Taylor Made

On the first day of school this year, newly appointed Kansas City school district Superintendent Dr. Bernard Taylor visited Delano Alternative School near Linwood and Indiana streets. He spotted a young girl moving slowly with the aid of a walker. "Oh, sweetheart," he said. "Your shoe is untied." Then he knelt and tied it.

A photographer waved away onlookers and framed the scene. Kansas City Star reporter DeAnn Smith turned and said to no one in particular, "OK, that right there illustrates the difference between him and [Benjamin] Demps."

At the district's offices three days earlier, Smith would have seen an even better example of Taylor's contrast with the previous superintendent. Taylor had given the central-office staffers a pep talk in the auditorium at 1211 McGee. "We are going to be a customer service center," he told them.

Then he turned to face school board member Duane Kelly, one of five board members who had voted in an allegedly illegal meeting to fire his predecessor. "Mr. Kelly and his colleagues are my primary customer. Keeping the customer happy is extremely important."

Laughter erupted throughout the auditorium. Everybody knew that the relationship between the board and Demps had been far from happy.

Two months into the school year, Taylor is riding a wave of enthusiasm, just as Demps was when he arrived -- before his struggle to wrestle control from the school board turned bitter and earned him an early exit. With Demps out of the picture, the board didn't go through the formality of a national search for a new superintendent. Taylor wasn't even interviewed for the job. Over the past five months, the Pitchhas pieced together a behind-the-scenes account of how the Kansas City school board found its man.

During his first week on the job, in early August 1999, Benjamin Demps quizzed his staff about the condition of the district. There weren't enough teachers to fill all the classrooms, they told him. He was dumbfounded.

"What are we doing about this?" he asked.

They stared at him blankly.

He created a "war room." Demps hired a consultant from Oklahoma, Jack Goddard, for advice on organizing the human resources department; Goddard wound up becoming Demps' chief of staff.

Demps also brought in Cynthia Clegg, a professional with whom he'd worked at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, to run the human resources department. She arrived to a horrific mess. "There were piles of papers on every damn surface in that place," she remembers.

The chaos trickled down to the children of Kansas City. Staffers who'd been around for years told Clegg of teachers sneaking into the file room to purge their own disciplinary documents -- in some cases, teachers slated for firing were rehired.

It took months to bring order. But solutions to the teacher shortage were immediate. Clegg came up with creative ideas, such as figuring out a way for teachers who had retired from surrounding districts to work in Kansas City without losing their benefits. By the beginning of the school year, the number of teacher vacancies in the district was down to its lowest point in years.

This was exactly what the federal court had wanted when it proposed Demps for the job. A fierce bureaucrat, Demps had been a top administrator in the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981, when air-traffic controllers went on strike and President Ronald Reagan directed one of the toughest union-busting actions of the last fifty years. "This district needs to be run as a business," said Judge Dean Whipple, who oversees the district's desegregation case, on the day Demps signed his contract. (Demps did not return phone calls from the Pitch.)

But the court shared blame for the shambles in the central office. As a defendant in the nation's longest-running desegregation case, the district had to obtain approval from the court-appointed Desegregation Monitoring Committee for virtually every move it made. In the years prior to Demps' arrival, this committee had recommended that dozens of top administrators be removed because it believed the workers were unqualified. (In one case, the man responsible for the district's professional development program had no training in that area -- he had been a choir director.) The DMC also set arbitrary hiring requirements -- such as standards on how low teachers' undergraduate grade-point averages could be -- and slowed teacher recruitment by scrutinizing each new hire. Amid a national teacher shortage, other districts snatched teachers out of Kansas City.

The school board hadn't wanted to hire Demps. Whipple had rejected all the candidates the board had put forward, replacing them with four candidates approved by the DMC. Demps, who had been recommended by his friend, Whipple's clerk, was the second-to-last choice on this list.

In the early fall of 1999, crises erupted all around Demps. Paychecks bounced. Demps relieved Chief Financial Officer Bonnie McKelvey of payroll responsibilities and gave them to Clegg. (At one point McKelvey had been an interim co-superintendent of the district.)

A lone contractor ran the district's communications department, which was responsible for all internal communications, publications and interaction with the community at large. Demps hired another former associate, David Smith, who beefed up the staff. One of Smith's first duties was to improve the district's Internet presence. "The Web site was horrible," Smith recalls, so he had a new one designed.