Note:  After four years of observ­ing and eval­u­at­ing the Kansas City, Missouri School Board, Do the Right Thing for Kids has reluc­tantly con­cluded that the prob­a­bil­ity of the present sys­tem recov­er­ing full accred­i­ta­tion and pro­vid­ing a high qual­ity edu­ca­tion for the stu­dents is extremely small.  Under cur­rent con­di­tions, many more stu­dents are fated to received infe­rior prepa­ra­tion while a highly dys­func­tional sys­tem floun­ders. Therefore, rather than attempt­ing to stim­u­late improve­ments by cri­tiquing board per­for­mance we are sup­port­ing leg­is­la­tion that would turn the admin­is­tra­tion of the schools over to sur­round­ing accred­ited districts–several of which have demo­graphic char­ac­ter­is­tics sim­i­lar to KCPS.  Our Board Watch process is now focus­ing on keep­ing the pub­lic informed about the school board and admin­is­tra­tion in this period where accred­i­ta­tion has been with­drawn, enroll­ment is shrink­ing and key staff con­tinue to leave.  

A cou­ple of things about pend­ing leg­is­la­tion need to be clar­i­fied: In spite of rumors being cir­cu­lated, there is no inten­tion to force stu­dents to be bussed to sub­ur­ban dis­tricts. The pro­pos­als would, in one way or another, make exist­ing Kansas City schools part of an adjoin­ing dis­trict. The only case in which stu­dents would be bussed is where the fam­ily vol­un­tar­ily enrolled the stu­dent in another dis­trict. How this would hap­pen is still being decided by the courts. A sec­ond point is the adjoin­ing dis­tricts are not typ­i­cally sub­ur­ban dis­tricts with stu­dents dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent than ours. Most have some of their land within Kansas City, and most are sim­i­lar demographically.  

Report of the February 8, 2012 Kansas City School Board meeting.

The first meet­ing of the month is des­ig­nated a “work­shop” in which admin­is­tra­tive staff mem­bers report to the board on oper­a­tional and aca­d­e­mic issues and projects. The focus of this meet­ing was “Shaping a Safe and Secure Learning Environment”.  

Observations by board watchers:

On-going changes in staff appoint­ments and assign­ments con­tinue.  Only two mem­bers of the senior staff have been with the dis­trict for two years. There is a new interim chief aca­d­e­mic offi­cer after the pre­vi­ous one left.

A num­ber of pro­grams are pro­posed to improve safety and secu­rity. We agree that a safe and secure envi­ron­ment can enhance learn­ing assum­ing effec­tive instruc­tion and cur­ricu­lum are in place.  (We have yet to hear much about edu­ca­tional pro­grams.)  It was men­tioned that the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools have 22 secu­rity offi­cers for 18,000 stu­dents while our District requires 88 secu­rity guards for less than 16,000 students. We won­der why the dis­crep­ancy. Is this symp­to­matic of a school sys­tem in disarray? 

In order to bol­ster accred­i­ta­tion points a “sweep” by tru­ancy offi­cers and other staff resulted in the arrest of a num­ber of tru­ants fol­lowed by calls to their par­ents and deliv­ery of the stu­dents back to school.  It was indi­cated in the meet­ing that most of the stu­dents had left again in a few days. We won­der why that was a sur­prise. As far as we could tell, no pro­grams were devel­oped to keep the stu­dents in school.  

A mem­ber of the audi­ence at the meet­ing men­tioned a con­cern that is shared by board watch mem­bers. The school board con­ducts its “pub­lic” meet­ings as if they were in pri­vate, not in a fish­bowl. There is no inter­ac­tion with the observers; in fact, there is almost no acknowl­edge­ment that oth­ers are present, cer­tainly no dia­logue.  People feel iso­lated from the board.

Other obser­va­tions about the func­tion­ing of the District:

There has been a regroup­ing of Standards Based Learning stu­dents to grade level shuf­fling teach­ers, stu­dents and peers to pre­pare for State tests.  One teacher reported that she has expe­ri­enced 12 dif­fer­ent changes this year.  Teachers are being told to focus on the tests in hopes of reach­ing an accred­i­ta­tion standard.

The day after the meet­ing the Human Resources Department noti­fied Head Start teach­ers that they will not have jobs next year; slots will be filled by per­sons with asso­ciate degrees.  

Some $25,000,000 in con­sent item expen­di­tures was moved on to the next board meet­ing agenda for vote/approval.  No expla­na­tion is given for these items but the pub­lic can go on the dis­trict web­site, look at the agenda for the upcom­ing meet­ing and find a page for each item.  A brief sum­mary of the item is accom­pa­nied by a list­ing of how the item impacts the tran­si­tion plan and var­i­ous poli­cies.  Since there is no longer a bud­get and finance com­mit­tee to dig more deeply into the expen­di­tures, a high level of trust in the admin­is­tra­tion is required.  We hope that the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion war­rants the trust; past staff has not.

The January, 2012 KCPS School Board meet­ing was listed as a reg­u­lar busi­ness meeting; however, much of the meet­ing con­sisted of staff pre­sen­ta­tions and cer­e­mo­nial activ­i­ties includ­ing stu­dent recog­ni­tions and an award to the board. More effi­cient sched­ul­ing and time man­age­ment could have pre­vented the meet­ing from being adjourned at 9:00 pm with­out com­plet­ing the busi­ness of the board.

Staff pre­sen­ta­tions involved how to mea­sure achieve­ment, how to demon­strate progress and com­mit­tees to be estab­lished with much less focus on what con­crete steps are being taken, how to improve read­ing in the early grades and in other ways define what progress is. The dis­cus­sion sounded like a board with a good deal of time and resources under­tak­ing a long-term improve­ment program—not a turn­around plan for a sys­tem in cri­sis. Board mem­bers’ com­ments tended to be dif­fuse and ori­ented to per­sonal inter­ests rather than focus­ing sharply on mea­sures to regain accred­i­ta­tion.   Many sta­tis­tics that we have seen before were pre­sented, but there was lit­tle infor­ma­tion about the cur­rent sta­tus on spe­cific achieve­ment vari­ables.  Volunteers who serve in schools were some­what sur­prised to hear the interim super­in­ten­dent say that pri­mary level stu­dents are not pro­moted with­out req­ui­site read­ing skills. If so, why are so many ele­men­tary stu­dents read­ing below grade level?  

It was men­tioned that stu­dents attend­ing stu­dent cen­tered learn­ing schools were regrouped into grade lev­els to take the acu­ity tests–different class­rooms, teach­ers and class­mates.  Instability in the class­room is prob­a­bly not a good way to improve test scores.  Several com­ments fol­lowed to the effect that the dis­trict is ahead of the state in its learn­ing strate­gies, and the state is empha­siz­ing the wrong things and needs to catch up to the dis­trict.   To the observers these com­ments sounded like rationalizations.

Consent agenda items were approved with­out dis­cus­sion, as is stan­dard pro­ce­dure.  Some $16.5 mil­lion in expen­di­tures were autho­rized with­out any details.   Members of the pub­lic have lit­tle infor­ma­tion about what is actu­ally being spent and for what pur­pose.   We are asked to assume that proper admin­is­tra­tive con­trols are in place.  With the district’s prob­lem­atic his­tory with con­tracts and employ­ment this assump­tion seems some­what risky.

All in all, the observers saw a board and admin­is­tra­tors focus­ing on details and struc­tures rather than grap­pling with the seri­ous prob­lems that have caused the loss of accred­i­ta­tion. Specifically, why is ade­quate learn­ing not tak­ing place in the classrooms?

Two Board Watchers for Do the Right Thing for Kids observed and eval­u­ated the December 21, 2011 KCPS School Board busi­ness meet­ing. At the begin­ning of the meet­ing board mem­ber Ray Wilson moved to amend the agenda to allow speak­ers rep­re­sent­ing the Afrikan Centered Education Collegium Campus to protest the district’s fund­ing level for ACE. Ajamu Webster deferred his time to Clinton Adams, Rev. Sam Mann and Rev. Wallace Hartsfield, II. Board pres­i­dent Airick Leonard West main­tained con­trol of the meet­ing that had the poten­tial of being hijacked by speak­ers and included veiled accu­sa­tions of racism.

The Kansas City Star reported:

The dis­trict might be able to renew a con­tract with ACE if it could be restruc­tured to give the dis­trict con­trol of many of the finances, [Acting Superintendent Steve] Green said. The cam­pus likely would need to be reduced by at least one build­ing. “And the law­suit would need to go away.”

Unfortunately, it was busi­ness as usual at this meeting—groups press­ing for their own projects and inter­ests and still no focused dis­cus­sion on gain­ing accred­i­ta­tion for the district.

Seven mem­bers of Do the Right Thing for Kids observed and eval­u­ated the November 16, 2011 Kansas City Public School Board busi­ness meet­ing. The first half of the meet­ing involved rec­og­niz­ing stu­dent “super stars” who had out­stand­ing achieve­ments and hear­ing from pre­sen­ters in the pub­lic com­ment por­tion of the meet­ing. Speakers expressed sup­port for the Board as it faces an inter­ven­tion by the State Commissioner of Education. This was fol­lowed by a rather wan­der­ing dis­cus­sion of a pre­sen­ta­tion and requested pol­icy change by the chair of the District Advisory Committee. Unfortunately, none of the Board mem­bers had seen a copy of the pro­posed pol­icy change—nor had the audi­ence. Even though the dis­cus­sion of the pol­icy clearly had to be post­poned until board mem­bers could read the pro­posed changes, the dis­cus­sion con­tin­ued for some 15 min­utes. After approv­ing “con­sent” items on the agenda the meet­ing con­cluded a 7:15 p.m.

The pre­vi­ous evening the Commissioner of Education had urged the Board to focus on three major ini­tia­tives most likely to moved the District toward accred­i­ta­tion. DTRT observers were some­what sur­prised that there was no dis­cus­sion of aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment, accred­i­ta­tion or goal pri­or­i­ties. Caught up within the frame­work of the Policy Governance sys­tem, the Board did not work on the issues that most observers would believe to be of high­est priority.

Eight Board Watchers attended the November 2, 2011 school board meet­ing which was an infor­ma­tional meet­ing in which staff or other resource per­sons make pre­sen­ta­tions to the Board about top­ics of inter­est and rel­e­vance. The Human Resources staff made an exten­sive pre­sen­ta­tion to the Board about poli­cies and pro­ce­dures that are being devel­oped for teacher hir­ing and per­for­mance eval­u­a­tion. The plans are ambi­tious, but they seem like the plans of an effec­tive, sta­ble, medium sized dis­trict. We won­der if they are real­is­tic for a shrink­ing, fail­ing dis­trict. What the imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ties should be for turn­ing the dis­trict around were not discussed.

Do the Right Thing for Kids will con­tinue to mon­i­tor KCMSD School Board meet­ings and report our obser­va­tions on this Website.

Five Do the Right Thing for Kids “Board Watchers” attended the 10/26 meet­ing. This, the sec­ond meet­ing of the month, was the “busi­ness meet­ing” where offi­cial actions such as approval of con­tracts takes place. All stand­ing board mem­bers were present. Carl Evans, who is run­ning unop­posed for the vacant posi­tion, was invited to sit with the Board. Our reports are aimed at inform­ing the pub­lic about the Board’s and District’s progress in address­ing aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment and other issues related to accreditation.

Preceding the offi­cial start­ing time of the meet­ing two “Scholar Superstar” school groups gave per­for­mances for the audi­ence and board mem­bers present. Board Watchers thought this was a use­ful way to rec­og­nize stu­dents while sav­ing meet­ing time. We believe that such pre­sen­ta­tions should focus on exam­ples of aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment. One pub­lic speaker, Kent Kahill, spoke elo­quently about the fail­ure of some par­ents to nour­ish and sup­port their stu­dents and the need for more effort on the part of the District to edu­cate par­ents in par­ent­ing skills. Andrea Flinders, pres­i­dent of the teach­ers union, spoke about teach­ers being over­whelmed with new pro­grams, meet­ings, pro­ce­dures and other man­dates from the administration.

We observed that this meet­ing pro­ceeded very much like pre­vi­ous busi­ness meet­ings, with no urgency or strong focus on strate­gies nec­es­sary to achieve accred­i­ta­tion or deal with the prob­a­ble upcom­ing shrink­ing of enroll­ment and the bud­get. Very lit­tle direct dis­cus­sion of aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment. We won­der whether over use of the Policy Governance board man­age­ment sys­tem is lead­ing the Board toward a pas­sive and reac­tive role in the District’s gov­er­nance at a time when strong lead­er­ship is needed.

We are struck with how dif­fi­cult it is for the audi­ence to under­stand what is going on. A sin­gle screen in the front of the room shows power point pre­sen­ta­tions with fig­ures too small to be read by most of the audi­ence. Documents are dis­cussed that the audi­ence has not had access to. Presenters to the Board have their backs to the audi­ence. The expe­ri­ence of those present is more that of pas­sive observer than stakeholder.

The need for alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion sites is appar­ent from the num­ber of stu­dents who are caus­ing trou­ble in the mid­dle and high schools because they are not equipped intel­lec­tu­ally or socially to ben­e­fit from and con­tribute to reg­u­lar school set­tings. Information about progress in devel­op­ing alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion options was requested by board mem­bers. The staff pre­sen­ta­tion was very gen­eral with few specifics about num­bers of stu­dents to be served, the scope of the prob­lem, etc . Nor was there much demon­stra­tion of con­cern about the prob­lem or com­mit­ment to solve it.
A num­ber of pro­grams and pack­ages are in the process of being devel­oped or installed, but lit­tle detail about them was given.

As is usu­ally the case, the report by Dr. Lee-Gwin on the finan­cial sit­u­a­tion was clear and use­ful. She clearly has a good grasp of the bud­get and the fis­cal con­trol pro­ce­dures nec­es­sary for the District to pay its bills in the short term. There was no dis­cus­sion about the fact that if the District con­tin­ues to expe­ri­ence shrink­age in enroll­ment the finan­cial sit­u­a­tion will become more difficult.

The inci­dent of shots fired at a school bus after a foot­ball game was asked about. Staff expla­na­tions of the late report­ing of the inci­dent seemed vague. Nor was the much assur­ance to con­cerned par­ents that strong mea­sures are in place to pre­vent sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions in the future.

Do the Right Thing for Kids will con­tinue to mon­i­tor KCMSD School Board meet­ings and report our obser­va­tions on this Website.

The School Board has changed its for­mat for meet­ings. The first meet­ing of the month (usu­ally the sec­ond Wednesday) is an infor­ma­tional meet­ing in which staff or other resource per­sons make pre­sen­ta­tions to the Board about top­ics of inter­est and rel­e­vance. The sec­ond meet­ing of the month (usu­ally the fourth Wednesday) is a busi­ness meet­ing in which votes are taken, dis­cus­sions are held and resources allo­cated. Do the Right Thing for Kids sup­ports this change because thus far it has helped make meet­ings more efficient.

At its October 12 meet­ing the Board heard from senior staff about goals and plans for imple­men­ta­tion of the long range Transformation Plan which was devel­oped last year. This is an extremely ambi­tious plan that will involve a good deal of staff time and resources. While each of the goals is, in itself, a desir­able tar­get, observers from Do The Right Thing for Kids are con­cerned that the District may be tak­ing on too much given the cur­rent stress on the orga­ni­za­tion from loss of accred­i­ta­tion, lack of con­ti­nu­ity in lead­er­ship, and the inevitable shrink­age of enroll­ment and funds. Some pri­or­i­ties will need to be set. In future we will report in more detail on the Transformation Plan and efforts related to it.

Number of Board Watchers Reporting: 5

School Board Member Attendance: Airick West, Derek Richey, Arthur Benson, Kyleen Carroll, Joseph Jackson, Duane Kelly, Crispin Rea, and Ray Wilson.
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Report Card posted on: August 3, 2011

The DTRTFK Board Report Card has been greatly sim­pli­fied to meet two goals:
1) Make it eas­ier for read­ers to learn about the crit­i­cal ele­ments of the meet­ing.
2) Make it eas­ier for the Board Watchers to complete.

Number of Board Watchers Reporting: 5

School Board Member Attendance: Airick West, Derek Richey, Arthur Benson, Kyleen Carroll, Joseph Jackson, Duane Kelly, Crispin Rea, and Ray Wilson.
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The Kansas City, MO School Board has a new for­mat for its two monthly board meetings: The sec­ond Wednesday of each month will be a work­shop, and a busi­ness meet­ing will be held on the fourth Wednesday.  Look for our Report Cards fol­low­ing each busi­ness meet­ing.


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