Kansas City, Mo., closing nearly half its schools

March 11, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo.

The Kansas City school board narrowly approved a plan Wednesday night to close nearly half the district’s schools in a desperate bid to avoid a potential bankruptcy.

The board voted 5-4 after parents and community leaders made final pleas to spare the schools even as the beleaguered district seeks to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall. The approved plan calls for shuttering 29 of 61 schools — a striking amount even as public school closings rise nationwide while the recession eats away at academic budgets.

“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment,” Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said to applause from a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people.

“And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district,” she said. “It is shameful and sinful.”

Under the plan that the board approved, buildings would be shuttered by the end of the school year. Teachers at six other low-performing schools would be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district would sell its downtown central office. It also would cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs — including 285 teachers.

Laura Loyacono, 45, the parent of a 13-year-old girl and 16-year-old boy, served on a committee that helped draft the closure proposal.

“It’s not an easy thing,” Loyacono said. “We knew going into it that we would have to close a significant number of schools because of the budget issues and because the resources have been so diluted and so spread out that I think some of the program quality has really suffered.”

Despite the need, she said nobody likes to see schools closed.

“It’s a tough day,” Loyacono said.

Superintendent John Covington has spent the past month making the case to sometimes angry groups of parents and students that the closures are necessary.