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It had been nearly 15 years since Ashley Johnson enrolled her first child at Border Star Montessori in Kansas City. That kid is now a high school graduate.
Johnson returned to the same Brookside elementary school last summer, this time to enroll her youngest daughter, and was shocked by how little had changed.
The auditorium is still swelteringly hot. Classrooms house hazardous radiators. The gym ceiling is falling down.
“Our children deserve better than that,” Johnson said. “ Because if I have two generations of children, I have an adult child and I have a little one — and things are still the same — that is unacceptable for our children.”
Border Star resides inside an old building — the elementary moved there in 1928 — but that’s not unusual for the Kansas City Public Schools system. The average KCPS building is 60 years old, and some are closer to a century.
Across the country, school districts often rely on voter-approved obligation bonds to fund building improvements and repairs for deteriorating buildings. But KCPS hasn’t successfully passed a bond in nearly six decades, and many of these crumbling spaces reflect that disinvestment.
In April, the school district will try to change its luck. KCPS is asking Kansas City voters to approve more than $474 million in higher property taxes, which would allow the district to update classrooms and fund long-standing maintenance needs.
One of the biggest hurdles for Kansas City Public Schools in this election is overcoming residents’ lingering perceptions of the school district’s performance, past leadership decisions and uncomfortable history with desegregation.
The school district has transformed over the last couple decades, but these buildings have remained a persistent reminder of Kansas City's strained relationship with public education.
“ If the bulk of all of our children are going to public schools, and we see the institution that they're in is dilapidating, I feel like it's a… is it a moral obligation?” Johnson said. ”I feel like the main thing I could do as a citizen is to have our school system flowing and working properly.”
'Our schools were just falling apart'
Kansas City Public Schools buildings weren’t always in such poor condition.
Dr. Jessie Kirksey, the principal at John T. Hartman Elementary in south Kansas City, has worked in the school district for a long time — so long that KCPS had to create more awards to celebrate her tenure. She started working as a first grade teacher in 1966, catching three buses to get to Longfellow Elementary School at Holmes and 29th Street.
She lived in Kansas City, Kansas, but was drawn to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District (as it was then known) by the pay. At the time, KCPS paid $25 more than the neighboring districts. And the schools looked far different than they do now.
“They were very well kept. They were painted,” Kirksey said. “The yards were kept just beautiful.”
The classrooms also reflected that investment. Kirksey said the district employed a surplus of teachers and even consultants for each grade level, who helped teachers with things like writing, speaking or working with parents.
But over the next decade, Kirksey started to see a shift downwards. The school district tried to get a bond passed in the ‘70s to fund infrastructure needs, but Kansas City voters rejected it. And the repercussions were visible.
“We didn't have the maintenance for our schools, and so our schools were just falling apart,” Kirksey said.
Kansas City Public Schools was also hit hard by white flight, a national phenomenon that really kicked off in the 1940s in which white parents took their kids and abandoned urban centers for the suburbs, in large part to avoid attending schools with Black kids.
After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 found that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ordered all public districts in the United States to desegregate, "with all deliberate speed."
And yet, in practice, many public school systems still didn’t fully integrate, including in Kansas City.
White families leave Kansas City schools
Over the next two decades, the Kansas City school board got rid of explicitly racial school boundaries. But it kept illegally changing attendance rules to ensure white schools stayed majority-white, and Black schools stayed majority-black, with Troost Avenue serving as the border.
Some white families left Kansas City altogether for the suburbs — north of the river or west into Kansas — or communities served by once-rural school districts.
Missouri lawmakers also worked to keep Kansas City schools segregated. The General Assembly passed a law in 1957 preventing KCPS from expanding, even while Kansas City annexed nearby towns, so that smaller, majority-white districts like Center and Hickman Mills wouldn't become part of the KCPS system.
Lengthy teacher strikes in 1974 and 1977 dealt another blow to Kansas City Public Schools. Teachers were frustrated over low pay, overcrowded classrooms and a lack of education programs — lingering consequences of segregation and the absence of more taxpayer funding.
During the 1974 strike, the teachers union president went to jail for 10 days for failing to obey an order prohibiting the action. A state judge also fined the union thousands of dollars after the strike closed schools for more than a month.
Dr. Joshua Dunn is the author of “Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins,” a book that details KCPS’s history of desegregation. He said the strikes eroded the community’s faith in their school system, and exacerbated the exodus of families.
“ I had people tell me that they felt that the district had never really recovered from those two teacher strikes,” Dunn said. “They were quite lengthy, and really I think the result of them was a loss of public confidence in the school district.”
Growing tension over racial integration also contributed to families leaving KCPS. The district was still heavily segregated in the 1970s, and civil rights groups took notice.
In 1973, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed a lawsuit against KCPS demanding desegregation. The next year, a federal investigation found the school district had illegally perpetuated segregation and passed on opportunities to integrate.
In order to not lose federal funding, the district had to redraw attendance boundaries and launch a bussing program, which a lot of families — both Black and white — did not like.
“You could call it white flight, but it was broader than that. You actually saw a lot of families leave across racial categories,” Dunn said. “In some ways you could call it middle class flight, but there were more middle class white families.”
Fallout over desegregation
The school district would spend the next two decades embroiled in a court case aimed at desegregating the district and giving urban students the equal opportunities they deserved. But it came at a high price — both financial and political — that further eroded the community’s trust.
In 1977, Kansas City Public Schools filed its own lawsuit, on behalf of its students, against the states of Missouri and Kansas, federal agencies, and the surrounding suburban districts.
KCPS argued that the states and suburban districts had a financial responsibility to help desegregate Kansas City’s public schools.
Dunn said KCPS also wanted to retaliate against the federal government for the mandated desegregation plan and the resulting white flight that drained the district of resources.
”The district felt that they had been kind of cornered by the feds with this plan, and what you saw was it did lead to families leaving the district,” Dunn said. “The premise of that lawsuit was that the federal government was essentially causing this greater segregation.”
“Missouri v. Jenkins” was highly unusual. Dunn said it’s the only desegregation lawsuit he’s heard of that was filed by a school district itself.
It also had a strange twist: The federal judge who heard the case, Judge Russell Clark, ended up making Kansas City Public Schools a defendant in its own lawsuit.
When Clark took over the case, he ruled that KCPS couldn’t sue Missouri because the public school district was an entity of the state. The district court had already dismissed the lawsuit against the suburban districts and federal agencies.
Instead, in 1985, the judge found KCPS and the state of Missouri liable for segregation.
Clark’s aim was to kickstart desegregation, for real this time, in Kansas City Public Schools. But his options to do so were limited.
The U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled that neighboring districts couldn’t be forced to fund desegregation efforts if they hadn’t caused the problem — which is to say, if suburban districts showed they hadn’t intentionally kept Black students out.
Meanwhile, a 1984 ruling from the U.S. District Court of Western Missouri established that the state could not be forced to desegregate schools, which dismantled bussing and other such solutions used by other cities.
As an alternative, Clark ordered KCPS to build expensive magnet schools, to the tune of $2 billion. And they would be paid for by both Missouri taxpayers and Kansas City residents.
“The idea was to gold plate the school district, which would also improve the quality of education for the students in Kansas City,” Dunn said. “But then also hopefully attract white students from the suburbs.”
Clark required the state of Missouri to pay for 75% of the magnet plan, and KCPS the remaining 25%.
But when KCPS couldn’t shoulder its share, Clark did something extraordinary for a judge: He doubled property taxes within the school district.
Magnet schools were a ‘dream’
The judge’s desegregation ruling led to a massive infusion of money into Kansas City Public Schools — and the last major investment it would receive for decades.
Within a few years, Kansas City built multiple new magnet schools, and the amenities offered were striking: a 2,000 square foot planetarium, petting zoos, robotics labs, movie editing and screening rooms, and a temperature-controlled art gallery all became available to students in Kansas City’s public school system.
Kirksey, the principal at Hartman, was the district’s director of elementary education at that time. She helped implement the desegregation plan by asking teachers and principals to “dream a school.”
“ They wanted to say, we have a swimming pool. We have this. We have a science lab. We have all the equipment,” Kirksey said. “It gave them a feeling that, ‘Boy, our children… they're really going places.’”
Kirksey said students loved the chance to attend brand-new buildings that looked and felt like the ones their suburban counterparts attended. That’s an experience that students in KCPS haven’t gotten to enjoy since.
One of the Kansas City students who benefited was Matt Oates, who attended the environmental science magnets North Rock Creek Elementary and Knotts Elementary School in the early 1990s.
He remembers how remarkable the school district appeared to his mother, who grew up out of state.
“ My mom had never seen like a school district that had a greenhouse or novel things that we take for granted like free before and after school care,” Oates said. “She just thought the district was just the greatest thing to have ever happened.”
Oates remembers the walking trails behind the schools, greenhouses where students could grow plants and a river where they could witness the water cycle.
“To be able to get into an environment where I can kind of learn and tinker — I've always been fascinated by how the world works and things like that, so that was a big thing,” Oates said.
‘Everyone wanted better schools’
However, the judge’s plan was controversial from the jump — and not only because of its hefty cost.
Schools were given a quota for how many white students needed to enroll, but never reached those numbers. As a result, some Black families in Kansas City couldn’t enroll their children in the district’s most desirable schools. A few even listed their children as white so they could get in.
Dunn also said there was a stark difference in how students got to school. Kids in the suburbs could receive a door-to-door taxi service to attend the magnet schools, while kids who lived inside the district had to walk or take the bus.
Black civic organizations and parents first pushed to overturn the quota system, and then some campaigned to eliminate the magnet schools altogether. They led a charge to take over the Kansas City School Board with members sympathetic to their cause.
“Obviously, everyone wanted better schools for their kids,” Dunn said. “But then they did disagree with how those resources were deployed and thought that they weren't necessarily helping their kids.”
Missouri taxpayers were also frustrated, and accusations of mismanaging funds dogged KCPS over the years. Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon complained that the district couldn’t account for 23,000 items purchased with taxpayer dollars, and had spent $40,000 on a display case at a high school with no trophies to display.
Despite the new money and shiny schools, white parents never returned to KCPS the way the district hoped. Test scores hadn’t improved much either — elementary school scores rose a little bit, but middle and high schools still remained low.
One decade after Clark’s trailblazing court decision, the grand Kansas City experiment came to an end.
In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to the desegregation plan, ruling that parts of the arrangement were unconstitutional and exceeded the court’s scope. The court also urged Clark to end the judicial supervision of KCPS and return control to the school district.
Clark approved a settlement in 1997 between Missouri and KCPS, under which the state would pay the school district $320 million over three years in return for being dismissed from the litigation. The property tax hikes went away — and that extra funding for schools evaporated.
The case wouldn’t officially end until the early 2000s, but 1995 marked the Supreme Court’s final say on its legality. It would also be the last time the nation’s highest court addressed desegregation, serving as a sour bookend to Brown v. Board of Education.
By 1996, one year later, the school district had a nonwhite population of about 78% and public sentiment had soured. Fewer families trusted KCPS with their money or their children.
Dr. Jessie Kirksey said even now, there’s a lot of pain around the desegregation case.
“We can say we did build some beautiful schools, but our problem was we weren't able to maintain the schools, nor the staff, at that time,” Kirksey said. “But it was a dream. It was an attempt to bring things together and make it better.”
“We weren't successful, but it was an attempt.”
Disaccreditation and the district's lasting stigma
After the drawn-out drama of the desegregation case, Kansas City Public Schools faced an onslaught of other challenges, both internal and external, that set it back in restoring its relationship with the community.
The Missouri State Board of Education voted in 2000 to withdraw KCPS’s accreditation status — essentially its seal of approval — for failing to meet all of the state’s academic standards.
The department also looks at the district’s leadership and finances to make sure it’s on track.
It was the first time in the country that a state had stripped a school district of its accreditation status.
“We’ve given Kansas City more time than maybe we should have to address the problems,” Missouri education commissioner Chris L. Nicastro said at the time. “Over a sustained period of time, student performance has not met state standards.”
It would take more than two decades for KCPS to fully regain accreditation.
Losing the state’s endorsement comes with consequences. If a student in an unaccredited district wants to transfer to a neighboring district that does have accreditation, their home district has to foot the bill for tuition.
And then there’s the stigma.
As a student, Oates remembers an exodus of classmates and friends whose families were unsure of what it meant to attend an unaccredited school. Those who stayed internalized the district’s negative reputation; others took it as a challenge.
“It kind of put a chip on your shoulder, because we could hear what people were saying about us as students and as kids, and maybe what we did or didn't deserve or how worthy we were for things,” Oates said. “ People don't think kids hear that, but you do. You can hear how the news talks about you.”
Two years earlier, the Missouri legislature had passed a bill allowing charter schools to open in Kansas City. Suddenly, families dissatisfied with KCPS had a lot of other school options to choose from.
“ There may have been a perception 20 years ago that it was mismanaged, when it was just superintendent flying through each time, that they were unaccredited and that it was just not a place that was well functioning,” says Julie Holland, director of the Parent Leadership Training Institute and the former education advisor for Kansas City.
School choice advocates say that wealthier families always had education options for their kids, whether that was enrolling in private schools or picking up and moving. And in Kansas City, those wealthier families were usually white.
With the creation of charters, advocates say, another choice was now open to everyone.
Holland said the families she works with never identified as charter or public school “purists.” Many of their kids attend both — for example, starting in a KCPS school for elementary and then moving to a charter for middle and high school.
“What I've really come to realize is that parents want what's best for their children. And every child is different,” Holland said. “Especially if they have children as a special, maybe they're gifted or they like Montessori or they really need something in Spanish immersion.”
But with roughly half of Kansas City’s children attending charters, it’s clear that many families have decided that public schools aren’t the best option for their child.
The way charters work is when a student enrolls in a charter school, the state money designated for that child no longer goes to their neighborhood school — that student is now counted at the charter, which raises their budget.
And when more and more families do that, the public schools can lose out on a lot of funding — and Kansas City Public Schools says that’s exactly what’s happening.
When the first charter schools in Kansas City opened in 1999, about 33,000 students attended Kansas City Public Schools. Enrollment these days sits at about 14,000 — less than half what it was pre-charter.
Those dynamics are largely the same as what KCPS still deals with today.
Kansas City Public Schools faces competition for students from both inside the city and out — charters and neighboring school districts. At the same time, KCPS has lost the public funding that was supposed to give it an edge by investing in buildings and amenities.
Instead, without a designated funding source for infrastructure, the district has to pull money for repairs and building projects out of the same pot it uses to operate and pay teachers. And there’s just not enough to keep up.
Over the last two and a half decades, Kansas City Public Schools has fallen behind on $650 million worth of basic maintenance to building infrastructure — issues like electric wiring, windows, roofs, plumbing, foundations and HVAC systems.
Teachers, students and families all had to make do with their limited resources.
Ashley Johnson, a KCPS parent, remembers what it was like navigating her kids through a school district with resources and a reputation that lagged behind its suburban peers.
“That doesn't even come to (suburban families’) mind, about the lack of books or faulty playground equipment,” Johnson said. “They have a recurring bond, they don't have to think about sacrificing this fund over here to move over here because the seesaw or the slide tore down.”
She remembers hearing rumors about what was transpiring inside KCPS, including its leadership woes, while her tight-knit group of parents worked together to support their children’s teachers by volunteering or cleaning out classrooms.
”We had to do what we had to do. If things needed to be done in the school, collective parents would come together and try to get things done,” Johnson said. “ Teachers needed extra supplies or something, you know, we would all just chip in and all come together.”
The school district seemingly couldn’t catch a break. KCPS regained partial accreditation in 2002 then lost it again in 2011, before working its way back to partial in 2014.
Kansas City Public Schools made national headlines once again when it closed half of its buildings and laid off hundreds of teachers in 2010, in an effort to avoid going bankrupt.
A former superintendent’s unfinished business
School leaders, families, city officials and community groups in Kansas City all seem to agree that the district has transformed over the last decade.
That turnaround is largely credited to former superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell. Arriving in 2016 after a revolving door of leadership, Bedell’s six-year tenure marked him as the district’s longest-serving superintendent in more than 50 years.
When Bedell joined the district from Baltimore County Public Schools, he promised to lead KCPS to full accreditation. Bedell said the district was in worse condition than he anticipated — both physically and academically.
“ I remember telling the school board after I got through the first 100 days that I felt like the bag of goods that people were selling them, or even sold me — when I opened up that bag, it was nothing but bricks in there.” Bedell said in a recent interview with KCUR.
Bedell said the district didn’t have a framework for student instruction, a strategic plan for the district’s goals, or enough support for developing teachers. Bedell also had to deal with the fallout of falsified student attendance records, a scandal that led to several employee exits and set back the entire district’s accreditation process
And facilities had only gotten worse. Bedell said the district didn’t even have turf football fields when he first arrived — a stark contrast to the schools he previously worked at in Baltimore and Houston.
“ The districts I came from, that stuff was just not acceptable,” Bedell said.
Under Bedell’s leadership, student performance and outcomes improved enough for the Missouri Board of Education to fully restore the district’s accreditation in 2022. He hoped the state’s backing would help give not just students, but also the entire city, pride in its school district.
Buildings were the other part of the equation, however. Bedell is still disappointed that he was never able to truly address that during his tenure.
“ I can't go and ask you for money if people, if all they gonna say is why should we give you money? Why should we increase our taxes for a low performing school district?” Bedell said. “My plan all along was, I have to show people that we can get this district fully accredited and give them some confidence that we're doing right with the resources that we have.”
Just months after regaining full accreditation, Bedell left KCPS. He now leads Anne Arundel County Public Schools, in a high-income Baltimore suburb — but Kansas City is never far from his mind. After his first month in the new job, he called his KCPS successor to share how guilty he feels about the facilities, opportunities and programs his Anne Arundel students enjoy compared to kids in Kansas City.
“ I feel like my legacy was solidified by what I did during those six years, but I felt like that would have just been the cherry on the top, to be able to have been able to get a bond passed so those kids could could really learn in in some nice facilities,” Bedell said.
Overcoming the ‘sins of the past’
Dr. Jennifer Collier had big shoes to fill when she took over as the district’s next superintendent in 2022. With more than 20 years of experience in the school district, though, Collier was the community’s first choice pick.
Residents described her as “deeply rooted” in Kansas City. Collier got her start as a teacher at Northeast High School, working her way up to becoming principal, director of human relations and then deputy superintendent.
Still, Collier was left with a lot of big problems to tackle. Her primary task was figuring out what to do with aging buildings that were expensive to keep up and didn’t have enough students to fill them.
Within Collier’s first year as superintendent, KCPS proposed closing 10 schools, which would have required a massive reshuffling of students and changed the shape of multiple neighborhoods.
But after weeks of heated pushback and public outcry at town hall meetings, the district scaled back its plan to just two school closures.
Although it was a stressful time for families, community members say the process proved that Collier — and Kansas City Public Schools as a whole — would listen to their needs and earn their trust.
After seeing families organize to keep their schools open, district leaders hoped to keep that momentum going by creating engagement groups focused on issues like student performance, safe schools and buildings.
In 2023, the school district announced they’d finally ask voters to approve a ballot measure to fund building improvements — their first ask in decades.
To get ahead of public messaging, KCPS launched a campaign to educate voters about the upcoming bond by holding workshops, school walkthroughs and door-to-door visits.
“Now is the time to invest in Kansas City's children,” Collier said at the school board’s announcement. “As we look to move into this phase where we have a world class city, we know it's important also to have a world class school district.”
A general obligation bond is the primary way that school districts fund improvements and repairs to buildings. School districts have to ask property owners for permission to borrow that money, since residents’ property taxes cover the principal and interest payment.
KCPS would receive $424 million from this April’s bond measure. Another $50 million of the funding would go to participating charters.
At the taxpayer level, residents who own a $200,000 home within the boundaries of KCPS would pay $231.80 a year, according to the district. And more than half of homeowners would pay less than that, since KCPS officials said the median home value in the district is $180,000.
Passing the bond won’t be easy. The school district will have to convince 57% of voters to sign off. Dunn said KCPS last attempted a bond measure back in the 1970s, and didn’t even win a third of the vote.
This time, it’s not just the school buildings on the ballot. In a way, the question at the heart of the vote is whether Kansas City residents are ready to trust Kansas City Public Schools with their kids and their money.
Bedell acknowledges how the failed desegregation effort left so many people disappointed. But he hopes families — and Kansas City voters — can move forward, because the district has.
“I would tell people to please stop penalizing the school district for the sins of the past. I wasn't there for that. Jennifer Collier wasn't there for that. This current board wasn't there for that,” Bedell said. “And these kids most certainly weren't there during those times.”
“It's time for us to put all of that behind and recognize the district is in a much better place,” Bedell continued.
Bedell also says that race must be acknowledged as influencing the conversation around Kansas City Public Schools, because of the role that racism and redlining played in shaping Kansas City. Nearly half of KCPS students are Black, about 32% are Hispanic and about 10% are white.
“ I think that plays a role in why people want to support the district and not support the district because of who the kids are too,” Bedell said.
By most metrics, the tide has indeed turned at Kansas City Public Schools. Enrollment is growing, test scores are improving and more students are graduating. It’s regained accreditation and now has stable leadership in both its superintendent and school board.
"I don't think I can think of, at this point, there's really no excuse for why we're not supporting this school on a bond," Bedell says.
With those successes, it feels like that public image of KCPS as a failing district is finally changing, too. Holland, the parent leader, said she certainly feels that way.
“If you want to continue to have a perception, which is not maybe really aligned with reality anymore, about what you think KCPS is, just because you've been normed that way or socialized that way because you've grown up in the ‘90s,” Holland said. “Or you could really say this is an opportunity to make a change and to make a different trajectory for KCPS.”
High stakes for the bond vote
Many people around Kansas City see the April bond vote as a chance for the community to say it believes in the city’s public education system after decades of distrust and disinvestment.
So what happens if it fails?
Dr. Derald Davis, deputy superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools, came into the district as a teacher in the mid-1990s, towards the tail end of the desegregation case.
If the bond doesn’t pass on April 8, Davis said KCPS would have to continue what they’ve been doing — trying to keep up their buildings without any dedicated funding.
“We're in a stage where we're constantly having to patch something up,” Davis said.
Missing ceiling tiles, rusting walls and run-down floors would remain, and the district would make repairs as needed with what money they have. Many new buildings or projects to improve student learning would be off the table.
Davis said the district would eventually regroup and come back with a better message for the community. But he thinks if Kansas Citians saw the KCPS buildings as students see them, they’d feel differently.
A student at Northeast High School once told Davis that a neighboring district wouldn’t allow its student athletes to play on their field. The ground was so filled with pits and holes that it could injure players.
“This young lady, as she's telling this story to me, she just broke out into tears and she started crying,” Davis said. “The impact on her was she felt less than, that others would not come and play on our field.”
Then there’s the classrooms. One of the most persistent issues for students is the sweltering heat when they return to school in August. Up until last summer, Kansas City Public Schools didn’t have central air in all of its high schools, and the older buildings struggled to keep cool in the city’s triple-digit heat.
In 2023, KCPS had to dismiss students early for the entire first week of classes, because their buildings were unbearable. The district has since added window units in each classroom, but it’s not a complete fix.
Tyler Jackson, a senior at Lincoln Preparatory College Academy, said the high temperatures tire him quicker during tests. He plays basketball in a gym that has paint peeling from the walls.
“ My younger brother's in the Kansas City Public School District too, so I feel like the next generation needs this stuff,” Jackson said. “Especially with how everything is progressing in life, the next generation needs this very bad.”
Zoe Wilson, another senior at Lincoln Prep, wants to educate other students about the bond. So they started an Instagram page.
They remember their elementary school never felt like the right size, and the playground equipment was falling apart.
“ When you're a kid, you don't really always think about that type of stuff. You think about, ‘Oh, this is my teacher and I'm going to go learn things,” Wilson said. “But you don't think about, ‘Oh, why are the seats broken? Why do we not have enough chairs in the classroom?”
Wilson thinks constantly about the conditions at their current school. Lincoln Prep is Kansas City’s oldest public high school and the city’s first high school for Black students.
It’s often ranked as one of the best in Missouri, but the building doesn’t reflect that distinction. Students have tried to improve the place by painting the walls or creating makeshift study spaces.
“It’s almost like having your first apartment and you try to make the best out of what you have,” Principal Shanelle Smith said. “Despite the aged linoleum, the peeling paint, I think the kids are making the best out of what we have.”
Wilson travels around the region for speech and debate tournaments, and they can tell the difference between KCPS buildings and the other schools they visit.
“They don't have the problems that we do. They have beautiful furniture that's adjustable for the student. They have new furniture, new buildings. They have murals on the walls,” Wilson said. “It's sort of disheartening, but it was always seen as something that was accepted, to me.”
Wilson wants high schoolers to know what their individual school would gain from the bond. Lincoln Prep would receive $28.3 million to renovate classrooms, athletic facilities and bathrooms, and replace deteriorating classroom “pods.”
Dr. Jennifer Collier, the district superintendent, said when announcing the bond vote that building conditions directly affect a student's ability to perform well in school.
But beyond that, it also sends “unintentional messages” to children that impact the way they view themselves.
“We want to eliminate that. We want to level the playing field,” Collier said. “We want our kids to know they're important, they're worthy, and they have the same kind of spaces and learning environments as other children that they're interfacing with each and every day.”
Before the bond was announced, Wilson said that students accepted their circumstance because they’re an inner city school, and perceived that they would always have less money and worse buildings than their suburban counterparts.
But now, Wilson said that Kansas City students are starting to believe that they have another option. Wilson thinks it’s time for the community to make things right and fix what’s been broken all this time.
“The idea that we would leave Kansas City Public Schools to be the same idea that people had in their mind 30 years ago with desegregation, it just seems unfair,” Wilson said. “It seems like a failure of our city if we can't bring our schools along on that ride towards a bigger, better, more awesome Kansas City that I'm seeing everywhere.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported by Jodi Fortino and produced and mixed by Mackenzie Martin, with editing by Gabe Rosenberg and Madeline Fox.
