MISSOURI WATCH: AND THE BAD (DESEG) NEWS IS...

Every week seems to bring news of further closure of the two school integration cases that have brought educational and financial turmoil to Missouri since 1980. Under the thumb of federal courts in St. Louis and Kansas City, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has labored to meet the legally mandated changes that would transform the two largest school districts in the state to a unitary status, i.e., to an integrated system.

The cost to the taxpayers of Missouri has been, to put it mildly, astronomical, with per-student expenditures in the Kansas City district reaching the highest level in the United States. Through the past fiscal year, Missourians have invested $2.6 billion to meet the demands of a series of federal judges who sought to desegregate districts that, until 1954, were constitutionally separate, but hardly equal.

The most recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which serves to rein in what many Missourians consider to be exorbitant demands to advance the unitary status of the Kansas City district, seemed to move Missouri a step nearer to final closure on a 14-year journey that at times seemed to more closely resemble Alice in Wonderland than racial/academic logic. State leaders hailed the court's abandonment of earlier district court mandates that, at various times, seemed not only beyond the bounds of reason but patently unfair to 540 other school districts across Missouri.

An even more recent tentative agreement between the state and Kansas City school officials, extending to 1999 provided additional evidence that unitary status was closer at hand than had previously been thought. The Kansas City deal is expected to have an as yet unknown impact on the longer St. Louis case, which has shown signs of winding down even as the state's financial input has remained at near-record levels.

All of this is good news, yet despite the signals of impending closure, there remains a question that has yet to be addressed by the state and, to a lesser degree, by the affected districts in the two urban areas. That imponderable at this point may be even more critical to the future of Missouri than the date and details of final agreements.

To put it simply, Missouri must come to grips with what kind of educational opportunities will be available to more than 60,000 children in the state's two largest metropolitan areas after integration orders are recorded in the courts' archives.

Unless there is a cloistered think-tank that has been considering this eventuality for the past decade and a half, there seems to be little activity in Jefferson City or within the two school districts to resolve this all-important question. To complicate matters further, since the remedies ordered by two separate court jurisdictions were different, there appears to be little likelihood that remedies proposed in St. Louis will fit the problem in Kansas City. Even if the remedies could be identical, the two areas have internal conditions that make similar solutions all but impossible.

The first desegregation plan, originating in St. Louis, ordered compliance with Brown v. Topeka primarily through busing inner-city students to presumably better equipped and staffed districts in St. Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson counties. Although some magnet schools have been built, at enormously high costs in St. Louis city, the major emphasis was on transporting thousands of students to outlying districts.

This was initially viewed as both a traditional and logical solution to integration, with the added advantage of providing schools in the three-county area with additional operating and capital bonuses from Jefferson City. When new buildings were required in these areas to accommodate the newly arrived students, the state paid the bill, and school boards applauded and welcomed the extra cash. A second result was more devastating: inner-city schools were viewed as inferior and with a declining tax base were subjected to less financial support from St. Louis residents.

The end result was a long string of closed schools, impacting greatly on the quality of life in urban neighborhoods, not to mention a loss of appreciation for education by those who remained in smaller, sparsely supported city classrooms. Virtually everyone agrees this has been the denouement of the St. Louis effort to achieve unitary status.

As noted, the Kansas City district offers a different challenge, one that is of equal importance to the one on the eastern side of Missouri. In the Kansas City desegregation effort, the use of busing to enhance educational opportunity was not available since outlying districts were relieved of pre-1954 culpability by the federal court, thus eliminating them from mandated solutions. The only seemingly viable option was a massive capital building program that would entice outlying district students, most of whom are white, to the core city classrooms. Even when this plan was obviously failing, the federal courts undertook no remedies, except perhaps to increase their demands for still more state funds. By 1991, this policy was bringing more state money into Kansas City than was being delivered to St. Louis, and this pattern continues to date.

When the court eventually orders an end to all of these inequities, there is little evidence to support the contention that all segregation will have ended. Indeed, the educational conditions, as well as their opportunities, may well be worse than 1981, even 1954.

This is the challenge that should now face Missouri's elected officials, as well as those who direct the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. It would be nothing short of criminal to resume an educational system in 1999 or 2000 that was, in virtually every detail, inferior to the ones in existence two decades earlier.

Even though they had no choice but to comply with solutions that were neither equitable nor in many cases workable, Missourians have an even greater stake in providing acceptable educational opportunities to thousands of young urban boys and girls whose futures depend not on federal court remedies but superior classroom instruction and equipment.

~Jack Stapleton is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.