Hickman Mills superintendent leaving to lead Lee’s Summit schools

The Lee’s Summit school district announced Monday that it has hired a new superintendent: Dennis Carpenter, the current superintendent of Hickman Mills schools.

Carpenter’s new office is only 10 miles from his current one, but he will be stepping into a very different job. Eighty percent of Hickman Mills students are African-American; all receive free or reduced-price lunches. Lee’s Summit students, by contrast, are predominantly white and college-bound; only about one in five kids receives free or reduced-price lunches.

At a Hickman Mills school board meeting in November, Carpenter gave a presentation that, in light of Monday’s announcement, now seems like a farewell.

Carpenter spoke for about an hour in response to the release of performance review data from the state. Hickman Mills showed progress from 2015 but still posted a lower score than Kansas City, Missouri, Public Schools.

Carpenter argued that testing was more or less a shaming device. He said he no longer believed that urban educators could lift their students through hard work alone. Teachers at places like Hickman Mills, he said, have too little control over their students’ lives to turn them into high achievers. He quoted passages from the book 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools and cited statistics showing the disparities between what poor and wealthy families spend on lessons and other enrichment activities.

Carpenter suggested that critics of public schools who play down the role of class and racial stratification in K-12 education are kidding themselves. “We resegregated the schools after Brown vs. the Board of Education, that’s what we did,” he said.

In addition to the frustrations of urban education, Carpenter leaves behind a district with a reputation for dysfunctional governance.

A 2014 state audit found that the Hickman Mills school district had awarded no-bid contracts, was lax in monitoring spending and had violated the Sunshine Law. The auditor’s office had to issue subpoenas to one former board member in order to locate some of the contracts.

Of course, the Lee’s Summit school district is no stranger to controversy, either. But compared to the challenges of running Hickman Mills schools, Carpenter may feel he’s reached another world.