What’s Wrong With the KC School District? This.

Taxpayers, like students, deserve consideration.

Taxpayers, like students, deserve consideration.

With aftershocks still rumbling from the Great Jackson County Appraisal Quake of ’19, we should pause to compile a damage report.

The bungled attempt by the assessor’s office to correct structural deficiencies in the county’s appraisal processes generated lots of heat, especially from property owners tagged with valuation increases of 200 percent, 300 percent—even more. But it didn’t shed much light on how the leadership of taxing authorities here values the dollars of constituents.

The bulk of almost any homeowner’s tax bill every year finances public school systems. For those lucky enough to live within in the Kansas City School District boundaries, that means roughly 60 percent of your tax burden will fund that long-underperforming enterprise.

So it was instructive this fall to track the profiles in courage of school boards for the 12 districts that operate in the county. Of those, six districts showed at least a modicum of respect for their residents by scaling back the mill levies upon which a property tax bill is based. Lower levies, higher valuations, minimal impact. The math is pretty simple.

Hats off, then, to the Center School District, which rolled back its levy by an impressive 19.84 percent, the largest among the six districts that cut their rates. Hickman Mills (down 14.94 percent), Grandview (down 11.40 percent) and Lee’s Summit (down 11.14 percent) also had the guts to produce double-digit rollbacks. Blue Springs, Independence and Grain Valley reined in their rates, but in single-digit levels.

Which brings us to the other six. And there, you really have to hand it to the Kansas City school board. Never a group to rush into a hasty decision, get the policy right and do the morally correct thing, the board decided to leave its levy intact. Instead, it would simply sit on its hands and reap the windfall of higher valuations.

How big a windfall? The district’s financial people had projected that the higher valuations would produce a 17 percent increase in local property tax revenues. (Hat tip: County Appraiser Gail Beatty.) Turns out, though, that the 17 percent bump wasn’t quite accurate. The final number-crunching put the increase more than a third higher, 23 percent.

That pile of money was just too good to resist, too big to consider doing the right thing. Taxpayers be damned. It’s for the children,
don’t you know.

Fort Osage, Lone Jack, Raytown and Oak Grove adopted the Kansas City strategy: Hold the levy intact, keep the extra cash, and blame it all on the assessor’s office. But “Gosh, our hands are tied on this” loses some of its debate-point luster when you compare that response to those of the six districts that cut their levies.

One might forgive that approach in suburban districts that produce, for the most part, functioning graduates. For the Kansas City district, though, the gutlessness falls in between outrageous and unconscionable.

For years, the district has told us it is laboring mightily to produce a product that would be the equal of private schools in the Kansas City area. While the academic deliverables still have jusssst a little bit further to go on that score, the KCSD stood toe-to-toe last year with private schools in one important respect: Per-pupil spending. The district proudly touts its $14,853 cost per head for its 15,568 students.

By comparison, that figure, understated in that it includes elementary school students, is $353 more than Rockhurst High School’s tab this school year—a sum that includes buffet-style cafeteria selections for lunch and a $200 technology fee.

And what do the good taxpayers of the district get in exchange for their “investment”? Let’s see. The average ACT score at Rockhurst last year was 26.9. Too bad they weren’t charging a little more to keep up with the public schools, because the average score for students in the Kansas City district was … wait for it … 16.2. More than TEN points lower.

The ACT average in Johnson County’s Blue Valley district public schools, by the way, was 25.4. Per-pupil cost: $10,399. So once again, we’ve conclusively established that more money is the only thing holding back improved public-school student performance in public schools.

None of this should come as news to anyone paying attention to school district leadership over the past, oh, 50 years. But, hey: Rest assured, KCSD residents. The district has your back—and its fingerprints all over the knife therein.

Your money is going to a good cause. It’s for the children, after all.