A QUARTER-MILLION IN KC?

Watching developments in the Kansas City school system just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

For a few months now Missouri taxpayers have been breathing somewhat easier after the courts struck down the long-term desegregation plan in that city, which has cost the state's taxpayers over $1 billion. Unfortunately, all that money hasn't solved very many problems.

Now, without huge sums of money flowing from the state treasury, the Kansas City district is looking for a new superintendent. The district goes through superintendents like a hot knife through butter. A full semester would be a long tenure for recent occupants of that position.

The search for a superintendent has been littered with miscues and backfires. One candidate turned down the job because his name was made public. Either he was too insecure in his current position -- in Little Rock -- or he didn't want anyone to know who the Kansas City superintendent was even if he took the job.

The most recent development, however, is about money. Lots of money. The superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district in North Carolina turned down a $250,000 package -- that's right, a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total is significantly higher than the $180,000 received by the former superintendent who was fired last April.

The staggering sum was shocking to a lot of folks in the Kansas City district, which takes in only a portion of the city's aging core area. There are some 37,000 students.

It was so staggering, if fact, that even the vocal president of the Kansas City teachers union who once led a strike in defiance of state law expressed his dismay.

The district is laying off hundreds of teachers and other staff members in the wake of the elimination of state funding for desegregation program. While Kansas City needs a good superintendent to get through what promises to be some tough years, it also needs to restore some sanity to the district, particularly in the area of fiscal responsibility.