Northeast News
June 10, 2015

The Kansas City Public Schools repurposing committee is givin’ this lil’ pooch fits. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, repurposing as far as KCPS is concerned is akin to saying demolition. Because in all truth, a demolished building HAS been repurposed…repurposed into bricks, dust, rubble and re-bar. This truth minded canine is cryin’ foul.

While the district mouthpieces on the 10th floor of headquarters might spout all sorts of feel good psycho-babble about their “concern for the community” and “salvaging a community icon” in the form of architectural artifacts from the former Thacher Elementary, the fact of the matter is that in their eyes, the sooner this building is reduced to vacant ground, the easier their lives get. No more Manny and Bryan rattling cages, stirrin’ up all sorts of preservation minded hub-bub against the district. No more having to address factual arguments that the building was actually structurally sound until the district waved its hand and all of a sudden it wasn’t. No more having to take time from real district programming, like trying to find sweetheart contracts for cousins of administrators, to having to address the ongoing onslaught of preservationists pleading for the building to be saved.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly how to alienate your community in three easy steps: A) Placate them, B) lie to them, C) do whatever your agenda says anyway. This pooch thinks last week’s “miscommunication” line is a load of bunk. The district lied and obfuscated. Period, paragraph done. KCPS has no interest in working with the community, which accounts for the abysmal record of how many schools on the repurposing list have been saved and adaptively reused. We count a total of one. But that’s old dog, old math. Anyone?