A Sad State of Affairs: Ignoring Kansas City Public Schools Is Bad Economic Development Policy
It is 10pm.
Do you know where your Kansas City Public Schools’ administrative staff is at?
Well…they’re probably reviewing tax incentive applications and preparing to wage battles for their tax dollars without holding any real power.
Kansas City does a lot of things well. It does a lot of thing badly.
But in my opinion, one of the city’s most glaring black eyes is the near constant disregard for Kansas City Public Schools, Center School District, and Hickman Mills School District.
Under the current system, tax incentives both for physical development (aka new buildings) and luring new companies to town often take from or do not have to pay tax dollars to all of our taxing jurisdictions to subsidize private investment.
Sometimes tax incentives are good. Kansas Citians rejected a cap on tax incentives in a recent election. People aren’t dumb. They know they are necessary, especially in the urban core.
And sometimes, the application of tax incentives is misguided.
But one thing that is indisputable is that their use in Kansas City, Missouri disproportionately affects schools districts with majority Black and brown students.
I mean look at this! While I believe KCPS got adjusted down to $1,000/student, how ridiculous is this entire chart?
Of the school districts where the majority of the district is within KCMO boundaries, Center has 70% African American students, Hickman Mills has 69% African American and 15% Hispanic students, and Kansas City Public Schools District demographics include 57% Black, 28% Hispanic. (Grandview only has a sliver of land located in KCMO but is still not a great situation).
And these school districts rank 1, 2, and 3 in abatement per student.
That means the school districts, without a vote, give up that amount of $$$$$ to make economic development happen.
These economic and racial inequities have prompted calls for reform only to be met with a mixture of stiff resistance, apathy, and filibustering by business interests and people.
Many of these interests do not have children in KCPS, Center, and Hickman Mills. They live in parts of town that are treated much more fairly by the tax incentive process, have the means to send their kids to private schools, or live in Kansas where tax incentives are often dealt with in collaboration with the school district.
Since it often doesn’t affect their own kids, the process currently benefits their interests, and policy change is hard there is little to no movement to figure out a way to change it.
This reality along with a healthy dose of systemic racism affecting urban core districts has led to a fragmented and weakened public education system.
But aside from the disparities being flat out morally wrong, the business community in stalling incentive reform is stunting our best economic development tool: strong, well funded public schools.
You don’t have to go far to see where strong, well funded schools help economic development.
We constantly hear from the northland councilpeople about how “a majority of economic development is going on in the northland.” There is a strong argument to be made that that is driven by the school systems.
The same goes for Johnson County where the schools are often touted as “the differentiator.” It can be argued that the threats from Topeka to school funding helped flip Johnson County blue.
It might help that the school district staffs aren’t constantly fighting political battles with development attorneys.
When you dive deeper though, economic development aims to increase economic production and hopefully raise wages, quality of life, etc.
Investments in education have constantly demonstrated a Return On Investment for the community at large. (God I hate that I’m saying that but we have to communicate in terms they understand.)
And yet Kansas City’s business and political community continues to ignore the pleas from our urban core public school systems for a more equitable economic development policy!
Can our elected officials and the business community actually support holistic economic development when they continue to divest from one of the key economic development strategies?
I’d argue no.
We need serious course corrections and it starts with good faith and expedited reform changes among all parties.
Tax incentives aren’t all bad and if you actually pay attention the school districts agree with that statement too.
But when one economic development tool undercuts another, you’re missing the mark. And when that affects close to twenty thousand students and their future, it’s even worse.
Everyone! Dispatches From Waldo is nominated for a Pitch Award for best local blog. Please take a minute to vote for me. I’d appreciate it!
As always, if you’d like to subscribe to more analyses, hot takes, and amateur citizen reporting about Kansas City, Missouri politics and other musings please consider subscribing.