The Kansas City School District works to erase a tragic history - KansasCity.com

The Kansas City School District works to erase a tragic history

By RICK MONTGOMERY

The Kansas City Star

Shane Keyser

Superintendent John Covington’s conference room — the “war room,” his staff calls it — is ringed by 14 white boards, covered with grids, drawn in black marker, that track some 200 tasks under way in the school system’s transformation effort.

I t’s 1991 and Stanley Peeples II has entered a new world. Central High School — the core of Kansas City. He can’t believe this.

Stanley and his classmates are looking at a row of desks with robotic arms stretching out, able to pick up blocks. Downstairs there is an Olympic-size pool with underwater windows. It’s the first day at this $32 million school, Stanley can choose either the “Classical Greek” or “Computers Unlimited” track, and the front foyer alone — man, fresh! Marble floor and Greek columns.

Back in sixth grade, Stanley shivered in class for a month because the boiler broke. In junior high, Nancy Reagan made a visit to address the plight of drug-infested, gang-haunted schools.

But this place — yeah, tight!

It’s too bad, in this magnificent magnet school, that test scores and graduation rates will never climb out of the dumps.

•••

He is only 30, but Airick Leonard West knows the tragic history of the school district he wants to help save.

He knows the saga of the lawsuit that took flight before he was born. How it led to the most ambitious school-desegregation plan a court ever crafted. How $2 billion in taxes, imposed by a judge, produced lavish new buildings across the Kansas City School District, yet never turned around lowly achievement.

He knows, as we all do now, that money doesn’t teach

Sunday, June 6, 2010