Unchartered Waters
The boundaries of 230 sector — the Kansas City Police Department area bordered by 63rd Street, Bannister, Paseo and State Line — are Sergeant Jerry Wagoner’s beat. He’s patrolled 230’s turf for the past ten of his 28 years on the force.
“I’ve gotten offers to go to different sections,” Wagoner says, “but I have always declined. I have a certain personal preference because it’s my old neighborhood.”
When something bad happens in Brookside or Waldo, Wagoner answers the call — just as he did one afternoon in November when he was cruising through the intersection of 63rd Street and Brookside Boulevard.
“I had just driven past there, and I was at [63rd and] Troost,” Wagoner says. “I hadn’t seen anything when I went by, but by the time I got back, there was obviously a large disturbance.”
Two officers already were on the scene when Wagoner, the sergeant in charge, arrived. It was shortly after 3 p.m., just about the time students from the newly opened Southwest Charter School were making their way home on foot and by Kansas City Transit Authority bus.
Around thirty of the middle school’s students were throwing punches, yelling and jumping off of buses. More officers converged on the scene, but the melee escalated.
“The majority of the crowd did disperse, and the fight was broken up,” Wagoner says, “but there was still a lot of screaming and yelling, and we couldn’t get them to leave. Both male and female students kept arguing and trying to get the crowd to come back and start fighting.”
Finally, one of the officers reached for his belt. He pulled out a canister of pepper spray.
“There were several students who refused to back away,” Wagoner says. “A basic statement was made for them to leave, and some of the students stood there yelling certain expletives. Because of the potential for violence, the pepper spray was sprayed into the air. Nobody was directly sprayed.”
But Francis Ford Crow, a Southwest Charter School seventh-grader in the crowd, says some of the burning mist landed in students’ eyes. (Another witness says the cops aimed the spray directly at the students.) Some of them went into the Mr. Goodcents Subs & Pasta shop, a popular after-school hangout, to flush their eyes with water.
The cops took two Southwest Charter students — a boy and a girl, both age 14 — to the KCPD’s juvenile unit downtown and cited them for creating a public disturbance and refusing to obey police orders. The rumble, in which no injuries were reported, allegedly stemmed from several female students’ dating the same male students.
“It doesn’t surprise me what they were fighting about,” Francis says. “Being at Southwest is a violent experience, not a learning experience. It’s a hypocrisy.”
Last summer, Southwest Charter School made a controversial move into the old Southwest High School building at 6512 Wornall Road after completing its first year with 160 students in the cramped and windowless basement of Temple B’Nai Jehudah on East 69th Street.
From the outset, the Kansas City, Missouri, School District — deemed inferior by charter school organizers seeking to reform public education — bristled at allowing Southwest to open in a vacant building that carried the legacy of the once-proud Southwest High School. School district officials wanted to use the four-story building for other purposes. Negotiations for acquiring the old Southwest High property grew melodramatic last March, when Southwest Charter students staged a protest hoping to convince the KCMSD board to reverse a tie vote that denied the school access to bigger and better digs. Two months later, the Kansas City school board, in a legally questionable 5-4 vote, approved a month-to-month lease for the charter. District officials later claimed that they might have erred by approving the lease with only five votes instead of six.
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When Southwest staff members went to the school in June, their keys wouldn’t open the doors. District officials had failed to notify the charter personnel they were holding the wrong keys — and at the time, KCMSD board members were considering a state statute that would void the lease agreement.
Another 5-4 vote on August 10 spurred the resignation of a KCMSD board member. At first, Fifi Wiedeman, who is white, hadn’t been in favor of the charter school because she feared that charter organizers were attempting to revive “that all-white, privileged school” that Southwest High School had been before the ’70s and the onset of desegregation. But during the school’s battle to get into the Southwest building, Wiedeman was impressed by the charter’s can-do attitude and the fact that 70 percent of the school’s population was nonwhite, indicating the school wanted to address the needs of a demographic lacking educational options. Wiedeman threw her support to the school, but the board continued bickering over the lease. She ended up criticizing the board for trying to deny “a quality education” to the white kids in the neighborhood who might have wanted to attend the school. After Wiedeman made her remarks, board members Lee Barnes Jr. and Elma Warrick, who are black, stormed out of the meeting. Minutes after the meeting, Wiedeman resigned.
The board’s decision to approve the lease stood, and Southwest Charter School opened on August 23.
In the school’s new location, aspirations were high. Enrollment jumped to more than 500 students in grades six through nine (and a half-dozen tenth-graders). Southwest drew its population from 112 local and out-of-state schools, including Central Middle School of Edmond, Oklahoma, where Francis Crow completed the sixth grade last spring.
Southwest Charter’s population — which helped Kansas City’s seventeen charter schools make a 30 percent jump in enrollment to 5,600 over the past year — comes from a diverse pool of students. “We’ve got students who are in the 99th percentile to ones in the 5th, from well-to-do and traditional families to poor or those living with grandparents,” says the charter school’s board president, Jim Lloyd. “There is a strong demand for alternatives, not just from families who might be picky about schools, like those in the southwest corridor, but those who want options from everywhere.”
Promoting itself as a healthy alternative to public, parochial and private schools, Southwest offers a nontraditional project-based learning curriculum — students work in teams to complete a variety of projects (such as drawing a city or making a model of a shipwreck) designed to let them incorporate basic skills along the way. The school also emphasizes moral values in its code of conduct. Its mission is “to create a learning community of students, parents, outstanding teachers and staff, and committed adults from the neighborhood and throughout the city that will provide each student with an academically challenging curriculum and the support necessary to reach his or her highest individual potential — intellectually, socially, emotionally and physically.”
But two weeks into the school’s second semester, Southwest Charter still struggles with what might be termed the “three Ds” of modern education: discipline, drugs and direction. The school’s own annual report noted that its student body suffered from a “not-cool-to-study disease” and that changes needed to be made in 2000-2001.
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Margaret Crow, Francis’ mother, enrolled her son in Southwest Charter because she was wary of Kansas City district schools. A divorced mother of two, Crow moved back to her home state in August after leaving Oklahoma.
“My family knew we were coming back, and they knew he needed a nontraditional school. The move up here was quick, and we didn’t have a good chance to apply for private school,” says Crow, who heard about the school through word of mouth. “I was really excited about it.” She thought the school’s project-based approach would keep Francis challenged.
“He has the potential to be a straight-A student, but after the divorce, his grades started slipping,” Crow says. “He’s a free thinker and very individualized. I looked into sending him to a military school, someplace structured and with good academics, but a military school is not for him.”
Francis relishes talking about politics and his hobbies. A punk music fan, he laughs at the irony of songs like Anti-Flag’s “Captain Anarchy.” “I think it’s funny because you can’t have a captain of anarchy,” he says. “A captain is part of a system of government, and true anarchy is about not having any organization. That’s like me saying I’m the president of my anarchy club.”
One night recently, Francis stayed up late to make a wallet out of duct tape. He designed it using th Pythagorean theorem to make sure he was folding the tape with the correct right angles. “It came out well,” Francis says. “It’s got seams, pockets for credit cards and a cigarette case so that cigarettes won’t get smashed. I’m more into things like physics and kinetics. I don’t like dealing with live things like in biology.”
Less than two months into his first semester at Southwest, Francis struggled to fit in. He endured constant harassment and often was chased home or punched and kicked by gangs of fellow students. He argued with administrators. He lost interest in his classes because he was unfamiliar with the project-based method of learning. He saw classmates in the bathroom shooting dice for points and the right to “be with” certain girls. He noticed his fellow students’ interest in drugs.
The cumulative effect of all the distractions, Crow says, nudged Francis into trouble. Her son was suspended four times in the first semester — for yelling in the cafeteria (two weeks); for fighting in the gym (three days); for possession of a cigarette (ten days); and for missing detention (one day). Suspensions were nothing new to Francis — he was suspended twice in the sixth grade at his last school. But for some reason, Southwest Charter School seemed to bring out the worst — not the best — in Francis, who spikes his discussions of philosophy and politics with four-letter words. When discussing his part in the altercations with other students, Francis explains that he doesn’t like to hit back because he is a pacifist. “When someone hits you and you’re not looking, it’s a cowardly act,” Francis says. “I’ve taken a year and a half of kung fu, and I could kick their asses if I wanted to.”
Toward the end of his first semester, Francis begged his mother to allow him the privilege of packing some sort of protection.
“He asked me if he could take Mace to school. I said no. He wanted to take a stun gun. I said no.”
Then Francis suggested taking a pocketful of pennies and an extra sock. His mother said no. She didn’t think a present-day version of a medieval flailing weapon would do the trick. Instead, Margaret Crow took a desperate measure. She gave her son permission to shoot his attackers — with a disposable camera.
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“I told him to take it: ‘It’s your weapon.'” And for all practical purposes, it worked.
“It got to the point where they would see him reach into his pocket and they would turn and start walking away,” Crow says. “We just wanted to get pictures of their faces and their names later, but they caught on to it.”
Melvin Lee Wilson, a sales clerk at Mr. Goodcents, says Southwest Charter School students have been warned about rude behavior. “They know they will get kicked out after that happens. We don’t mind if they sit down and eat or just come to sit down and talk. They are just kids, you know. I can say this: For the past month, we haven’t had to do that.”
A trio of well-behaved Southwest girls hanging out at Mr. Goodcents speaks to the Pitch on the condition of anonymity.
“I think the way they promote the school is good, but the way they treat us is not the way to do it,” says the first girl, an eighth-grader. “They say we are going to have the best learning experience, but it’s not. We’re doing stuff we’ve already learned.”
The second girl, a ninth-grader, says she thinks the teachers “don’t know what they are doing.” She and the other students agree the project-based learning system frustrates and confuses them.
The third girl, who is in the eighth grade, blames the school’s suspension policy for having an adverse effect on student morale. “They will give you ten days for rolling your eyes at a teacher and one day for skipping class. That’s not right.”
Moments later, Francis Crow shows up. He’s being taunted by several black students who are calling him a racist. After his tormentors leave, Francis goes outside to meet a friend but returns by himself, saying one of the boys has just punched him in the jaw. It’s January 9, and Francis is counting the days until the end of the school year.
“When I got suspended for screaming at my friend in the cafeteria, I needed counseling,” Francis says. “People rarely hear me talk in class. The best way to rebel at that school is not to talk, especially to the administration. They will twist your words. They take ‘dammit’ as a threat.”
In its chapter titled “Educational Goals and Objectives,” Southwest’s charter — the school’s constitution — makes several references to character and self-esteem building. “Each student will master each year a developmentally appropriate guidance and counseling curriculum that assists his or her growth in and understanding of positive character formation, self-esteem, respect of self and others, personal responsibility and self-direction, conflict resolution, participatory governance in the school, time management and study skills, productive attitudes toward work and achievement, career exploration, college preparation and other topics related to the mission statement, educational philosophy and educational goals of the school.”
The person responsible for attaining those goals is principal Tracye Bruno. She obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of Kansas in 1995. For her thesis, she created her own charter school on paper. “It helped me when I was looking for jobs at charter schools,” she says. “And when I was thinking of some things I wanted to do for this school, I went back to my thesis. I remember this school in Jefferson County, Colorado, where they have innovative schools. It was in my thesis, and I went back to that. When I came to Kansas City, had I not done the thesis, I wouldn’t have known about charter schools.”
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Bruno first began thinking about alternative methods of education when she attended Topeka West High School. She describes herself as a “rowdy” student who found little challenge in traditional classwork. Part of her dream was to have a career in education and toss tradition out the window. For four years, she worked as an assistant principal at Blue Valley Middle School and Center Middle School before moving to Southwest Charter, where she’s getting a chance to put her KU thesis to the test.
“You have to put out fires every day, and it’s more challenging than a public school,” she says. “Any time you start a school from scratch, from birth, that requires a lot of trial and error. It’s a tough job, but I love it.”
The 32-year-old Bruno, who earns an annual salary of $75,000, is a striking presence. In college, while attending the University of Nevada-Reno as a freshman, she was a swimmer who went to the Division I finals. Bruno now stays in shape by teaching aerobics and kick-boxing — at Center Middle School, she tutored her students on the finer points of jabbing and punching.
“People underestimate her because she’s pretty,” says Southwest Charter School board member Ruth Fritts, “but she has the gift to educate. The school is her life.”
The school’s most tangible signs of achievement since opening are the first-year results of its state test (the MAP) and a national standardized test (the Stanford Nine). Three local charter schools, including Southwest, notched MAP scores higher than those of the Kansas City school district, but Southwest trailed the state of Missouri in three of the four categories listed, according to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On the Stanford Nine last spring, Southwest improved its scores from the previous fall. Bruno says the scores reflect her students’ ability to persevere under adverse conditions.
“There’s hurdles when you create a start-up school, but we have a solid background,” Bruno says. “We are just continuing our focus from last year.”
Francis Crow has spent plenty of time in Bruno’s office. On one trip there to talk about an impending suspension, Francis told her the school was an example of “parasitic socialism.”
Former Southwest eighth-grade teacher Josh Harden overheard the conversation. He’d had Francis in class during a period of the day known as “enrichment class,” in which students concentrate on basic skills or bettering skills they already have.
“Francis and I hit it off,” Harden says. “I don’t know if it was the craziness of the school, but it was easy to realize this kid is very intelligent. But I know Francis can get worked up. When I heard him say that the school is ‘parasitic socialism,’ [I knew] he’s a man after my own heart.” Francis says the term “describes people who live off of other people to live. It’s like people who insult you to get their popularity; that’s how they thrive.”
Harden says Francis, like other students, resisted an environment ill-equipped to handle the diversity of its student body — kids with criminal histories, kids with drug problems, kids with learning disorders, kids from abusive homes and kids who, for the most part, could benefit from a more structured and regimented learning program.
“Francis feels victimized,” Harden says. “I was in the front office when Francis had one of his explosions, and he would yell and walk out of the front office, which is bad. Don’t think Francis didn’t deserve to get suspended. But I think if the school wasn’t run in a state of chaos, things would be a lot better. I think if Francis goes to a good school, he will be a doctor or an author. If he’s left in that school, he will become a very good criminal.”
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Harden says the high number of suspensions, disciplinary problems, frustrations with the project-based learning concept and a shortage of financial and educational resources are hurting the school. “Teaching there is a nightmare. The open rumor was they refused to expel certain students with flagrant discipline problems because there was a financial price on their head. You can suspend a kid, but after a while, you can lose your state and federal funding. A person doesn’t get into education because it’s easy — but it would be nice to have supplies. The school hardly has any educational resources — running out of paper so you can’t make copies.”
Harden and other teachers have contributed to the school’s high teacher-turnover rate — according to board president Jim Lloyd, only six out of the first year’s twelve teachers came back for the second year. The school, in its first annual accountability report and financial review, says the exiles are “generally due to weak hires.”
After one semester, Harden quit his $26,000-a-year position and moved to Colorado with Renee Kammeier, who also had been a Southwest teacher.
“I’m not saying this about all charter schools, but the project-based learning is just a very sort of hip term in education,” Harden says in retrospect. “Lee’s Summit and places with tons of resources, where you can have lots of projects and computers and funding, can do that. But that’s part of the fraud of Southwest — there is not real project learning going on. We are getting kids at an academic remedial level who were the scraps of the KCMO school district, which hasn’t been educating kids for millions of years. It was a good selling point, but students need to learn how to read, write and do math first.”
Josh Harden’s opinions of Southwest Charter School mirror those of Washburn University education and school law professor Daniel Harden — his father. The elder Harden, who taught more than a half dozen of the charter school’s teachers (his son among them), visited for part of a day with Bruno (also a former Washburn undergrad but not one of Daniel Harden’s students), faculty and students earlier in the year.
“It seemed to me they had a good-quality faculty and they were young with a good deal of idealism and wanting to do something,” Daniel Harden says. “I believe in charter schools, and I believe in more alternative education. But I believe Southwest is working at a real disadvantage. They came up with a charter that meets progressive assumptions … but they do not need a lot of progressive [teaching methods]. They need a content-rich curriculum that’s structured and presented in an exciting way. These kids need to learn stuff. For the particular population and demographic that they are trying to reach, these kids [need to] be in command of more facts than they are.”
Harden says Southwest’s charter places too much emphasis on such goals as building self-esteem. “Progressive schools emphasize process instead of content, where a school is all about being supportive. I’m not against the self-esteem stuff, but we have developed a cult of self-esteem. The blind emphasis on self-esteem as a kind of cure-all has been very destructive.”
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The younger Harden says Bruno has difficulty living up to the lofty tenets of the school’s charter.
“I was given a book by Tracye Bruno about today’s paradigm of leadership and how the school was going to be run by consensus. People were going to work democratically and as a team. As things started to erupt, things were thrown quietly out of the window. Then the teachers realized there was this communication break-off. For a while, Tracye Bruno and [assistant principal] Rie Clark weren’t seen that much. It was like they were hiding out because things were not going as planned.”
And things didn’t go as expected when Bruno led the Pitch on a tour of the school two weeks ago. After one of the morning “enrichment” classes, school security guard Charles Banks apprehended two male students in the hall nearby, handcuffing one and body-pressing the other against a wall. Banks sifted through the second boy’s pockets and emptied the contents on the floor — a hair pick, some dollar bills and pocket change.
Bruno reluctantly agreed to interrupt the tour to let the Pitch check out the incident, saying, “You’re just looking for the negative, aren’t you?” Banks said he had caught the boys trying to run away. He had found them carrying ammunition — BB pellets — and was certain there must have been a gun somewhere nearby.
Bruno downplayed the situation. She and assistant principal Clark touted the school’s discipline record. “I think everyone is concerned about discpline everywhere,” says Clark. “You are going to have your share of discipline problems in middle school, and we’re taking proactive steps to address these problems. We utilize a program called B.I.S.T. [Behavior Intervention Strategy Team]. It’s unique in that it’s not punitive and it works on relationship building among students and faculty and addressing the issue behind what’s causing the behavior rather than punishing kids for the behavior. It lets you get to the root of it.”
When it comes to discipline problems, Bruno says, Southwest Charter School is “no different than any other public school.”
But wasn’t the point of starting a charter school to be different?
Lois McGee sends her son, Connor (not their real names), to Southwest Charter because she believes that “when there is a discipline problem, they are not namby-pamby about it.” She also says Southwest’s project-based learning curriculum can improve her son’s academic potential. She says Connor is a “master of evading schoolwork” and his test scores weren’t good enough to get him into Lincoln College Prep.
McGee says one of Connor’s first projects became a tip-off that he wasn’t grasping his schoolwork. After Connor’s team completed a scale-model design of Kansas City’s past, present and future, the mother — who has some design experience — noticed that the project fell short of the assignment’s requirements.
“They put it on display in the hall, and it wasn’t well-drawn to scale,” McGee says. “Even though they give them time to work on it in class, it’s too vast. Maybe they should have smaller, less-encompassing projects. We’re setting them up for failure, and no one wants them to fail.”
But Connor also has a serious marijuana habit, something McGee didn’t know until he transferred to Southwest.
“It might be part his fault, but things are overwhelming at Southwest,” she says, “and I don’t know if Connor needs to be in a more defined program.”
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One morning before she took Connor to school last semester, McGee caught him with a joint. She took it away from him and dropped him off at school anyway. Within an hour, McGee received a call from the school. Connor was lit. “I was glad he was kicked out,” she says. “That’s what should be done. He’s a very sweet child, but he’s been given entirely too much freedom. I take responsibility.”
At the time McGee talked with the Pitch, Connor was on a lengthy suspension for getting high.
“I’m totally naive when it comes to the drug culture, but Southwest is known as a drug school,” says McGee (who needs an explanation of the term “reefer” during her interview with the Pitch). “A year ago we found out Connor was doing things, and it came up in the spring, but the drug culture is such a lying culture, and they lie extremely well.”
Bruno will not discuss the number of times the school has suspended students for incidents involving drugs. “Drugs are a concern everywhere,” says assistant principal Clark. “It’s a concern here and at all middle schools and high schools. Unfortunately, we live in a society where kids have access and money. Bringing drugs to school is a violation of the Missouri State Schools Act.”
“There is one student who is a drug dealer, but he never gets caught. They don’t bother him,” says Francis Crow.
Warren Deval Boyington, a seventh-grader, says he sees evidence of drugs before and after school. “It does go on, but I don’t come to school for that. I come to learn.”
Since January 3, when classes started up again after the holiday break, Officer Wagoner says the police haven’t received any calls involving students from Southwest Charter School.
After the November melee, Wagoner says, the school’s board, along with parents, police and owners of nearby businesses, met to discuss ways to curb the school’s perceived appetite for trouble. Over the following weeks, police and neighborhood activist organizations, such as D.A.R.E., the Police Athletic League, the Community Action Team and the Community Action Network, made Southwest Charter a priority. “We are working with the community and school to get the problems solved. The majority of the students are there and they want to be,” Wagoner says. “But some students are not interested in education, and those are the ones we are trying to deal with through other means.”
And, Wagoner says, the old Southwest High School generated many more 911 calls than the new charter school has. (When Southwest High School was closed after the 1997-’98 school year as part of the district’s move to combat falling enrollment, 465 students had been registered there in the fall.)
All may be quiet for now, but Southwest Charter faces other uncertainties. Charter schools are financed by a combination of state and federal funds and sometimes by seed money from for-profit management companies. Southwest’s parent company, Boston-based Beacon Management Inc. (which has 28 school-management contracts in five states and operates three St. Louis charter schools), acts as a consultant and investor. But newspapers in other states have reported speculation that the 9-year-old company, which grants schools start-up loans, wants to position itself as a hands-on administrator. Beacon is required by law to allow the schools’ local nonprofit boards to make most major decisions about their curricula, budgets and administrations. Charter schools have an all-too-serious possibility of losing their tax-exempt status and federal funding if, for example, their for-profit parent companies wield too much control or undermine the educational process by cutting corners for the almighty dollar.
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“Charter schools are in their infancy level, and we want to make sure everything is on track,” says Beacon’s marketing director, Carol Wing. “The way that Beacon complies [with the law] is that we are a service provider. The board is the governing body, and we are the service arm, if you will.” Wing says Southwest’s board makes its own decisions, although Beacon will step in from time to time to make suggestions.
Beacon’s role is not necessarily for profit, Wing says, though the company’s fee for managing Southwest’s second year is $326,361. That figure, combined with the first year’s fee, makes the school in debt to Beacon for more than a half million dollars. The most recent budget shows Southwest Charter School expecting to finish in the black by $15,521 by the end of its current fiscal year. But Sherron Bauer, a former Kansas City school district administrator who now works as Beacon’s associate director of school operations in Missouri, says the budget is being revised and will be presented to Southwest’s board at its next meeting later this month.
“We have all new textbooks and all new materials, and I’ve had complete autonomy to use what was budgeted for staff development and classroom supplies,” Bruno says. “I’ve felt like it’s been Christmas. I’ve gotten things that I like, and my teachers have gotten things they like.”
But as it stands, a number of major concerns — including whether Southwest can retain residence in its current location and whether the school can make good on a promise to hold summer school (the school has yet to announce the specifics of its summer-school program) — could darken Bauer’s mood. Without a summer program, the school could lose substantial revenue — summer school is projected to bring in $338,031.
And because of the school’s chilly relationship with the Kansas City school district, which is charging Southwest $172,870 this year to rent the old Southwest building, Southwest may be looking for its third home in three years come summer — a financially dismal prospect, considering that Beacon invested $300,000 in restoring the building. “I’m sure the question will arise before long as to whether the district will let us continue to the use the building,” Bauer says. “But that’s between the Southwest board and the district.”
Neither has agreed on much. And without the school district’s largesse, Southwest could be out of luck. “The pickin’s were pretty slim,” Bauer recalls of the school’s last search for a home. “We didn’t get into the building until late last summer and we had looked at some commercial buildings that I can’t even remember. But I think there were two or three commercial buildings that were an option.”
The bad blood between Southwest Charter School and the KCMSD is spilling into more than the building issue. Southwest board president Lloyd says the district can’t cope with competition. “I think the school district and people who don’t like competition in the area have long claimed charter schools are a mechanism for skimming the best students out of public schools,” Lloyd says. “We’ve shown that lots of people want choices — the ones doing well and the ones not doing well. They want a better school.
“Various people on the [Kansas City] school board have said they don’t want us to be there, but we think we’ve earned the right to be there,” Lloyd continues. “If [the school board] wants us out, they have to vote to kick us out.”
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That vote might be coming.
Later this month, the Kansas City school board’s three-member executive committee is scheduled to discuss whether its lease with Southwest Charter is worth keeping. “I’m not that presumptuous to say whether the board will not continue the lease agreement,” says board president and committee member Helen Ragsdale. “That school, before it became Southwest charter, was for the KCMO school district. We have some equipment over there for the science program, and we had hoped to use the school for administrative [purposes] — not a charter school.”
Ragsdale is joined on the committee by board vice president Patricia Kurtz and treasurer Lee Barnes Jr. Barnes says he’s opposed to the charter school’s staying at Southwest.
Says Southwest’s Lloyd: “The confidence in public schools in Kansas City is so low, with a couple of exceptions. You need good schools in the city. The district won’t admit this, but there have been improvements in some of their schools because of the charter challenge.”
Ragsdale disagrees. “This continues to cause dissention. There is not a charter school in this district that’s successful. Ask them what their baselines are for their test scores. They have nothing to compare their tests with,” says Ragsdale, noting that it takes three years to establish a school’s baseline scores on the state’s MAP test. “This is a contentious situation for me, but they aren’t doing anything to the KCMO district.”
“There’s no doubt they have challenges,” says former board member Wiedeman, “but a lot depends on how the parents deal with it. Are they going to complain and leave or are they going to stay and build it? That’s what I hope for Southwest. I’m hoping for the best every day.”
The Charter’s January 17 board meeting indicates the people running Southwest had better worry about their own district before worrying about Kansas City’s. At the meeting, the earnest intentions of the fourteen members were overshadowed by their own disorganization and evasiveness.
Bruno got the meeting off to a rickety start by explaining that her 32-page report had a problem — some of the sheets were upside down and out of order because she’d dropped it on the floor while making copies. The sorry condition of Bruno’s homework wasn’t a good sign.
For more than a half hour, the meeting’s “special focus” was on library development. Jane Elliot Jones, a library consultant, presented a laborious itemization of her “wish list” for Southwest, which has yet to include the library in its school budget: furniture ($25,634); technology equipment other than computers ($3,240); operation ($42,044); nonprint materials ($5,678); and print materials ($142,125) for a total of $218,721.
At the bottom of her report, Jones wrote, “The plan can be adjusted, but this is what I think we need to submit to donors. I was told to plan disregarding costs.”
The youngest attendee at the meeting, seventh-grader Lloyd Murray, questioned the rationale of Jones’ budget and her emphasis on equipping the school with a technologically advanced library. One of her selling points was to get students using the educational Web site bigchalk.com, but for weeks Southwest had been without Internet or e-mail service because its provider went out of business. Murray’s young voice pleaded to Jones: “I think what the library needs are books. Lots of books. Why not more books?”
Perhaps Southwest Charter School could take a page from Murray’s book on how to be straightforward. Assistant principal Clark, a teacher during Southwest’s first year, gave a brief update on the effectiveness of the school’s discipline policies. When another board member asked Clark to elaborate, she continued her spiel that problems were minimal. Yet, due to problems with school suspensions, Southwest was considering in-school and after-school suspensions and revisiting its commitment to the B.I.S.T. model of discipline. (“It’s like we are evaluating ourselves, looking at things that are working and not working,” Bruno tells the Pitch later; Officer Wagoner says the police department’s new acronym with regard to Southwest is a four-step crime-prevention method called S.A.R.A. — Scanning Assessing Response Analysis.) And starting on January 22, Southwest would impose a uniform policy, much to the consternation of students and parents who might have been better prepared for such a change at the start of the year. In fact, Bruno didn’t reveal the school-issued “spirit wear” or logo shirts to the entire board until this meeting.
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Clark told a questioner that abrupt changes in school policies were part of the beauty of Southwest. “Welcome to charter world!” she chirped.
After members skipped a planned vote on the school’s revised budget (it won’t be ready for prime time until the February 21 board session), the meeting ended with a vote that named Ruth Fritts, an active parent and the school’s Web designer, and Joan Caulfield, a Rockhurst University professor and the founding principal of Lincoln College Prep, to the board.
The next day, Fritts stands in front of the bulletproof window at the police department’s Metro Patrol Division station, near 63rd and Euclid streets, filing a police report on the apparent theft of her purse. Over the past weekend, someone has used her credit card to buy women’s athletic shoes, men’s clothes and gas. Fritts tells the officer at the counter she doesn’t know when she last had her purse. But she reports two possible scenarios — including leaving it somewhere at Southwest Charter.
Fritts says she doesn’t want to implicate any students in the theft. Southwest has been answering her prayers for a place where her seventh-grade daughter, Katie, can excel in and out of the classroom.
“We are happy,” says Fritts, a former math teacher and computer programmer. “It’s a very good school for a whole lot of people. If I think Southwest is the right place for someone’s child, I recommend it. [And] I will tell a parent if I don’t think it’s right for them. But I totally believe in the school.”
Margaret Crow once believed in Southwest Charter School. On January 22, the day the school initiates the uniform policy, she escorts her son, Francis, to campus. He is out of uniform, however, opting instead to wear a gray pullover shirt and a pair of green, baggy shorts with paint smeared on them. Francis swears he will never put on the required khaki pants and collared shirt. He’s right. This marks his last day on Southwest grounds. His mother withdraws him from school. (It’s not the first time Crow has seen a relative leave Southwest: Her oldest brother dropped out of the old Southwest High School about 25 years ago. “It was so dangerous back then,” she says. “He quit school, and my mother had to find him another school. How’s that for deja vu?”)
“I’m going to home-school him until we can get in a private school,” Crow says of Francis. “As a divorced mother of two, I couldn’t afford it when I got here, and the waiting lists are incredible. I will have to borrow money to send him to a private school, but in the best interest of the child, isn’t it worth it? I feel disappointed, but I also feel sad. A lot of people had their hopes up. It was supposed to be a whole new thing.”
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Instead, it was charter world.
