Taylor Made
On the first day of school this year, newly appointed Kansas City school district Superintendent Dr. Bernard Taylor visited Delano Alternative School near Linwood and Indiana streets. He spotted a young girl moving slowly with the aid of a walker. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “Your shoe is untied.” Then he knelt and tied it.
A photographer waved away onlookers and framed the scene. Kansas City Star reporter DeAnn Smith turned and said to no one in particular, “OK, that right there illustrates the difference between him and [Benjamin] Demps.”
At the district’s offices three days earlier, Smith would have seen an even better example of Taylor’s contrast with the previous superintendent. Taylor had given the central-office staffers a pep talk in the auditorium at 1211 McGee. “We are going to be a customer service center,” he told them.
Then he turned to face school board member Duane Kelly, one of five board members who had voted in an allegedly illegal meeting to fire his predecessor. “Mr. Kelly and his colleagues are my primary customer. Keeping the customer happy is extremely important.”
Laughter erupted throughout the auditorium. Everybody knew that the relationship between the board and Demps had been far from happy.
Two months into the school year, Taylor is riding a wave of enthusiasm, just as Demps was when he arrived — before his struggle to wrestle control from the school board turned bitter and earned him an early exit. With Demps out of the picture, the board didn’t go through the formality of a national search for a new superintendent. Taylor wasn’t even interviewed for the job. Over the past five months, the Pitch has pieced together a behind-the-scenes account of how the Kansas City school board found its man.
During his first week on the job, in early August 1999, Benjamin Demps quizzed his staff about the condition of the district. There weren’t enough teachers to fill all the classrooms, they told him. He was dumbfounded.
“What are we doing about this?” he asked.
They stared at him blankly.
He created a “war room.” Demps hired a consultant from Oklahoma, Jack Goddard, for advice on organizing the human resources department; Goddard wound up becoming Demps’ chief of staff.
Demps also brought in Cynthia Clegg, a professional with whom he’d worked at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, to run the human resources department. She arrived to a horrific mess. “There were piles of papers on every damn surface in that place,” she remembers.
The chaos trickled down to the children of Kansas City. Staffers who’d been around for years told Clegg of teachers sneaking into the file room to purge their own disciplinary documents — in some cases, teachers slated for firing were rehired.
It took months to bring order. But solutions to the teacher shortage were immediate. Clegg came up with creative ideas, such as figuring out a way for teachers who had retired from surrounding districts to work in Kansas City without losing their benefits. By the beginning of the school year, the number of teacher vacancies in the district was down to its lowest point in years.
This was exactly what the federal court had wanted when it proposed Demps for the job. A fierce bureaucrat, Demps had been a top administrator in the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981, when air-traffic controllers went on strike and President Ronald Reagan directed one of the toughest union-busting actions of the last fifty years. “This district needs to be run as a business,” said Judge Dean Whipple, who oversees the district’s desegregation case, on the day Demps signed his contract. (Demps did not return phone calls from the Pitch.)
But the court shared blame for the shambles in the central office. As a defendant in the nation’s longest-running desegregation case, the district had to obtain approval from the court-appointed Desegregation Monitoring Committee for virtually every move it made. In the years prior to Demps’ arrival, this committee had recommended that dozens of top administrators be removed because it believed the workers were unqualified. (In one case, the man responsible for the district’s professional development program had no training in that area — he had been a choir director.) The DMC also set arbitrary hiring requirements — such as standards on how low teachers’ undergraduate grade-point averages could be — and slowed teacher recruitment by scrutinizing each new hire. Amid a national teacher shortage, other districts snatched teachers out of Kansas City.
The school board hadn’t wanted to hire Demps. Whipple had rejected all the candidates the board had put forward, replacing them with four candidates approved by the DMC. Demps, who had been recommended by his friend, Whipple’s clerk, was the second-to-last choice on this list.
In the early fall of 1999, crises erupted all around Demps. Paychecks bounced. Demps relieved Chief Financial Officer Bonnie McKelvey of payroll responsibilities and gave them to Clegg. (At one point McKelvey had been an interim co-superintendent of the district.)
A lone contractor ran the district’s communications department, which was responsible for all internal communications, publications and interaction with the community at large. Demps hired another former associate, David Smith, who beefed up the staff. One of Smith’s first duties was to improve the district’s Internet presence. “The Web site was horrible,” Smith recalls, so he had a new one designed.
Worst of all, Demps learned that the district’s curriculum had not been implemented in its classrooms. The curriculum was, and still is, a critical barrier to ending the desegregation case. It was completed in 1996 and thoroughly revised in 1998 as part of a transition plan arising from a tenuous 1997 settlement of the case. Arthur Benson, lawyer for the plaintiff schoolchildren, says curriculum implementation lagged due to inadequate training. “You can’t just put it on teachers’ desks and say, ‘Here, start implementing it.'”
But poor management was also an issue. The district’s fractured chain of command hindered the process. Plus, Benson says, there was a districtwide “lack of will” to implement it.
Demps promoted Cheri Shannon, who had been hired by the district as an instructional director prior to his arrival, to help get the curriculum into classrooms. Reports filed as part of the desegregation case show that Shannon made substantial progress.
A tight team of top administrators formed around Demps, all bound by a common goal of reshaping the district and raising student achievement. His cabinet often met at the 45th Street Coffee Shop for strategy sessions. On Wednesday nights, some of them gathered to watch The West Wing. “We were ready to rock and roll,” says Hal Gardner, Demps’ director of information technology.
From the beginning, however, Demps faced resistance. His first day on the job, some board members had tried to strike language from his contract granting him sole authority to hire and fire principals.
Demps wanted to hold principals accountable for poor student performance. He had little patience for excuses and let it be known that principals would be fired if student achievement didn’t improve.
Many principals, teachers and parents found this approach too dogmatic, arguing that Demps was failing to consider the hardships inner-city kids face every day. “Some people say that’s a soft approach, that you’re making excuses,” says board member Michael Byrd. “But if [support systems] aren’t there, and they aren’t today, then the focus is more on surviving as a family than it is on homework.”
But Demps’ charge was to improve education. “We didn’t care much about the culture of the schools when that culture was damaging to kids,” says Smith. “In this district, too often there is a culture of low expectations.”
Yet even the district’s best principals were put off by Demps’ approach. Audrey Bullard, principal at the successful Chick African Centered Shulé, says morale among principals and teachers hit “a low ebb” during Demps’ tenure.
His strategy pounded a crack into the foundation of the district’s political structure. Principals attain a certain amount of political clout — they’re like minimayors, with constituencies of students, families, teachers and administrative staff. By being a compassionate listener, providing space for community functions and, in some cases, offering job opportunities, Goddard says, a principal can keep his constituents happy. “And that’s a very different skill set than being able to raise achievement level.”
After Demps demoted nine principals in April of this year, for example, scores of students, parents and teachers rose up in protest — even though some of those principals had run schools that would later be declared “academically deficient” by the state.
A dissatisfied school community can turn a board member against a superintendent, as was the case with former board member Michelle Hensley, whose district encompassed her alma mater, Northeast High School.
Hensley’s neighbors complained about how Demps changed Northeast’s boundaries. This, she says, quickened the school’s path to academic deficiency. “If you ship all your mentally retarded kids and all your immigrants who don’t speak English and your kids with a criminal past to one school, that’s going to lower those kids’ test scores,” she says. Demps changed the school’s boundaries, Hensley says, “without consulting the neighborhood or the board member of that district. And Northeast has been around for about 150 years. We take it quite personally when you do things like that.”
Early on, Goddard began calling Demps “The Boss.” Others in the district — even those who had been there long before his arrival — followed suit. Where there was any doubt about who was in charge, Demps moved to squash it.
His first major power move involved the district’s top in-house attorney, Kathy Walter-Mack.
Originally from Chicago, Walter-Mack had begun working with the district in 1991 when she took a job as executive director of the Desegregation Monitoring Committee. Those were the desegregation case’s golden years, when more than a billion dollars flowed into the district for spectacular new schools and educational programs that were to be the envy of the richest suburban districts. She left in 1995 for a stint with Sam’s Town, directing the casino’s efforts to comply with city-mandated quotas for contracting with minority- and woman-owned businesses. Two years later she returned to the district and eventually became its general counsel. (Though Walter-Mack spoke with the Pitch at length on several occasions, she refused to be quoted for this story.)
As general counsel, Walter-Mack handled the district’s liability issues, which, with nearly 30,000 students, are substantial. This required her to be in continuous contact with principals and administrators. She also provided legal services to the board and was the point of contact for all matters regarding the desegregation case. She was in charge of presenting nearly every action the district took — from new hires to educational initiatives — to the DMC.
It didn’t take long for Demps to grow concerned about Walter-Mack’s ties to the school board and the community at large. This was partly due to Judge Whipple’s warning about the board’s “bad history of meddling in administrative matters and micromanagement … particularly in personnel and contract manners.” And Clegg tells the Pitch she had been contacted by several board members — president Helen Ragsdale, Elma Warrick and Lee Barnes Jr. — about personnel matters. Barnes says his calls were to inform Clegg about teachers he had met who had recently moved to Kansas City. (Warrick and Ragsdale told the Pitch they did not have time to be interviewed for this story.)
Soon after taking over as the district’s general counsel, Walter-Mack hired Harold Holliday III as staff attorney. Holliday is the son of Harold “Doc” Holliday Jr., who had once been represented by fellow attorney and notorious district meddler Clinton Adams Jr., and Gayle Holliday, a contractor who helps facilitate the school board’s community meetings and has spearheaded an effort to improve the board’s image. (Goddard says Harold Holliday III performed well for the district.)
Walter-Mack also hired board member Elma Warrick’s niece; that occurred within days after the board appointed Warrick to replace Connie Clark, who had resigned over inappropriate use of a district credit card. Warrick’s niece filled a temporary position; when Goddard informed Walter-Mack of the family ties, Walter-Mack said she was unaware of them and promptly fired Warrick’s niece. (Demps himself hired Ragsdale’s daughter, Debbie McGill, as MAP test coordinator.)
Most troublesome to some members of Demps’ team was Walter-Mack’s interaction with Adams. A month before Demps’ arrival, Whipple had hosted a lengthy court discussion of Adams’ interference in district affairs. Newspaper articles cited him as a behind-the-scenes force during the ill-fated tenure of Demps’ predecessor, Henry Williams. Adams had allegedly worked closely with Williams and then-board president Ed Newsome to restructure the administration and muscle friends into jobs. (Adams did not return calls from the Pitch.)
Walter-Mack received many phone calls and visits from Adams. One former staffer recalls hearing his loud, distinctive voice booming through Walter-Mack’s phone “just about every time I stepped into her office.” Goddard remembers that “Kathy and Clinton had an ongoing dialogue. He was in her office a couple times a week. But so were a lot of other community activist people.”
But according to Goddard, Adams was little more than a nuisance. He says there was greater concern about how Walter-Mack used district information. “Really and truly, she was running a large part of the district,” Goddard says. “A lot of everyday decisions, principals were reporting up through her as much as they were through the superintendent…. You had a really confused chain of command.”
Associates of Walter-Mack say this theory is absurd. “The superintendent supervised Kathy Walter-Mack,” says former DMC member Eugene Eubanks, who hired her in 1991. “He could make a decision any time he wanted.”
That’s exactly what Demps did.
Because students continued to score poorly on achievement tests, on October 21, 1999, Missouri’s board of education stripped the district of its accreditation.
District officials jumped into legal action. Demps and the K.C. board directed in-house and outside attorneys to call on the federal court to reverse the state’s actions.
In response, Whipple shocked everyone by declaring on November 17, 1999, without a hearing, that the district was successfully desegregated. He ordered the desegregation case closed. Arthur Benson II, attorney for the plaintiff schoolchildren, sought an appeal.
But first, he offered the district a settlement. Its provisions could have kept Benson involved in district affairs indefinitely.
In mid-December, a flu epidemic spread, and several key administrators fell ill, including Demps, who returned briefly to his home in Oklahoma City. After a week and a half, he left for a holiday vacation in Belgium. While he was gone, negotiations proceeded.
Walter-Mack’s prescribed role was to relay information among the superintendent, the board and the lawyers negotiating the settlement — Benson, Delaney and Taylor Fields of Fields & Brown. Whipple had warned her and other lawyers to keep Demps included in the process. He told them not to hurry the settlement while Demps was out of town.
By January 3, Demps had returned to his office. On January 4, Benson, Delaney and Fields convened at the opposite end of the hallway at 1211 McGee. They wrote an eight-point agreement on a sheet of paper and shook hands. Then they summoned Walter-Mack to deliver the document to the superintendent.
“The sense we had was that she was pleased and we would get the pro forma endorsement of the superintendent,” Benson recalls.
But Goddard says Demps had made it clear to Walter-Mack that he would not accept any agreement that kept Benson involved in the district, and this deal allowed Benson to sue for compliance years into the future.
The three lawyers waited. Perhaps two hours passed before Walter-Mack returned. She looked “ashen,” Benson recalls, as she told them Demps had rejected the deal.
“That settlement was about political accommodation — not necessarily about educational goals,” Goddard says. “What they really wanted to do was maintain the continuity and funding for certain programs, devoting district resources into specific schools regardless of how many kids were in those schools.”
Later that day, Demps met with the board in the conference room adjoining his office on the tenth floor. Without showing a copy of the settlement to the board, Demps recommended against it. Walter-Mack argued that if they didn’t settle, they would fail in their appeal and the case would drag on.
The board went with Demps. Patricia Kurtz, who has served nearly eight years, wanted a no-strings settlement. “I’d been there for the last so-called settlement” in 1996, she says, “and look where we are now. Benson is still around.”
Demps immediately asked Walter-Mack to resign, which she did in writing. Certain members of the board were deeply troubled by this — among them Warrick and Ragsdale. The board ordered Demps to offer her $120,000 in severance pay.
Some observers believe Walter-Mack’s termination was Demps’ retribution for her ties to Clinton Adams.
Adams has a reputation as a braggart, and in the months prior to Walter-Mack’s dismissal, he had told all who would listen of his disdain for Demps’ appointed curriculum director, Cheri Shannon. (His was not a unique opinion. At board meetings, Warrick often asked pointed, critical questions about reports Shannon presented.)
Adams called Shannon so frequently that she kept a log of his contacts as evidence of his badgering. She noted instances in which Adams demanded she hire his friends and made comments such as “We don’t need a white woman teaching our children.”
When the flu epidemic hit the administration, Shannon became so ill that she had to check into a hospital. Sources say Adams bragged that he’d caused her to have a nervous breakdown.
Upon release from medical care, Shannon received a long white box from a florist. She opened it to find dead flowers and a card that read “Wishing you well.” The sender had crossed out the name of the florist with a thick black marker. Goddard says he held the card up to a light and determined that the florist was the same one Adams had used months earlier when he had sent Shannon fresh flowers as a show of support. Adams has denied responsibility for the incident.
Demps strongly encouraged Shannon to file a restraining order against Adams, sources say, but she didn’t.
Goddard says Walter-Mack’s termination was not, however, in retaliation for Adams’ shenanigans.
Demps had a tactical reason for getting rid of Walter-Mack, one that ultimately became a key factor in his own downfall. “He did a good job of cutting out people who would infiltrate the district and try to influence the superintendent,” says one parent who is actively involved in the district. “But he didn’t stop there. He went after the board.”
Within a month, Demps replaced Walter-Mack with a young attorney named Lisa Weatherspoon. “Lisa never had any doubt that she reported to the superintendent and not to the board,” says Goddard.
This caused a major rift between Demps and the board, and not simply because it cut off opportunities for meddling. Under state law, the board is the actual legal entity of the district and is therefore entitled to the full services of the district’s general counsel.
Demps used the new arrangement to defy the board’s wishes. Shortly after Walter-Mack left the district, lawyers at Spencer Fane did some research and found that the state had erred when it set the standards by which the district had been deemed unworthy of accreditation. They advised taking legal action in an attempt to buy the district two more years to avoid state takeover.
The board wanted to sue the state. Demps declined.
“We understood that we could, in fact, raise scores,” Goddard says. “We were competitive. And at that point it didn’t make a lot of sense to be suing your partner on down the line. The people who are ultimately going to evaluate your achievement.”
Test scores came in last month. Although they showed improvement, it’s uncertain whether that is enough to allay the threat of state takeover.
Some board members are still unhappy with Demps’ decision. “It was a direct order,” Barnes complains.
Demps was also losing support on the academic front.
Because the board had originally wanted a superintendent with an educational background, Demps had vowed to place a top-caliber educator in the deputy-superintendent position. It took him almost a year to find one.
In March 2000, Demps came up with a short list, which included Bernard Taylor, then principal of a Pittsburgh elementary school that had made a miraculous turnaround in achievement. Goddard pushed for Taylor, saying, “I liked Bernie.” But Demps chose Taylor’s boss in Pittsburgh, Joseph Hines, because of his administrative experience.
Demps had a vision for Hines’ role. “He needed to do the really harsh things around the school management,” says Goddard. That meant taking no excuses for poor performance. It meant firing principals.
One of Hines’ tasks was to oversee the district’s three executive directors, each of whom supervised a long list of schools. Hines brought in Taylor as an executive director to oversee the bulk of the district’s elementary schools.
Demps wanted the executive directors to help Hines make the tough decisions. But most of the executive directors were softer than Demps wanted them to be. “They had a lot of empathy for the schools and principals,” says former communications director Smith. “But we were in a situation where the empathy should have been for the kids and the failing system they were in.”
The feeling within Demps’ inner circle was that Hines was being swept up by the district’s “culture of low expectations.”
Hines had spent less than half a year on the job when Demps asked him to resign, glibly telling the board it was due to philosophical differences. But politics were the primary reason.
“The Boss had the impression [Hines] was building his own constituency,” says a source close to Demps. “His own subkingdom.” Hines met often with a subcommittee of board members, the meetings of which were not announced publicly. “It was an informal subcommittee that consisted of the black members of the school board,” says the source. “He only dealt primarily with Elma Warrick and Lee Barnes.”
“He has no proof of that,” Barnes says. “But what is wrong with a deputy superintendent meeting with or asking questions of two board members?”
Hines also gained popularity among segments of the black community that had come to feel alienated by Demps. Demps saw this as a threat — a notion that repulses Hensley (who is white). “God forbid a black man being involved in the black community in this city,” she says. “Unlike Mr. Demps, who was more involved in the Southwest Corridor than he was in the black community. To me, it’s like he had a real contempt for black people. He had a real contempt for black people who are assertive…. Every time he talked to Elma Warrick he could barely get his teeth ungritted long enough to speak to her.”
The Hines buzz was all over the schools and on the street. In response, the Call wrote an article about him that irked Demps. “It was like a puff piece for Dr. Hines at the expense of the superintendent,” says one source.
The Star began asking questions about Hines, too, some of which were directed at board members such as Warrick and Duane Kelly. They spoke of him enthusiastically, and members of Demps’ staff overheard them. At 1211 McGee, staffers speculated that Hines was angling for the superintendent’s position.
Hines sought to end this chatter, a friend says. He stopped by Demps’ office and reaffirmed his allegiance to the team. Demps told him not to worry. But still feeling uneasy about the political rumblings, he drafted a staff-wide memorandum declaring his support for the superintendent.
“It was too little too late,” says a source close to Demps.
Hines is now in Tucson, Arizona, and declined to comment for this story. But according to Hines’ friend, in early October 2000, Goddard came into Hines’ office to express concerns about his commitment. Taken aback, Hines asked if he was being asked to resign. Goddard said he was. Hines stormed into Demps’ office, where the superintendent confirmed Goddard’s message.
Hines at first agreed to resign but then retained the counsel of Harold “Doc” Holliday Jr., associate of Adams and father of Harold Holliday III, who had since left the district to work for his father’s firm. Under Holliday’s guidance, Hines demanded a settlement package that exceeded Demps’ spending authority (any transaction over $50,000 had to be approved by the board). Demps fashioned a deal, cutting a check for $49,500, authorizing the district to pay Hines’ apartment rent for several months and retaining Hines as a “contractor” so he could draw his $125,000 salary and benefits through the end of the year. “It was a way of letting the man leave with some dignity,” says a source.
Board members who had grown fond of Hines were incensed. They say they were angry to lose Hines’ educational experience. But more than that they were enraged by Demps’ slyness. “When that happened,” says Byrd, “I got a voice-mail message from Mr. Demps saying ‘Mr. Hines is no longer with the district.’ Click.”
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Hines resigned on October 13, 2000, just five days before the board was to assess Demps’ performance before negotiating to renew his contract. Over the ensuing winter months, Demps’ conflict with what was fast becoming a majority of the board members exploded onto the morning papers.
The board cut his spending authority in half. He responded with a letter to court monitor Charles McClain, complaining of micromanagement. The board stripped him of his authority to direct the district’s legal matters. Off went another letter. Negotiations over Demps’ new contract broke down. Finally, in late February of this year, Demps met privately in Jefferson City with state legislators who, in response to the chaos playing out in the papers, were considering an early takeover of the district. “If they are going to do it,” he told a reporter in a break between sessions, “they have to do it now. We can’t put our head in the sand and hope the situation gets better.”
This comment outraged most board members and many of their constituents. “I had people driving by my house asking when was I going to fire this guy,” Hensley says.
Yet Hensley, at an emergency meeting called the next day, helped stave off immediate termination by offering mediation — and a reprimand — as a last-ditch effort. “I tried to keep the district stable,” she says. “I pulled that mediation thing out of my ass. They were going to fire him that night.”
Demps was reluctant to participate. After more than a month of wrangling, however, he acquiesced. A few days before the first session, which was set for April 2, the board met at the Main Street law offices of Blackwell Sanders Peper & Martin to outline its issues with Demps. Nothing on the list of grievances related directly to the education of Kansas City’s children.
Most of the items dealt with Demps’ communication with the board. “Mr. Demps was a constant problem because he never would answer questions,” Hensley says. “I mean we’re trying to do our job, which we’re statutorily required to do by law, and he wouldn’t even answer basic questions. He made my job absolutely impossible to do.”
Byrd says he was frustrated because he learned of Demps’ activities mostly through the media. He recalls showing up for work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and being greeted by colleagues who asked what was going on in the district. Having read the newspaper articles, they knew more than he. “That was distressing,” he says.
There were other concerns as well. Board members wanted to clarify the scope of Demps’ authority and reach a “resolution of disputes and superintendent misconduct.” They wanted him to attend meetings of the board’s executive committee, notify the board on senior-level appointments, communicate in writing with the board on a weekly basis, be more forthcoming concerning plans of action and strategy and “initiate informal contact with board members to solicit information and advice.”
The list picked personal bones as well. Warrick demanded that Demps force Smith to publicly apologize for telling an 89.3 KCUR reporter that the district had become “a boon to the black community,” which didn’t want to lose control of it.
Kurtz, who was openly leery of the integrity of the mediation process, challenged Warrick on this point. “I didn’t hear that radio show,” she told Warrick. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Warrick replied that she could provide a transcript as proof. Ironically, however, Warrick was being criticized for calling state legislators “rural, racist rednecks” during that same broadcast (though, at the time, she was denying that she’d said it).
Nonetheless, considerable progress was made in the first session. Demps agreed to most of the terms — which made some board members suspicious. Demps offered no issues of his own. All he wanted to do was resume negotiations of his contract. Given the trail of screeds he’d fired off to the federal court, it seemed odd that he was suddenly carefree.
“I know when I’m being played,” says Barnes.
The second session, eight days later, began nearly an hour late because Warrick had been delayed by car trouble. While Demps and his lawyer sat in the other room, the board was adding grievances to the list. Some members wanted him to explain his comments in Jefferson City. They asked for clarification of micromanagement complaints he had raised in a letter to McClain.
Then Hensley brought up a personal matter. For weeks she had been furious about the way her brother had been treated by the principal of Wheatley Elementary, which her nephew attended. She claimed that the principal had not allowed her brother to speak at a parent meeting. Prior to mediation, she’d left a long, profanity-laced tirade on a district employee’s voice mail, for which she was chastised on the Star‘s editorial page. In mediation she brought it up again, demanding that Demps force the principal to apologize to her brother and nephew.
The session was scheduled to run until 9 p.m., but Demps didn’t get the list of issues until near the end. Through the mediator, he said he could accept most of the demands and asked if the board could stay late so they could finish negotiations on his contract.
Some board members declined. Byrd tells the Pitch he had family obligations. Warrick said at the time that she had to return to her broken-down car. So they adjourned, scheduling another meeting for April 18.
Two days later, Demps’ lawyers informed the federal court monitor that he was pulling out of mediation. Barnes, Byrd, Hensley, Kelly and Warrick began working behind the scenes to fire him. Demps sensed something was coming. At one point, Goddard told executive directors Debbie Kelly and Taylor that they might be approached to run the district.
Barnes was the first to call them. According to evidence that has emerged as part of an open-meetings lawsuit, Kelly told him she appreciated his consideration, but that she feared, as a single parent, the responsibilities of superintendent would be more than she could handle.
Around the same time, she received a call from Duane Kelly (who is not related to her). They spoke at first about an ecology book Duane Kelly had bought for fellow board members and top administrators to read prior to Earth Day, April 22. Then he asked her if the superintendent position “was something that I would be interested in.” Warrick also queried Kelly about her interest in a promotion. “She talked about my tenure with the district and having a pretty good reputation,” Kelly testified.
On the day that had been scheduled for the third mediation session, Barnes began working the phones. He called Warrick, who, by all accounts, had long since resolved to fire Demps. He also called Byrd, who believed that mediation was going well and clung to hope that Demps would come to his senses and attend mediation. But Byrd wasn’t naïve; he knew chances of this happening were slim.
Barnes and Byrd agreed on the phone that they needed to prepare a response to Demps’ likely absence.
Barnes hung up and called Maurice Watson, a Blackwell Sanders attorney who often represents the board. Though the board was scheduled to meet that night behind closed doors, that meeting had been publicly announced as a mediation session. The board would have to call another meeting if it wanted to fire Demps. A change in action required 24 hours’ notice, but there were provisions to allow an “emergency” or “special” meeting, which could take place immediately following the one scheduled for 5 p.m.
Watson told Barnes that a board majority — five members — would have to request the meeting in written documents submitted to board secretary Trayce Riley.
Barnes got the process rolling on his cell phone. He called Hensley, who remembers the conversation this way: “Lee was like, ‘Well, what’s up?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve already got enough flare from my constituents. I’d already had them chewing me out already for being nice. So I pretty much already know what I’m going to do.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I think I’m going to do the same thing.'”
Barnes called Duane Kelly on “multiple” occasions, according to Kelly. Hensley and Kelly also spoke with one another several times. Hensley and Warrick chatted as well.
And Barnes called Bernard Taylor to determine whether Taylor would like to be superintendent “if the opportunity presented itself.” He remembers that Taylor “said something to the effect of, ‘I work for the school district. Whatever position I’m appointed to, I will do my best.'”
“I just remember there was a lot of conversation back and forth, and the five communicated directly or indirectly and we decided … that we’d need to do something tonight about Mr. Demps,” Kelly says.
Yet none of the five believes the group violated Missouri Sunshine Laws by reaching a quorum by telephone. “You can talk to board members all you want,” Hensley says. “People do that all the time. That’s perfectly legal. And why some people are scrutinizing the school board for that, I don’t understand.”
They chose not to talk to the other four board members until less than an hour before the scheduled mediation, when Barnes called Ragsdale at her home. Kurtz, Al Mauro Sr. and Harriett Plowman received no phone calls, not even from board secretary Riley, even though board policy explicitly states she must inform all board members of upcoming meetings.
Riley testified under oath that the last of the written requests for the special meeting arrived after 4 p.m., and she believed she didn’t have enough time to contact the other board members, whom she assumed were on their way to the offices of Blackwell Sanders.
She did, however, find time to notify the media, sending half a dozen faxes to newspapers and TV stations beginning at 4:13. That suggests she would have had time to notify board members, all of whom live and work well within a 47-minute drive to the Blackwell Sanders office.
Riley arrived late at Blackwell Sanders, carrying copies of the special meeting notice which were intended for the four uninformed board members. But the other board members were eager to begin, so she laid the documents on the conference table in front of her.
Nearly an hour into the meeting, Duane Kelly blurted out a motion to fire Demps. But the motion, under the guidelines of this first meeting, required six votes to pass. Ragsdale, Mauro, Kurtz and Plowman voted against it. The meeting adjourned.
Several board members got up to leave. Kelly bolted from his seat and said, “Wait, we have another meeting!” He grabbed the meeting notices from Riley and passed them out.
The other board members were apoplectic. “This is an illegal meeting!” they shouted. Kurtz threatened to sue. “Go ahead,” Barnes retorted.
He and his four comrades said it was an “emergency” meeting, and therefore they were exempt from 24-hour-notice provisions. “What is the emergency?” Kurtz demanded. No one answered.
Some board members turned to Maurice Watson for advice. He told them the legality of the meeting was “fifty-fifty” or “iffy” — no one is sure of his exact words. (Watson will not comment on the incident.)
Mauro, Plowman, Kurtz and Ragsdale stormed out, saying they didn’t want to break the state Sunshine Law.
Without calling in members of the press, who were staged outside the conference room, Warrick made a motion to go into executive session — even though state law requires such an action to be taken in public session.
The meeting commenced at 6:37. Kelly moved to “notify Superintendent Benjamin Demps that he is relieved of duty, effective immediately, and that he will be paid through June 30, 2001, with full benefits.”
Then Warrick moved that the board “terminate the employment of Jack Goddard effective immediately, [and] that Mr. Goddard be barred from district premises.” Minutes later she proposed the same action for David Smith.
Under the terms of Demps’ contract, the board had authority to hire and fire only the superintendent and the board secretary. But since they’d fired Demps first, this thin majority of the board suddenly had complete control of the district.
The five board members offered no reason for Goddard’s termination other than his closeness to Demps. All who were present say they fired Smith because of the comments he’d made on 89.3. (“That would be an illegal reason,” quips Goddard, citing Smith’s constitutional right to free speech. And after the media released a recording of the broadcast, Warrick was forced to publicly apologize for her “rural, racist rednecks” comment.)
After several tries, one of the board members reached Demps by phone. Another called the district’s head of security and told him to notify Smith and Goddard and to secure the three men’s offices.
Then Kelly moved to appoint Taylor as interim superintendent. The five board members talked for a while before Kelly amended his motion to include Debbie Kelly as “interim cosuperintendent.” They decided to define the scope of the pair’s authority, naming Taylor “chief instructional and educational officer” and Debbie Kelly “chief administrative officer.”
Then Warrick proposed naming Bonnie McKelvey, the accountant who had overseen the payroll department when paychecks bounced, as “chief operating officer.” The other four approved. They closed the meeting at 8:18 and stepped into the hall, where reporters were eager to file the top local story of the year.
The ensuing days were painfully chaotic. On April 19, Judge Whipple reinstated Demps and stripped the board of virtually all of its authority. Board members appealed. Kurtz filed suit against her colleagues, alleging violation of Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Then, on Monday, April 23, Demps and six of his top administrators quit.
The board called another emergency meeting — one that even Kurtz agreed was necessary. The board met in the early afternoon on the tenth floor at 1211 McGee. Six members, Ragsdale now among them, decided that Taylor alone would run the district. He would later sign a contract for $150,000 a year plus benefits. But before calling him in to offer the job, the five board members who had voted to fire Demps and his cabinet discussed who should fill the other empty positions. One of the first people mentioned was Kathy Walter-Mack.
“I thought ‘That’s payback,'” Kurtz remembers.
They proposed that Cheri Shannon’s position be filled by Patricia Rowles, whom sources say was, at least at one point, “very close” to Clinton Adams. They wanted to promote Alonia Norwood, who was second in command in the information technology department, to head that office. And they tapped Brenda Thomas, who had worked with Walter-Mack at Sam’s Town, to move up within the human resources department.
Both Mauro and Plowman complained about these directives. “I even read a statement at the next meeting that I think [Taylor] should pick his own team,” Plowman says.
But the five board members say there was nothing sinister about the choices. “We needed people in those positions, and [our selections] were all next in line,” Byrd explains. All sources familiar with the district, including those close to Demps, say that both Thomas and Norwood are highly capable employees and that progress has not slowed in their respective departments.
Barnes says the five chose Walter-Mack because of her experience and knowledge of the district and the desegregation case. “She’s very good,” he says. “When things come up, she’s right there with answers.”
The board called Taylor into the Blue Room. Kurtz remembers him looking “very submissive.” He asked permission to sit.
Ragsdale offered their recommendations for his cabinet. Taylor readily agreed to all of them except for Rowles, whom he named director of curriculum several weeks later. On June 4, Rowles received a delivery of flowers.
On the first day of classes, after tying a schoolgirl’s shoe, Bernard Taylor was joined at Delano Alternative School by Barnes. Riding together in the district-owned Lexus Taylor drives, the two headed to King Middle School at 42nd and Indiana (on September 17, the state declared the school academically deficient). They toured the building, walking into classes at random. In one room, Taylor tapped a boy’s shoulder and politely asked him to sit up straight.
In another class, the students’ eyes were fixed on Channel One, an ad-heavy, flashy news program beamed into classrooms across the country. The morning’s top story was about Aaliyah, a popular R&B singer who had died in a plane crash the previous weekend. At the end of the report, Taylor strode to the front of the room. “Why is this so sad?” he asked.
The kids sat blinking. Then a few students opened up, offering ideas and a wisecrack or two. Taylor kept asking them questions until a girl in the back said, “I’m thinking, do as much as you can because you never know when it’s your time to go.”
“That’s the point,” Taylor said. “No matter how old you are. What are you all in here? Twelve or thirteen? You can be successful. You can do a lot at twelve or thirteen.”
Taylor is young himself — in his early forties — and has exceeded his own expectations. “I never would have believed I’d be in the position I’m in now,” he says. A little more than a year ago, he was principal of an elementary school in Pittsburgh. Now he’s running a district with nearly 30,000 students and more than 5,000 employees.
His lack of administrative experience concerns several board members and court monitor Charles McClain, who reported to Whipple that Taylor’s responsibilities under Demps had been “minimal.”
But for many — students, parents, teachers, principals and most board members — Taylor has exactly the kind of experience they crave. He’s a teacher. Unlike Demps, he’s quick to step in front of a class for a quick lesson about life. And he’s accessible.
After visiting King Middle School, Barnes and Taylor went on to visit several more buildings. Barnes says Taylor told him about his experiences in Pittsburgh and as an executive director in the Kansas City school district. He talked about programs he thought had been successful, and others he wished would have been better. He has guided similar tours for Kelly and Ragsdale.
“A superintendent wants to put a system in place to bring all factions of the community together, to work together to develop an educational plan,” Barnes says. “The top-down approach I don’t really think works as well as a more inclusive approach.”
Taylor’s first initiative would seem to dovetail perfectly with this philosophy. Dubbed the Entrepreneurial Model Schools Program, it allows school communities to forge their own paths. It proposes to shift a significant amount of authority away from the district’s central office to the schools themselves. To do this, schools will form their own councils which “may freely adopt educational reform strategies and programs.” Schools also will be given more authority over their own budgets. They’ll be able to hire additional staff and buy new books and supplies.
Principals throughout the district are excited about the prospects. Prior to the start of the school year, McCoy Elementary Principal Jo Lynn Nemeth told the Pitch she welcomed the additional freedom. McCoy is among the few overwhelmingly successful Kansas City schools. It was the only school in the Kansas City region to receive a Gold Star award, which the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education hands out each year to fifteen Missouri schools judged to be “outstanding.”
But McCoy has to compete to participate in Taylor’s Entrepreneurial Schools plan. Only ten schools will take part this year, and Nemeth is aiming for one of just five slots — the other five are reserved for the schools the state has recently deemed academically deficient; Central, Northeast and Southeast high schools, and King and Central middle schools are required to participate. Taylor wants them “to have a place at the table,” he says.
One critic of the plan likens it to forcing “a cancer patient to treat himself.” There’s ample evidence to support this opinion. The reports leading to the declarations of academic deficiency are deeply sobering. They are rife with examples of how the schools are failing to educate kids. At Northeast, auditors found “no common building-level purpose and vision regarding student achievement.” At Southeast, they discovered a “lack of parental support and involvement,” and at King, they noted that the “administrative staff does not support or encourage a community of learners that build trust or teamwork.”
Taylor trusts that these schools will figure out how to solve their own problems. “I can’t sit on the tenth floor and say I have all the answers,” he says. “But the answer to what needs to be done may very well be sitting in one of those schools.”
The Pitch spent a month last spring with students in one of those schools, Central High, and found, in the teachers’ resource center, stacks of plans that had been drafted and implemented over the years (“The Scholars of Central High,” June 21). Each was put together in hopes of turning the school around. Some have succeeded in helping portions of the student body — most notably the debate team, an award-winning peer counseling group and an ROTC program that straightens out a few at-risk kids. But overall improvement has been elusive, and sometimes the plans have failed. A much-vaunted “cluster” approach — which set up a team-teaching strategy to guide a group of incoming freshmen through their studies — was set back by an administrative error in which dozens of kids were shuffled to new classes midsemester.
However, Taylor’s plan does seem to meld perfectly with the political landscape of the district. It also offers loopholes wide enough for a healthy patronage system to thrive by allowing schools to recommend the hiring of individuals who “do not possess the necessary certifications for teaching or administrative positions.” It also pours money into the schools — up to $987,953 this year alone — for grants that let the schools negotiate contracts and make service agreements in the community.
Taylor knows it will be a challenge to keep the program pure. “The question is,” he says, “how do you do it with the needs of the student in mind? Now that’s the trick. See, a lot of times, issues are framed around adults.”
On the board, he insists he has what it takes to keep the interests of Kansas City’s children front and center.
“I am my own man,” he says. “I was that before I took this job. I’m gonna be that after I leave. I have to look at myself in the mirror. I don’t need this job. I enjoy what I’m doing. I have a tremendous opportunity and I’m grateful for the experience. But there’s a fundamental truth I also have to keep first and foremost, and there’s no job in the world that’s worth compromising what you value as a person. If it becomes like that, this is equivalent to prostitution and, you know, I don’t think they pay well enough for me to be a prostitute.”
