ChiefsPlanet - News KC closing half its schools--wow

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KC closing half its schools--wow (https://chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=224707)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dartgod (Post 6596239)

So they were supposed to spend more money on the schools?

The city should have managed it's funds better.

Quote:

Originally Posted by billay (Post 6596267)

The city should have managed it's funds better.

The city and the school district are two different entities even though they share the trait of incompetence.

Quote:

Originally Posted by billay (Post 6596267)

The city should have managed it's funds better.

I assume you mean the school district. You know, the ones who mismanaged billions of dollars since the mid 80's?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dartgod (Post 6596304)

I assume you mean the school district. You know, the ones who mismanaged billions of dollars since the mid 80's?

Yes the school distrct but also the city as well. It's done a poor job at investing in it's infrastructure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by billay (Post 6596309)

Yes the school distrct but also the city as well. It's done a poor job at investing in it's infrastructure.

So what was funny about the time you criticized the city for it's involvement in the P&L while the school district was crumbling, again?

Quote:

Originally Posted by patteeu (Post 6596330)

So what was funny about the time you criticized the city for it's involvement in the P&L while the school district was crumbling, again?

Really? Ths isn't hard to figure out at all.

The city is falling apart instead of fixing communities they build a new bar distrct (even though it wasn't needed) to attract douchebags and lose money when they could have spent that money to fix communities around Kansas City. If the community is broken how is the school going to succeed?

Quote:

Originally Posted by patteeu (Post 6596303)

The city and the school district are two different entities even though they share the trait of incompetence.

Totally, Lmao

Quote:

Originally Posted by Donger (Post 6595241)

So, back in the 80s, they were able to afford the best teachers? If that is the case, what happened?

From the article that NewPhin linked:

Quote:

Before the desegregation plan, the KCMSD could always argue that for more than 30 years it had not had the money to offer high enough salaries to attract a first-class teaching staff. But even after the desegregation money started rolling in, the district still didn't do anything to upgrade instructional personnel. It was less traumatic to concentrate on what Benson called the "easy expensive" things (new buildings, new equipment, busing plans) than to tackle the "difficult inexpensive" things that really make a difference in children's lives--appointing qualified principals, supervising instructional practices, developing a curriculum, providing incentives, hiring good teachers, and firing bad ones.

The result, education activist and gadfly Clinton Adams maintained, was that 50 percent or more of the teachers in the district were "not focused, rather vacuous, totally devoid of intellectual capacity, ill suited for the mission at hand."Benson, more tactful, argued that only 20 percent of the teachers were "totally incompetent" and that another 20 percent could be brought up to speed with retraining.

The biggest problem faced by KCMSD superintendents was that they didn't have a free hand when it came to personnel decisions. In Kansas City the two largest employers of middle-class blacks were the post office and the school district. Just the rumor of a dismissal sent tremors through the entire black community--there was no other place to go; the community needed the jobs. At the same time, school district employees were the mainstay of the black churches. (Kansas City mayor Emanuel Cleaver, a Methodist minister, had 200 teachers in his parish.)The black preachers closely monitored the district's hiring and promotion practices, with the result that the district essentially couldn't fire anyone.

Since it could do nothing about inadequate teachers, the district sidestepped the matter by simply raising everyone's (including cafeteria workers' and janitors') salary 40 percent.But that didn't so much attract better teachers as convince poor teachers to stick with the district as long as they could because they were getting salaries they couldn't get anywhere else.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

Good thing Congress bailed out the banks... and not the public education system... you know... the future of America? Yeah, **** them. Go banks!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Valiant (Post 6594948)

Sorry those idiots need to get over it.. The schools were half capacity of what they were built for. They need to be consolidated and should have been before the money issue..

And I would still feel the same if it were my old HS..

This!

My old High School (Hickman Mills) had this happen to them this year. There is no way in the private sector it would have taken this long for these changes to occur. The KCMO district had no other options and like Valiant said these schools were already and 1/2 capacity and were already running which is a problem to begin with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by billay (Post 6596335)

The P&L advocates would argue that they're investing in the city to bring commerce and residents back to the city core, thereby reversing trends that have contributed to the decay of the school district (by dropping enrollment and reducing the tax base, for example).

Sorry, I don't see much connection between your P&L criticism and the problems of the school district. Not enough to make your referenced posts "the funny thing about this" in any event.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KC Fish (Post 6595235)

Yeah...

Then it makes sense to shut them down and consolidate.

If they shut down all the schools, think of how much money they could save then.

Hell, I was thinking we could just wall off the whole of kansas city area. Build bridges on 71 highway and bump the speed up to about 125 mph. Of course there would be a little knook cut out for Arrowhead stadium, but we could leave the Royals in there. Then all our problems would be out of sight and out of mind. All we have to do is throw a few can goods, basketballs, and lil wayne cds over the wall every once in a while and they wouldn't even know the difference.

I do like lil Wayne..