MISSOURI WATCH: MISSING MMILLENNIUM MOMENTUM

Whether we are prepared for it or not, the new millennium will be upon us far sooner than we have thus far prepared for it. Like a ubiquitous presidential scandal, the start of a new century and a new thousand-year period has been discussed, debated and dissed, sometimes all in the same breath.

By now, Y2K is not only a shopworn subject, its importance to the lives of 5.4 million Missourians has been pretty well aired, even if not startling plans for its inception have been devised. For many, the new millennium will be just another calendar occurrence, or a time for worrying about whether computer bugs will destroy life as we know it, whether banks will inexplicably lose the money in our accounts or whether air travel will collide in one giant explosion at major airports.

There is no end to the silliness of mankind, as witness the media hype that has accompanied the journey form one year to the next, an occasion seen as our personal Armageddon. And if all we really care about is surviving from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, then our state and will have missed a splendid opportunity for religious, economic and social revival.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that officials in Jefferson City have given much, if any, thought to how Missouri can best spend the next century. If you examine the calendar of this year's state Legislature, you will find pretty much the same subjects that dotted last year's agenda -- and unless we begin to move toward some dim light at the end of the tunnel it will stultify any Y2K agenda as well. We don't have much time, nor much evidence that anyone has noticed some of the problems that need study, planning and implementation. Indeed, there are many who see no need at all to get excited about long-standing problems that have a way of becoming permanent roadblocks if ignored long enough.

Let's take a look at some of them, even if there isn't widespread interest in acknowledging, much less resolving them.

First, and foremost, is public education, which according to our last, and outdated, Constitution declares is the principal concern of our state and which should be the first priority of our citizens. Given the long-standing neglect of public education in our state, this constitutional priority seems written in invisible ink.

It's true that we have started sending more funds to local public school districts, but this became nothing more than necessity after more than a decade of spending 45 percent of our educational dollars on 9 percent of the state's students, thanks to some short-sighted federal court rulings that effectively destroyed minority neighborhoods and community cohesion by closing buildings in one area and building new ones in affluent neighborhoods. Given this calamity, it's surprising Missouri ranks as well as it does against its sister states.

After relying on busing to meet legal, but certainly not academic, needs, the state began preparing for the new millennium by seeing how fast we could fill our classrooms with computers, although no one seemed prepared to determine if they were really needed or could fulfill the multimillion-dollar promise of making Jack and Jill climb up the intellectual hill. To date there's no evidence that today's third graders are better equipped to confront the new world than a generation ago, and worse yet, there's considerable proof at hand to demonstrate that today's kids, except for the worldliness that goes with mediocre television programming, are any smarter than their grandparents or great-grandparents who managed to add, divide and subtract without the use of hand-held calculators.

An average of 16 cents out of every dollar earned by Missourians comes from so-called transfer payments, money supplied us by a government that is so far in debt that we would all have to contribute our total salaries to make any significant reduction in its size. In the meantime, Jefferson City will give unstinting attention to such pending business as whether to build a new baseball stadium in St. Louis, which is decaying about as fast as any city in America -- or India for that matter -- and whether our crumbling highways can withstand next year's ever-continuing increase in heavy truck traffic.

In the rush to fulfill every community's desire for a higher education institution, we have more colleges per square foot than Great Britain, and far too many of them are engaged not in the pursuit of academic excellence but in acquiring higher enrollments for the next semester. This myopic goal is the result of spreading a too-small higher educaiton dollar among a too-large number of campuses, and so our elected officials have simply adopted the crazy criteria of allocating money not on performance records but enrollment increases. The school that gets the most students, even if they flunk out in the first six weeks, is the big money winner. Wow! What a way to run a publicly supported educational system! Some day we might give some thought to building a first-class Missouri technological university that will attract more than cap factories and sub-assembly vendors. This, of course, will be dependent upon whether there will ever exist an alumni group more interested in academic records than football scores.

As competition for the economic dollar begins to heat up in the next millennium, Missouri can either take its place among the very middle percentile (if we're lucky) or we will resume our usual status in the just-above-Arkansas grouping. We'll not be overly concerned, if tradition holds, about what we need but whether the cost will be more than we want to pay, and which political party will get the credit for any real or imagined progress.

The new millennium won't alter the way we've been operating -- unless and until we decide Missouri Momentum is better than Missouri Mediocrity.

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