By Paul Thompson

Northeast News

October 21, 2016

KANSAS CITY, Missouri – Mark Bedell is set to deliver a report on his first 100 days as Superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools during a November 2 meeting with the KCPS Board of Education, but he met with Northeast Alliance Together (NEAT) representatives on the morning of Thursday, October 20 to offer an early reflection on the first several months of his tenure.

Serving as the guest speaker for NEAT’s monthly general meeting, Bedell held a frank discussion with Northeast community leaders. He began by discussing conversations he had with area citizens while he was still interviewing for the superintendent position. In order to conceal his identity and ensure open lines of communication, Bedell told the individuals that he was conducting educational research.

“This is what I heard: you don’t want to put your kids in this school system,” said Bedell. “There were things that happened in the 80s, quite frankly, that we’ve never recovered from.”

Intrigued by the challenge, Bedell accepted the job anyways. After all, he’d found previous success as an administrator in large school districts in both Baltimore and Houston, finding through experience that education can lead any student towards a path to success.

“Regardless of zip code or circumstance, there is an equalizer; and that equalizer is education,” Bedell said.

During his first few months at the helm of KCPS, Bedell has come face-to-face with some of the district’s long-term challenges. According to Bedell, some of the biggest issues include high teacher turnover, educating a large percentage of students who speak English as a second language, and unfair comparisons to charter schools that can pick and choose their student population. He added that KCPS has the highest mobility rates and the highest ELL rates in the State of Missouri.

“We have kids who were in four different schools in any given year. They can’t establish relationships, and they can’t develop routines,” said Bedell. “I want us to just be looked at in a fair and equitable way.”

Bedell added that a rise in violent crime throughout the city has percolated down into the school system. He told a story about a Central High School parent who recently came into the school, visibly shaken, retelling the story of how her home was shot up just 15 minutes before. According to Bedell, the parent said that the shooting was a result of her daughter’s refusal to join a gang that had sprung up in the neighborhood.

“This stuff is a reality,” said Bedell. “I’m not making this up.”

In response, Bedell organized a meeting with the Mayor and representatives from the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department. While he acknowledged that there has since been a notable increase in police presence in the surrounding neighborhoods, he noted that the trauma a student faces when confronted with that kind of violence is a clear barrier to a positive learning environment.

“These kids are coming to school with a lot,” said Bedell. “It’s more than just Kansas City Public Schools that are contributing to these issues.”

To combat these challenges, Bedell is committed to outside-the-box thinking. In discussing teacher turnover, Bedell revealed that seven or eight teachers have already quit since the school year began in August. One problem, he said, is that the district hasn’t prepared it’s teachers to deal with the second-degree trauma their students are bringing to school. Another issue, he added, is that the district’s provisional accreditation makes the process of recruiting high-quality educators a persistent challenge. To that concern, at least, he’s proposed a potential solution.

“We have a beautiful building over in the Brookside area that’s just sitting there dormant, right down the street from a park. What if we worked with the city and some of our business partners out here, and we turned that building into affordable housing for teachers that we want to go out and recruit?” suggested Bedell. “Maybe we’re not as competitive with our salaries as other school districts, but what we can do is we can offer you affordable housing in a very nice neighborhood where there’s a park down the street and you can feel safe. Nobody’s done it, so why not be the first? This is the kind of stuff that I’m looking at.”

Another example of creative thinking is the district’s latest partnership with Prodigy Learning, a company based out of Ireland which bills itself as a “One Stop Shop for IT Learning.” The company gives classrooms a certified teacher on the other side of the software, so that learning doesn’t have to come to a halt when a teacher needs to call in a substitute.

“Substitute teachers take on assignments that are available, and some of them become long-term subs in areas that they have no academic expertise in.” said Bedell. “So what happens to our kids during this long-term assignment? They get nothing for a whole year, in some cases.”

“All of our kids have laptops,” Bedell added. “We can train these people, they can get certified in the State of Missouri, we can give them our curriculum, we can give them the state standards, and they can teach the substitute teachers in the classroom to work as a facilitator to make sure that our kids are on target. We just started that, and we’ll see how it goes.”

Bedell exudes passion when he speaks on these subjects, even when the conversation is extemporaneous. He puts his money where his mouth is, too: despite the concerns he heard from citizens about KCPS when he moonlighted as an “educational researcher” all those months ago, each of Bedell’s three children are currently enrolled in district schools. Bedell is well aware of the history of his position in the district, and he’s prepared to buck the trend of shorter-than-expected tenures: for the foreseeable future, he doesn’t plan on going anywhere.

“I’m interested in being here a lot longer than three years and two months. Most importantly, I can’t interrupt my children’s education anymore,” said Bedell. “There is momentum in this city right now. What if we were able to somehow get all of the pieces to this puzzle together?”