’s a good academic school and it has good teachers.”
Nichols said it’s important that the district makes the enrollment process easy and that the people taking the applications are knowledgeable and friendly.
That is not by accident, Webster said. Like the recruiters, district administrators chose people to help with enrollment who can connect with families. It’s also why KCPS, where more than 50 languages are spoken by students and their families, has translators on speed dial who can show up to help at a moment’s notice.
As for the recruiters, “we live in the district, so for us it is a really great feeling to get up every morning knowing we are going to be of service to our neighborhood,” said Kim Riley, who graduated from Lincoln Prep.
Making sure that district public schools survive in this competitive enrollment arena, she said, “is personal for us.”
Kline of University Academy applauds their efforts.
“KCPS is right,” he said. “It is super important that you do well, but you have to treat kids and their parents like customers. We want all kids in Kansas City to get a great education. We don’t care if it is a district school or a charter school, just as long as it is a good school.”
