KCFreePress.com

When it comes to revitalizing Kansas City, Mayor Mark Funkhouser says it’s all about the dots.


As of late the mayor has been fond of referring his audiences to a series of four maps with blue and red dots of various sizes which tell the story of the depletion of the city’s once densely populated urban core as people fled for the suburbs starting in the 1970s.

At the annual mayor’s forum at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church on Sunday, Funkhouser unveiled his administration’s latest initiative to turn the tide of the dots around: a five-part program dubbed “Schools First” in which city service departments would work to prioritize neighborhoods with schools, and city funds would be used to improve infrastructure around the facilities.

“Schools are the anchors about which we can begin to reverse this tide and build neighborhoods,” Funkhouser said.

The program would reach out to public, private and parochial institutions in hopes of making Kansas City a more attractive home for the families of the city’s 75,000 school-aged children. The vision, Funkhouser said, is to create a city where kids can walk to class each day. This means cleaning up the neighborhoods around the schools — fixing sidewalks, clearing out overgrown weeds, picking up trash — so that students, and their parents, will feel that the streets are safe.

While several people in the audience commended the mayor for his proposal, some questioned whether its tactics would measurably improve the schools' performance, which they said would provide real incentive for middle class families to stay in the city.

During a question and answer session following the mayor’s formal remarks, Richard Tolbert, a trustee at Metropolitan Community College, asked if taking a “broken windows theory” approach to reform would address the underlying classroom discipline issues he sees as the core problem with city schools. Tolbert, who attended Center High School, said he didn’t think fixing up the neighborhoods surrounding schools would do much to improve the quality of education inside them.

“The surrounding neighborhood probably looks a little better now than it did when I graduated (from Center) in 1962 — and in 1962 the Kansas City School District was a well-regarded school district,” Tolbert said. “I think this is an example of what you see so often: people are looking for quick and easy solutions to complex problems. You can waste a lot of time and energy, not to mention money, going down a false trail.”

Kyleen Carroll, a former teacher at Kansas City Middle School of the Arts who is running for a seat on the Kansas City School Board in April’s election, said she thought Funkhouser’s proposal had merit, but that she would wait until she saw more details to fully weigh in.

“Every bit that you improve the outside of the school improves a child’s mentality about how they can do inside the school,” Carroll said. “It helps make the kids feel safe. I’m definitely happy to see that he’s looking at this, but I still want to see the details in a 5 to 10 year strategic plan about how this is going to be implemented.”

Funkhouser said during his speech that he would be working with stakeholders throughout the city — school administrators, community groups, and law enforcement agencies among them — to begin filling out details of the plan.

“Schools First” is the fourth major initiative aimed at rebuilding Kansas City’s urban core the mayor has launched since he took office in 2007.

“We have vacant schools, and we have vacant churches,” Funkhouser said. “And we’re going to keep having more if we don’t stop hemorrhaging people."

• Comment
• Blog / Link
  • Grab the link

    Copy and paste the link:

  • Blog about it

    Blog about this page.

  • Close
• Share |