Kansas City Public Schools needs four out of every seven voters to approve a $474 million school bond in April to repair aging buildings in Kansas City Public Schools and construct new facilities. It started making its case directly to families in the district last week.
The district held a Bond 101 workshop on August 22 to teach people about the bond. They walked through a gallery that explained the project proposal and saw a dashboard of schools’ current conditions.
The first phase of the 10 year plan would invest a total of $524 million to improve school buildings through renovations, new construction and relocations.
KCPS hasn’t passed a bond measure since 1967, making it the only Missouri school district in the region without tax revenue to support deferred building maintenance and improvements.
That means unaddressed maintenance totaling some $650 million has piled up. The district said it needs an additional $600 million to improve teaching environments by updating classrooms and adding indoor and outdoor learning areas.
Erica Taylor-Murff, the parent of a child at Holliday Montessori School, said the district will need to get families who don’t have kids in the district on board.
“I'm excited about our students having more access to different learning opportunities, more quality buildings, cleaner air in the buildings,” Taylor-Murff said. “They deserve the utmost quality, like our neighboring school districts have.”
KCPS would also ask its board of education to approve a $100 million certificate of participation bond, a loan that the district will pay back over time. Up to $50 million of additional funding from the general obligation bond would go to charter schools.
Meghan Wendland, the parent of a kindergartner at Border Star Montessori School, attended the workshop to learn more about the plan. The district is considering merging her son’s school with Holliday Montessori School and making Border Star a neighborhood school, rather than a school that draws students from across the district.
She worries that will mean less diversity at her son’s school. Still, Wendland said she overwhelmingly supports KCPS passing a school bond.
“There's a lot of work to be done, a lot of deferred maintenance,” Wendland said. “To really attract new families to the district, we're going to need to make some pretty drastic changes.”
What it takes to pass a bond
Other Kansas City area school districts regularly receive voter support to raise levies or issue bonds to increase teacher pay or pay for new buildings.
They take that route because Missouri does not provide state funding to schools for building and repair, and limits how much of their operational funds districts can spend on those each year. For Kansas City Public Schools, that’s about $7 million a year.
Linda Quinley, former chief financial officer at KCPS, is now senior director of school finance for the Missouri School Boards Association.
“We like to think that we can keep up with maintenance with the operating budgets we have, but that's really, really harder to do all the time,” Quinley said.
Quinley also served as financial officer at Columbia Public Schools for more than a decade, where she said the school district went to voters nearly every other year to issue a bond to build, expand and improve buildings as its community grew larger.
She said bonds pass more easily when school districts don’t ask for a tax increase, but because KCPS hasn’t had a bond in nearly 60 years, it wouldn’t have tax support to cover the bond’s principal or interest.
Quinley said school districts that routinely ask voters for bonds have an advantage because they can show their communities what they do with increased taxes.
“Communities who understand the value of what's happening inside those school buildings every day, and whose school systems are out in front of them asking for the bonds, are the ones who will pass it,” Quinley said.
‘Start the conversation’
KCPS polled voters about the bond last spring. About 60% said they’d support a $400 to $600 million bond, and about 57% would need to approve the bond for it to pass.
About 67% believed a bond would positively impact people of Kansas City and 60% believed KCPS did not receive enough funding.
The school district will conduct more polling in September to help craft the language it will put on the ballot. It will also continue to hold workshops and meetings at school sites to hear neighbors’ priorities.
Quinley said educating the community on what the district needs and what it would mean for them - like paying higher taxes — is key.
“It's been so long since you've been in that conversation with your community, you have to do exactly what Kansas City is doing now and start the conversation,” Quinley said.
Concerns about already-high property taxes and perceptions of public schools also influence a bond’s chances, Quinley said. Taxpayers in Jackson County are still dealing with the fallout of the 2023 property tax assessments, which raised homeowners property assessments by an average of 30% and more than 100% in some cases.
A taxpayer with a $200,000 home within KCPS’s boundaries would pay about 64 additional cents a day, or $231.80 a year, according to the district. The district's median home value is $180,000.
Getting people on board
Wendland, who lives in the Brookside area, said her family is the only one with young children in their neighborhood. Many of her neighbors are retired, and she said they are concerned about any tax increases.
“I think getting them on board with voting for a tax increase will be challenging, but I'm excited to talk with them, because I think it's very important for our community,” Wendland said.
Leaders with the Valley Center School District, a smaller district north of Wichita, said misinformation about schools being torn down played a role in its bond’s failure last fall. It went to voters to ask for higher taxes to cope with growing enrollment at its schools, but fell short by a couple hundred votes.
The district went back to voters with a new plan in May based on community feedback, and it narrowly passed. The plan didn’t include a tax increase, but did increase the school district’s debt and decrease the length of time that it would owe money.
Greg Lehr, the district’s superintendent, said having people who know the facts helps combat misformation, but thinks negative perceptions of public schools will make it more difficult for bond measures to pass.
“If people have the opportunity to walk our halls and see what happens on a daily basis, I do think that people will be more inclined to vote for things like this, because the reality — it is our future,” Lehr said.
If a bond doesn’t pass for KCPS
If voters in KCPS don’t approve the bond in April, school district leaders said they’ll reflect on what went wrong and prioritize ensuring students have access to safe and clean environments.
“We'll continue to find ways to do the best we can, but candidly speaking, that is not a sustainable way, a proper way to support kids' educations,” said Jordan Gordon, the district’s chief operating officer.
Taylor-Murff said people without kids in the district will need to understand the stakes.
“This is really going to impact not just the students, but it's going to impact Kansas City as a whole,” Taylor-Murff said. “This is the city of champions, so our primary school district needs to reflect that.”
