Now that the 94-year-old school is closing, residents are fearful that the neighborhood could become even worse, attracting drug dealers and vandals when the children are gone. McCoy is among the roughly half of Kansas City district schools expected to shut down before class resumes next fall, part of a wave of school closures across the country.
"When it does close, it's going to get bad around here," said Virginia Stanley, standing outside her home with her husband, her 22-year-old granddaughter and her two young great-grandchildren, who live with them.
Superintendents of struggling districts are winning praise for confronting budget woes by shuttering half-empty and underperforming schools, a move often blocked by local politics in the past. In many cases, the schools have been declining for years, but were never closed because residents and local advocacy groups fought to keep them. Now school leaders have an argument that trumps any parent outrage: The struggling economy makes these schools a luxury that districts can no longer afford.