... WHAT ABOUT THOSE PHONES?

Anyone who wonders why taxpayers are so angry about Missouri's funding of the Kansas City School District need only consider the latest example of the bureaucratic garbage dump the district has become.

Throughout the years that Missouri taxpayers have been soaked for the failure called desegregation in Kansas City, there have been reports and then more reports about how the money has been squandered.

Take the report this week of the unregulated use of some 100 cellular phones by district personnel.

Not only did no one know who was using the telephones -- or why, there was absolutely no attempt to decipher monthly bills to see if calls were related to official district business.

Give board member Ed Newsome some credit for raising the issue several months ago. The response? Nothing, until The Kansas City Star starting telling readers what was going on. Now the cellular phones have been recalled in an attempt to figure out this mess.

Monthly bills were running above $100 in several cases and three times that amount in some instances. One question is why secretaries who never left their offices were using cellular phones. Other questions stemmed from late-night and out-of-district phone calls.

Even the cellular phones -- one in a car and another to carry around -- assigned to the former superintendent, who was officially on sick leave starting last December but who in reality had been fired, continued to produce monthly bills. But records were so vague that officials couldn't even determine if the phones has been given to someone else.

Bottom line: the district couldn't say for sure how many cellular phones it was paying for, much less who was supposed to be using them or for what purposes.

"We should have had much better control," said board member Newsome.

Kansas City school officials continue to argue that the district can't survive without massive state funding for the indefinite future. At some point, some state official responsible for authorizing checks, like the governor or the commissioner of elementary and secondary education, is going to need the grit to withhold all payments until some satisfactory answers are supplied about accountability. Or maybe some federal judge with sufficient judicial fortitude could make the long overdue decision to derail the gravy train that Missourians have been sending to Kansas City like clockwork.