TOP STATE OFFICIALS SUBVERT HANDLING OF DESEGREGATION

"Whose side are you on?"

-- Sen. Steve Ehlmann, R-St. Charles, in a July 18 letter to Robert Bartman, Missouri's commissioner of elementary and secondary education.

Sen. Steve Ehlmann's blunt question to Robert Bartman is one to which countless Missourians would like an answer. Ehlmann's inquiry arose out of the strange episode of the payment of $5.4 million to the Kansas City School District by Missouri officials fully 18 days after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that these payments should end because they are unlawful.

Bartman didn't act alone. In the wake of the historic high-court ruling, Attorney General Jay Nixon had advised against any more such payments. A spokesman for Gov. Carnahan has confirmed that the governor personally approved the payment, directing State Treasurer Bob Holden to cut the check and deliver the funds on June 30, a Friday and the last day of the state's fiscal year.

It is thus clear that two of the constitutional officers of state government -- the governor and the state treasurer -- are complicit in making this payment and that in doing so, they rejected the advice of their legal counsel, the attorney general. Under state statutes, the real client in the case is the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, headed by Bartman. Everyone in Jefferson City knows that Bartman wouldn't make any such payment without the governor's approval. So Sen. Ehlmann's question can just as well be put to the governor.

Everyone also knows that for a decade the Kansas City school desegregation case -- the most expensive such case in American history -- has robbed funding from all the other school districts across Missouri. At one point, the level of funding under U.S. District Judge Russell Clark's order, now declared unlawful by the highest court in the land, reached $36,000 for each student. For about $23,000 annually, a student can attend the Graduate School of Business at Harvard University, or study at Johns Hopkins University for a master's degree in international studies. This is surely a scandal in a state where the range of other per-pupil funding efforts varies from a high of approximately $9,600 in affluent St. Louis suburbs to a low of around $3,000 in certain poor, southern Missouri districts.

It can be argued that the first half-billion dollars in spending, mostly for capital improvements, was a genuine effort to redress the real vestiges of a segregated, dual school system. Accepting that as true for purposes of discussion, the state passed that milestone and went to great lengths to redress that wrong more than a billion dollars ago. Why then, are Bartman and Carnahan so determined to continue making payments?

The position of these two, who constitute Missouri's negotiating team in the Kansas City case, consists of a strained reliance on the fact that the actual mandate -- the signed order of the Supreme Court -- had not physically been received in Jefferson City, even though the whole world had known of the ruling for nearly three weeks. This is indeed a thin reed on which to hang a decision if such magnitude.

Upon learning of the state's determination to continue making the payments, one report has an angry chief justice of the United States, William Rehnquist, signing the mandate in his London hotel room. The attorney general's office received the signed mandate in Jefferson City late on the afternoon of the June 30 and rushed it over to Bartman, only to be told the $5.4 million had been sent just hours before. This sounds suspiciously as though Bartman and Carnahan were literally racing to pay the funds before they actually received the signed mandate that would have flatly prohibited such action.

Missourians are entitled to know more about this entire episode. What we know to date doesn't justify confidence in the negotiating team currently representing us.

One fact is clear, though. Desegregation is about money by the hundreds of millions. And continuing these payments has become essential to an unholy alliance of political, journalistic, legal and educational interests who don't want to face tough scrutiny and don't want any of these issues discussed openly. Although powerful, these interests really represent a tiny clique. Against them are arrayed 800,000 Missouri school children and nearly all the state's taxpayers.