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This was the state of affairs when, in 1976, the Federal Government threatened to cut off funds to the KCMSD because it had maintained a dual system of segregated schools. Pro-integration kitchen-table activists who had won control of the KCMSD school board responded by suing suburban school districts and the State of Missouri, arguing that they had worked to confine blacks to the inner city.
Until the Brown decision, schools were segregated by law in Missouri; after it, the state allowed desegregation at the discretion of local school boards. Many of the suburban districts (parts of which extended into the city) had not allowed blacks to attend high school, forcing black families to move into central Kansas City in search of education. As the city's minority population grew, the KCMSD redrew school-attendance zones hundreds of times and bused some black children far from their neighborhoods in order to keep the races apart.
Federal District Judge Russell G. Clark, a conservative Democrat, ruled that the state and KCMSD had violated the Constitution, but he dropped the outer districts from the case, finding insufficient proof that they they had acted illegally--a decision he would have cause to regret. "The very minute I let those suburban school districts out, I created a very severe problem for the court and for myself, really, in trying to come up with a remedial plan to integrate the Kansas City, Missouri, School District," the judge reflected years later. "The more salt you have, the more white you can turn the pepper. And without any salt, or with a limited amount of salt, you're going to end up with a basically black mixture."
KCMSD's only remaining hope for racial balance was a system of magnet schools designed to lure whites back from private schools and the suburban districts. In 1986 Judge Clark ordered such a plan. After the KCMSD's enrollment became majority black in 1970, the district's voters, who remained majority white, had allowed the schools to literally fall apart, rejecting funding initiatives 19 times while pipes burst and ceilings collapsed. In addition to smaller classes and higher teacher salaries, Judge Clark's order required renovation of 55 schools and construction of 17. When the school district failed to come up with its quarter of the cost--Clark had laid three-quarters of the bill on the state--the judge took the unusual step of doubling the local property tax. The money bought, among other things, a planetarium, radio and TV studios, and 1,000 computers for Central High School's 1,069 students. Central, which before Clark's order was awash in broken toilets and overrun by rodents, now occupies a $32 million building that resembles a small city's airline terminal and features an Olympic-size swimming pool.
The KCMSD's annual per-pupil expenditure, excluding capital costs, reached $9,412 last year, an amount exceeded by perhaps 40 of the nation's 14,881 school districts. All together, as of this February, $1.7 billion has been spent under court order in Kansas City.