"I've gotten offers to go to different sections," Wagoner says, "but I have always declined. I have a certain personal preference because it's my old neighborhood."
When something bad happens in Brookside or Waldo, Wagoner answers the call -- just as he did one afternoon in November when he was cruising through the intersection of 63rd Street and Brookside Boulevard.
"I had just driven past there, and I was at [63rd and] Troost," Wagoner says. "I hadn't seen anything when I went by, but by the time I got back, there was obviously a large disturbance."
Two officers already were on the scene when Wagoner, the sergeant in charge, arrived. It was shortly after 3 p.m., just about the time students from the newly opened Southwest Charter School were making their way home on foot and by Kansas City Transit Authority bus.
Around thirty of the middle school's students were throwing punches, yelling and jumping off of buses. More officers converged on the scene, but the melee escalated.
"The majority of the crowd did disperse, and the fight was broken up," Wagoner says, "but there was still a lot of screaming and yelling, and we couldn't get them to leave. Both male and female students kept arguing and trying to get the crowd to come back and start fighting."
Finally, one of the officers reached for his belt. He pulled out a canister of pepper spray.
"There were several students who refused to back away," Wagoner says. "A basic statement was made for them to leave, and some of the students stood there yelling certain expletives. Because of the potential for violence, the pepper spray was sprayed into the air. Nobody was directly sprayed."
But Francis Ford Crow, a Southwest Charter School seventh-grader in the crowd, says some of the burning mist landed in students' eyes. (Another witness says the cops aimed the spray directly at the students.) Some of them went into the Mr. Goodcents Subs & Pasta shop, a popular after-school hangout, to flush their eyes with water.
The cops took two Southwest Charter students -- a boy and a girl, both age 14 -- to the KCPD's juvenile unit downtown and cited them for creating a public disturbance and refusing to obey police orders. The rumble, in which no injuries were reported, allegedly stemmed from several female students' dating the same male students.
"It doesn't surprise me what they were fighting about," Francis says. "Being at Southwest is a violent experience, not a learning experience. It's a hypocrisy."
Last summer, Southwest Charter School made a controversial move into the old Southwest High School building at 6512 Wornall Road after completing its first year with 160 students in the cramped and windowless basement of Temple B'Nai Jehudah on East 69th Street.
From the outset, the Kansas City, Missouri, School District -- deemed inferior by charter school organizers seeking to reform public education -- bristled at allowing Southwest to open in a vacant building that carried the legacy of the once-proud Southwest High School. School district officials wanted to use the four-story building for other purposes. Negotiations for acquiring the old Southwest High property grew melodramatic last March, when Southwest Charter students staged a protest hoping to convince the KCMSD board to reverse a tie vote that denied the school access to bigger and better digs. Two months later, the Kansas City school board, in a legally questionable 5-4 vote, approved a month-to-month lease for the charter. District officials later claimed that they might have erred by approving the lease with only five votes instead of six.
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you alll should be concerned about what's going on in the brookside area, i know that southwest "charter" school seems like a hell hole to most, but to me it is my 4 yrs. of learning, fun,& friendships. you see i am a "high school" grad. from the class of 1996. when south west was a high school. back then the area was the same, the people that lived (live) in the brookside area didn't want us there either, the school was prodomittly black students that was bused in from neighborhoods as far down as 34th street(brooklin, euclid, paseo) you get my drift. at the time there was a lot of complaints about our school and the"kind" of kids that attended, but i don't blame the school or anything it's the kids and how they made us look to those residents.beyond the "hype" we have had alot of successful grads come from this school not just in '96 but previous and prior. so my concern is history has had ups & downs but we all have proven to overcome. this school has made me become a great mom, meaning that despite what went wrong in my high school yrs. i had alot of positive happen to me as well. although the school has now changed certain directions it's still a learning process for some, a as i have read also hell for others. but you "ney-sayers" should not be so quick to but down the posibilities of what southwest has meant to myself and so many others.thank you for "listening" to my comment about the what was and what is, about my southwest.--one of the success stories of'96.
you alll should be concerned about what's going on in the brookside area, i know that southwest "charter" school seems like a hell hole to most, but to me it is my 4 yrs. of learning, fun,& friendships. you see i am a "high school" grad. from the class of 1996. when south west was a high school. back then the area was the same, the people that lived (live) in the brookside area didn't want us there either, the school was prodomittly black students that was bused in from neighborhoods as far down as 34th street(brooklin, euclid, paseo) you get my drift. at the time there was a lot of complaints about our school and the"kind" of kids that attended, but i don't blame the school or anything it's the kids and how they made us look to those residents.beyond the "hype" we have had alot of successful grads come from this school not just in '96 but previous and prior. so my concern is history has had ups & downs but we all have proven to overcome. this school has made me become a great mom, meaning that despite what went wrong in my high school yrs. i had alot of positive happen to me as well. although the school has now changed certain directions it's still a learning process for some, a as i have read also hell for others. but you "ney-sayers" should not be so quick to but down the posibilities of what southwest has meant to myself and so many others.thank you for "listening" to my comment about the what was and what is, about my southwest.--one of the success stories of'96.
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