Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas had just listened to several area school district superintendents share their pains as they sat with him around the table at LINC’s Feb. 24 commission meeting.

Absenteeism. Families suffering mental stress. So many troubled children.

“It’s really easy to be pessimistic,” Lucas said when he took up the microphone.

The tension of the city’s 2026-2027 budgeting process and the struggle to provide housing and services has weighed over him, he said, knowing that “what’s keeping me up at night is a lot of what’s keeping you up at night.”

There were many challenges the mayor was about to describe before the commission meeting audience at the Kauffman Foundation Conference Center.

But first he wanted to recount a moment of enthusiasm — a story that his audience that was rife with educators would understand — as a reminder why civil servants, LINC and the school districts take on this hard work.

He’d just left the stage of one of those difficult public hearings on the budget when the first people to approach him were a group of Ruskin High School students — “Thespians!” they called themselves, joyfully taking the moment to promote to their mayor their upcoming school play, all acted, directed and fully prepared, from the stage set designs to the wardrobes and the publicity, by the students themselves.

“We have that story in every school in Kansas City,” Lucas said. “The reason we do this work,” he said to LINC’s team and superintendents and school administrators who strive so students can have such experiences, “is because we get to lift up opportunities and ultimately change lives.”

The road ahead, though, is hard, he said.

“As we see fewer and fewer federal and state resources, as it gets harder to access those resources . . .  we see us needing to step up,” he said. “We see us needing to fill more gaps than we did perhaps in the past. I hope it is not that way forever, but that is the reality we face now.”

A lot of attention with the budget will continue to focus on public safety and the police department, Lucas said, but he emphasized his office’s priorities of providing better housing and giving families and neighborhoods support to have stability, free of the crippling consequences of evictions and transience.

Lucas also noted the challenges need a regional approach, calling on city and state governments on both sides of the state line to work together to weave plans and share tax burdens in improving public transportation, housing and health care.

“To me it’s not a battle,” he said. “It’s a collaboration.”

One of the school superintendents listening to the mayor’s remarks was Hickman Mills’s Dennis Carpenter. And Lucas shared a memory from when Lucas was a new City Council member more than 10 years ago. Carpenter, who then was in his first tenure as Hickman Mills superintendent, came before the City Council with a plea.

“This superintendent, this grown man, had to come to the city,” Lucas said, “to say to someone . . . ‘Somebody think about my kids. Somebody think about my students.'”

That persistent voice from schools, neighborhoods and LINC is needed just as much today, Lucas said.

“I ask all of you,” he said. “Keep having those uncomfortable conversations. Keep sharing with us what we need to do. Keep inviting us and letting us see the talents that you all have, the needs that exist in our community and where we can help.”

That’s the path, he said, that can actually lead to “some real, systemic solution.”

“But sometimes that scares people,” he said. “When we try to do those things, we always look forward to your partnership.”