In Amato We Trust?

"My first month here, they said, 'Here's a bill,'" Amato says. "So I say, 'OK, no problem.' I look in last year's budget for the $1.2 million LINC allegedly said we had to pay them and, lo and behold, I don't find it. Turns out there's no contract. It's not in dispute. They can't produce it."

Hobbs argues that the contract was a 1999 agreement with an automatic-renewal clause, but LINC officials were unable to supply the Pitch with a copy of the document as of press time. In any case, LINC ended its programs and pulled its computers and other equipment out of the district's rooms.

Also a mystery to some: LINC's accomplishments with its programs.

Consultant Christopher Henrich, an associate professor of psychology at Georgia State University, was hired during the 2004-05 school year to evaluate LINC for the federal 21st Century grant program, which funded some of LINC's work. He says he was never able to gather enough data to determine whether students in LINC programs improved academically; the review was stopped this year because of problems with the district. However, he says there was some evidence that middle-school students who attended regularly might have raised their test scores slightly.

What LINC clearly did do, Henrich claims, was establish bridges to other community organizations such as the YMCA, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the Boy Scouts. "What they were doing," he says, "was helping kids connect to their communities and to adults, something they need to do in a friendly setting."

Besides, he adds, "there weren't many families who needed the services and didn't get them. At Garfield Elementary alone, you've got a lot of underprivileged kids, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone there who needed a LINC service they didn't get."

But some parents doubted the value of LINC's after-school programs. After a recent school board meeting, one mother complained that her son's involvement was only "sitting around watching movies, doing nothing."

Amato says he offered LINC a chance to continue working with the district. But he proposed an entirely different role for the organization, one that would have focused on LINC's ability to raise state and federal grant money. Amato says the two parties went back and forth on deals that were agreed upon, only to have LINC renege days later. LINC officials say they never agreed to anything.

Meanwhile, several surrounding districts have contacted LINC for programs now that its resources are available. Hobbs says the organization won't make any commitments until the end of this month.

Amato has one word for LINC's complaints: "BS."

Amato says he told LINC that it could maintain its attendance rolls by reporting every kid in Power Hour as a LINC program participant, even if those students never actually went to a LINC program.

"I told them we were having Power Hour, and, as far as I was concerned, they could still count the kids in that on their tallies. I don't care, as long as we get to prepare. They could keep being the baby sitter."

In other words, according to Amato, it's OK to fudge numbers that get used in grant applications.

Step 3: Get the Kids in Line

Once you've neutralized one powerful outside interest, you'll need everyone in the district to support your vision. A quick way to do this is impose a curriculum that'll get every kid moving in lockstep.

For that, Amato has relied on something called Success For All. The phonics-based reading program, packaged and promoted by a nonprofit in Baltimore, can cost more than $3 million for schools to implement.

Amato purchased Success for All in Hartford and in New Orleans. He had been in Kansas City for little more than a week when he started pushing it.

Amato says Kansas City lacked a standardized reading program. "We needed to do something dramatic here to raise the scores. I went to the board and said, 'We can do nothing and spend a year talking about it, and next year we'll be in the same place. Or we can do something right now, and I guarantee we won't be in the same place next year.'"

But Judy Morgan, who is president of the Federation of Teachers Local 691, says two reading programs were in place before Amato's arrival.

By the end of Amato's first month on the job, July 2006, the school board had agreed to put Success for All in 15 middle schools for the academic year that would start just a month later.

This surprised even the people at Success for All's main office.

"We have done things fast before, but this is the fastest I've ever seen the program implemented," says Sandra Pool, area manager for the program. Her territory includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and Wyoming, along with the Kansas City district in Missouri. Pool is quick to praise teachers and administrators for their willingness to participate, but she admits that many teachers likely did not receive proper training.

"It was a rush on our end to get training rooms and materials together — especially training rooms, because that time of year you have so much going on in high schools," she says. "My guess would be several teachers didn't get training either because they went to the wrong place or got the wrong information. But if they didn't get it, we offered makeup training for anyone hired after the fact. So there were opportunities."