Future focus: You can help shape Kansas City schools' vision toward 2030

The Kansas City Public Schools’ Blueprint 2030 aims to reshape the educational landscape for everyone, including these children in LINC’s program at KCPS’s Border Star Montessori School.

We’re all in this together.

So goes the message as the Kansas City Public Schools gathers its community to reimagine the educational landscape over the next 10 years.

The system needs to evolve.

A year-long effort the district has named Blueprint 2030 is examining not just the district itself, but dynamics of its city, including the growing reach of the public charter schools that share the city’s and the state’s educational resources.

Simply put, they want to hear from you — be you parents, students, staff, civic leaders, concerned neighbors, business owners or invested partners like LINC, which operates the before- and after-school programming at all of the district elementary schools and one charter school.

“KCPS is embarking upon an engagement process that will capture how we approach the future of schools in our school district and community,” reads the introduction to the project on the Blueprint 2030 web page. “This process of engaging our school district and community will be an opportunity to gather voices and participate in conversations that are important to the future of our schools.”

By this fall the district wants community-driven recommendations that will maximize resources, improve efficiencies and enhance the educational experience and outcomes of all children.

Parent surveys are under way. You can answer a survey here.

The district is taking volunteers to join focus groups here.

The district is forming an advisory group, and you can ask to join or recommend someone by emailing the district here.

There’s a lot to talk about:

From Blueprint 2030

Where to begin?

The district prepared for this year-long project by conducting a far-ranging system analysis in 2018 and 2019.

The 110-page report unpacked the strengths and the strains on a public school system in the KCPS boundaries with an enrollment of 26,707 that is slowly rising again after decades of decline hit a low point in 2014.

KCPS still enrolls most of the students in its district, now holding steady at about 14,000 students. Charter schools continue to grow, now enrolling more than 12,500 students.

The system analysis sets up many of the issues Kansas City is facing in the new decade.

The entire public school system still loses students to other communities or to private schools as 12th grade enrollment is 47% less than kindergarten enrollment.

Buildings are underutilized, especially among high schools where 13 of the 15 public high schools — district and charter — fall below the standard high school enrollment of 700 to 1,200 students.

Compared to similarly sized school districts, both KCPS and the charter schools pay significantly higher costs per student on administration, buildings and transportation as buses from different schools pass each other traversing the city’s neighborhoods.

The costs take away from the resources schools put into classroom instruction. It strains the academic success of a district that has been improving but is still provisionally accredited.

Though 68% of the system’s public school students attended a choice school — meaning a district signature school or a charter school — only 48 percent of them chose a school that outperformed what would be their home school.

Want more issues? KCPS is coping with a 40.9% mobility rate that charts students moving in and out of classrooms, often because of housing stress and homelessness. District schools and charter schools are becoming more racially and economically segregated.

Time for change

Now comes the opportunity, the district says, “to help shape and refine our plans for the future . . . Blueprint 2030 will define how KCPS should serve students in the future and the system-level changes we need to take to get there.”

SchoolSmartKC has awarded $155,000 to the district to help cover the costs of two consultants working with the district. Hanover Research is leading the market studies that are exploring the enrollment decisions Kansas City families make. Mass Insight Education and Research is helping in the system analysis.

By April, the district plans to pull together the information and ideas it has gathered and shape it into goals for the next decade.

By the end of summer the district wants to be able to present scenarios and strategies to reach those goals.

And this fall come recommendations on how to make it all happen.