As KC-area school district redraws maps, families fear for ‘incomparable’ community
Cynthia Astorga isn’t ready to let go of her neighborhood school.
She didn’t know her children, and more than 200 others, risked losing it until months after Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools voters approved funding to finance new buildings that would prompt districtwide realignment.
“That’s what connects us,” Astorga said of New Stanley Elementary School. “We love the history. We love everything that we grew up living through in Argentine.”
Astorga is among a group of families in the Argentine neighborhood in KCK that wants to preserve New Stanley for their children and future generations.
As KCKPS gears up to redraw its boundaries and change which middle and high school campuses local elementary schools feed into, it’s possible that New Stanley Elementary will be consolidated into a newer, larger school alongside two others.
If approved by the local school board in December, the beloved campus that sits in the 3600 block of Metropolitan Avenue would combine with Noble Prentis and Silver City elementary schools to form a new school that would be located near Haas Drive and Steele Road, about a three-minute drive southeast of New Stanley.
The change would be part of a realignment plan that would alter where roughly 1,200 KCKPS students attend school starting in the 2027-28 and 2028-29 school years. KCKPS expects changes districtwide would affect where about 243 incoming ninth graders, 346 incoming sixth-grade students and 617 elementary students go to school.
And although a committee tasked with drafting a recommended plan for realignment has been meeting since June, plans to include the campus of roughly 250 students in the consolidation didn’t come along until later in the process, Randy Lopez, school board president, said during a Nov. 11 meeting.
District families in September quietly learned they could lose their local school, which has served the predominantly Latino neighborhood for more than a century. The district formally announced plans to consolidate New Stanley during an Oct. 1 community meeting held at the school.
Even though the district says consolidating the three elementary schools makes sense when you look at the big picture and its broader goals, parents and teachers worry that officials aren’t considering the negative effects that closing New Staley could have on the families thriving there, or on the surrounding community that cares about the school and its history.
“I was surprised and disappointed that during this process no one from the boundary committee reached out to parents to ask for our input about this potential change,” said Emily Rietema, a district parent, during a recent board meeting. “Closing New Stanley is not what I voted for in the latest bond.”
Some schools will keep the students they already have but could see new students come in because of the changes. Those schools are: Banneker, Douglass, Eugene Ware, Frank Rushton, Hazel Grove, John Fiske, Lindbergh, Lowell Brune, Mark Twain, McKinley, Stony Point North, Stony Point South, T.A. Edison, Wellborn, West Park and Whittier elementary schools and Arrowhead Middle School, according to the district.
Parents push back
Residents during last week’s school board meeting, when a final realignment plan was brought to the board for a first reading ahead of a Dec. 9 final vote, told district officials that the school’s closure would mean losing a key community institution and putting teachers’ jobs at risk.
KCKPS told The Star that consolidation wouldn’t result in teachers losing their jobs, but some may be moved around to other schools.
“However, not all teachers would be assigned to the new elementary school; some may be placed at other district locations based on enrolling and staffing needs,” according to the district’s boundaries committee.
Parents also said they were frustrated by what they found to be a lack of communication from the school district, claiming a district survey did not gather comprehensive parent input on the changes. In a district with about 20,000 students, the survey had 154 responses.
The district said it didn’t know why people were frustrated, adding it’s “committed to ongoing communication and will continue to seek ways to improve engagement and clarity as the process moves forward.”
Erika Gudino, a district parent who said she was speaking on behalf of Hispanic families that don’t feel comfortable to speak, told the board that teachers and staff of the neighborhood campus have become like family in the tight-knit school community.
She said families worry that teachers will lose their jobs if New Stanley is consolidated and that teachers at the new school won’t have the same established levels of trust among families, many of whom are immigrants without extended family close by, she said.
“The love they give to our children is something unique and incomparable,” Gudino said of the school’s teachers.
Amanda DeVriese-Sebilla, executive director of the Argentine Betterment Corporation and a New Stanley parent, told the board she felt like the school was treated as an afterthought in the realignment planning process. The community survey didn’t ask what people thought about changing the campus.
And, she said, documents regarding the new boundaries have kept changing throughout the process, confusing people in the area. She thinks preserving the elementary school would allow its strong relationships to continue to flourish. “New Stanley is proof of what happens when the relationships are nurtured,” DeVriese-Sebilla said.
Outgoing member Rachel Russell told attendees of the meeting that the district didn’t secretly plan to consolidate New Stanley with intent to deceive residents.
She also said considering many people didn’t respond to the survey, and typically don’t, people need to tell the district what their preferred form of communication would be moving forward, adding the board is open to discovering new methods to get parent opinion.
Russell said she was concerned about how the potential of continued federal changes with public school funding will affect the district’s ability to finance keeping New Stanley and other campuses in the district open. She asked that the district find out how Title III and Title IV funding affects district buildings.
“That is a critical piece that this board is going to have to look at,” she said.
What about the teachers?
Two school teachers, Jennifer Spears and Andrea Madrigal, spoke during a late October board meeting in defense of preserving New Stanley.
Spears said that although the plan may make financial sense to the district, consolidation would tear up the school community. And teachers and staff working on a larger campus won’t have the same time or capacity to host extracurricular activities and events for school families when they’re working in a larger building with more students.
Combining New Stanley was not part of the adopted bond plan. The $180 million bond voters approved last year called for the district to combine only Noble Prentis and Silver City. If the district wants to merge the school with another, it should wait a few years and consider Emerson, Spears said.
“We’ve been here 100 years, I’m pretty sure we can stand five or 10 more,” Spears said.
Like some district parents, Spears was also concerned about what this change will mean for staff.
“We will lose amazing veteran teachers,” Spears said. “We have quite a few such teachers who will be making decisions when the new building is built. These are teachers who were planning to be here until retirement.”
Madrigal, who has taught at New Stanley since 1998, said it feels like a decision has already been made on behalf of the campus and that the board’s December vote will be merely a formality.
She’s concerned about staff cuts, less aide help and higher class ratios when New Stanley transitions into the new campus. Class sizes are anticipated to be 26 students to one teacher, Madrigal said, which could really mean 30.
“What it really means is a reduction in staff,” Madrigal said. “The larger schools are not going to have more classroom teachers, or the ESL teachers, SPED teachers, paras.”
Madrigal voted for the bond measure but said she wouldn’t have if she knew that would mean merging three campuses.
Spanish language program
Astorga, a longtime Argentine resident with three children in KCKPS, has two kids — one in first grade and another in fourth grade — attending New Stanley. All three of them participated in the campus’s dual language program, which allows students to learn course material in both English and Spanish.
“They’re getting taught not only in a different language, but a different way,” Astorga said, adding her children also have academic and emotional support from staff in two different languages.
She hopes her fourth child, who is 2, will have the same opportunity.
During last week’s board meeting, it wasn’t immediately clear where the dual language program would be located after consolidation. The Nov. 11 presentation on the item offered the new campus or Emerson Elementary as options.
However the district on Wednesday told The Star that the program will be relocated to the new elementary school, not Emerson.
Astorga’s children’s Spanish classes have about 15 kids in them, and their English learning classes have no more than 18, she said. She’s worried that growing classroom sizes at a larger school would mean kids will have less-focused learning environments.
If consolidation of New Stanley passes, Astorga said she’s willing to give the new school a try, but she’d consider pulling her children out of the district if the transition doesn’t go well.
Changing campuses
Next month, school board members are scheduled to decide whether to approve the proposed changes to campus boundaries and feeder patterns. Through these changes, KCKPS wants to even out enrollment numbers and fill new school buildings that are expected in a few years.
The district is aiming to decrease overcrowding in some schools, like Wyandotte High School, which has about 1,900 students, and boost it at others, like F.L. Schlagle High School, which has about 900.
Should all go according to the district’s plan, Quindaro, Whittier and Grant elementary school students will attend different middle and high schools than the track they’re currently on.
Quindaro Elementary School students now move on to Carl B. Bruce Middle School after graduating and then go to Wyandotte High after. If the new plan is approved, Quindaro students would graduate to Gloria Willis Middle School then move to F.L. Schlagle High.
Whittier Elementary students that typically go to Central Middle School and then Wyandotte High would instead go to Rosedale Middle School and on to J.C. Harmon High School.
Grant Elementary School students currently go to Rosedale Middle School and J.C. Harmon High School. The plan would move those students to Central Middle School and Wyandotte High.
Douglass Elementary students would feed into Carl Bruce Middle School instead of Central.
And, after voters last year approved a $180 million bond initiative, KCKPS is constructing new campuses for Argentine and Central middle schools, consolidating the three elementary campuses into one and adding an addition to Sumner Academy, all within five years.
The district will demolish Silver City to make way for the new Argentine Middle School, according to KCKPS. The district hasn’t decided what it’s going to do with the New Stanley or Noble Prentis buildings.
“Plans for those buildings will be determined at a later date and will include input from stakeholders,” according to the district.
KCKPS anticipates construction for the Sumner addition will begin during Spring Break. The Central new build may begin toward the end of the school year and is scheduled for August 2027 completion. The Argentine building should follow a few months after and is scheduled for January 2028 completion.
This story was originally published November 20, 2025 at 5:44 AM.
