Joel Pelofsky is near the end of his second term on the Kansas City Missouri School Board. Pelofsky is a life-long Kansas City resident and attended Faxon, Paseo and Southwest High School before obtaining his law degree from Harvard University School of Law. Pelofsky also spent eight years serving as a Trustee for the U.S. Department of Justice.

He served two terms on the City Council before mounting a mayoral campaign which he lost to Richard Berkley. In addition to serving on the school board, Pelofsky has spent many years serving on the boards of Truman Medical Center and Jewish Vocational Services which assists people with physical, mental and developmental disabilities as well as those facing immigration or relocation difficulties.

What was your reason for joining the board?

For one thing, I have lived in this neighborhood for 43 years now, then it was a little over 37 years – my children went through the public schools up to high school. I had been watching the board for a long time, and they weren’t really doing the job. Too many swinging doors, too much activity that didn’t seem to be well thought out. They weren’t succeeding in educating the children. I thought, well, I will see what I can do.

Most everybody thought - and they still do – that you have to have a screw loose to run for school board in Kansas City, but that never bothered me.

It seems to be a pretty thankless job, it is not a paid position and has its share of controversy.

It’s not thankless, lots of people thank you. It is well worth doing, the kids need to be educated and they are the future of the community. I toyed with the notion of introducing a board item that it would pay something and then I decided “Well the public uproar…”, and in one sense you can’t pay enough. In another sense if you pay too much, people start looking at it as a career, and it’s not a career, it’s a part-time job.

Look at what has happened with City Hall. When I was on the council we got $4,800 a year, now they get almost that a month. It’s become a job and it’s not supposed to be a job. You are supposed to be there part time. You are not part of the government; you are the guidance for the government.

So the fact that somebody needs a pothole fixed ought not to be the job of the city council. Same thing with the school board, if you have a bad teacher in the system, it’s not your job to do anything about that except to pass that information on to the superintendent.

Becoming full time because you are getting a hefty salary is not what this system is all about. I think you see that in some degree in the Congress where they spend an awful lot of that time raising money for the next election and the rest of that time carrying messages. The legislation is so complicated; it’s impossible for an elected member to really understand what they are doing. Look at the bailout: we need to spend 700 billion dollars - and the next thing you know they can’t figure out what to do with it.

Because they don’t really know how we got in this position in the first place?

They know that. You just can’t cure greed and stupidity with money.

What do you feel you have been able to accomplish during your time on the school board?

I have tried to create an expectation inside the administration that if they don’t meet a certain level of competence and efficiency, people will question them and they can do better. I have supported some efforts like Lincoln Prep, which is something I have watched and tried to help. Their Jazz band is going to Carnegie Hall this spring and I have tried to help them raise money for that.

My wife and I may go, pay our own way of course. Carnegie Hall is a great place to hear music. The kids are great; I have been to several of their concerts. They win state awards all of the time.

My major project, other than trying to get better product out of the administration, is the reopening of Southwest and the support of the Montessori programs which are doing quite well. They provide a real attraction for parents who might otherwise hesitate to put their kids in district schools.

Declining enrollment is a major problem for this district, what is being done to try and increase enrollment?

We have struggled for years to try to develop a recruiting program for the district and for whatever reasons they haven’t been implemented. Part of the reason, I think, is the focus of the public information office. We constantly revisit that issue each year. The person in charge of that was just removed, so we may see another initiative there.

I have heard some parents complain that reopening Southwest is taking money and focus away from existing schools.

It didn’t, we recruited citywide. It’s a school that’s needed not only because it serves a part of the city geographically that otherwise would not be served, but also because we need, in this environment, a school that focuses on math and science and none of the others do that. In addition, the building sits there as an important feature in the community. If it sits there vacant, of course it says something about what the school district cares about.

It only goes up to 8th grade like the Foreign Language Academy, the Spanish immersion school, and the Montessori school. Those children have no place to go to continue those kinds of learning. What we hope happens at Southwest is that they will continue on into high school with those kinds of programs. Not necessarily Montessori – I think there is only one high school Montessori in America - but that type of discovery learning. And the language areas, a path for those kids to go on. For example, Academie Lafayette - there is no place for those kids to go for high school.

That’s kind of a shame after that total immersion.

Yes and then you end up losing it for the rest of your life unless you go someplace special, and a lot of those parents probably can’t afford private schools, although I suspect a number of them go on to parochial schools.

We knew that people were going to complain about Southwest, but it’s an important statement. And it’s working out very well, we were oversubscribed, attendance is very good, morale is high, (and) the kids are working. The early college program seems to be working out.

What do you think needs to be done to increase parent involvement?

Over the years I would occasionally have meetings in the subdistrict and you get 15-20 people and you never seem to get beyond that. Once in a while I will go to the SAC meetings. It’s a combination of things.

The DAC (District Advisory Committee) had a public meeting not too long ago and invited the board. 30 people came. 20,000 parents and 30 people show up. We didn’t really talk about education.

They asked the question “Well what are you doing?” Well educators are educators, they are not always great communicators. But we talk, and there is no follow up. We don’t really support the DAC very well and the SACs (Student Activity Committee), there is no mechanism by which the DAC can bring us – in fact there was an effort to have a report every month at the board meeting. It never went anywhere, it was never much used. The parents have a legitimate complaint but we don’t do much about it.

I am on the DAC for Lincoln this year and I am rather disappointed. I thought it was going to be communication with the board. And after the first meeting when you were all there – except for Airick Leonard West – it is just Administration that attends the DAC Meetings. I thought it was a Board/Parent communication vehicle…

It should be, but neither side uses it very well. There is no reason why the DAC president can’t come down to the board and say I want 5 minutes every month. The problem is to some degree we don’t know what people are thinking about because there is so much anecdotal.

There is some kind of fundamental demand for some information about what kind of initiatives we have, and are they doing any good and how do you know, are they doing any good and is there anything that you guys are doing that we ought to be helping with?. And the answer is yes, there are lots of things we are doing that we need help with but we don’t tell you and you don’t know and we don’t get the help.

Do you think this is a lack of communication and leadership on both sides?

It’s not necessarily just leadership, it’s energy, period. There is a limited amount of time that parents in an urban environment can invest. There are lots of competing considerations. Everybody needs to work a little harder at it. We spend a lot of time at the district doing things, but I don’t know if we are doing the right things.

Everybody always talks about “Well it’s the boards’ problems” – they are ineffective, they don’t do anything. They don’t know anything and they don’t keep an administration long enough to make anything happen and there is certainly some truth to that. Even when we kept Bernard Taylor for five years, nothing happened in the sense that test scores didn’t go popping up or anything like that.

But the current thinking in education is just leave it to the professionals, they will take care of it, don’t worry about it. That just doesn’t work – it never has worked. You have to have the kids engaged. And Duane (Kelly, a board member and retired teacher) always says “Well if you have good teachers then the kids will be engaged.”

But that it not necessarily true because one of the things that we do, and I am sure it’s true in most schools in the country, is you take a child that grows up in the computer age of instant gratification, instant messaging and constant change and put them in a classroom and say sit still for an hour and I am going to tell you something. That just isn’t working. But people don’t address s it – they say “Well we will give everybody a computer.” But that doesn’t work either if you don’t teach them how to use it, and you don’t train the teachers, and it’s very expensive. Then a few years later the fad aspect of wears off and you are back to the same old stuff.

There doesn’t seem to be any consistent evidence that it works.

One of the things I found most interesting about being in education is that there are two kind so information that you have. One is anecdotal successes, which is what the National School Board Association dotes on, and the other is systems that work, which are what the Council of Great City schools concentrates on, but even though systems work they are not getting the kind of results that we would like to have.

Missouri talks about the fact that Kansas City is way behind, but in Missouri only about 40 percent of all the children in the system are reading at proficient levels. 60 percent are not. So you have system wide failure even from schools that are supposedly hitting their mark. Like Duane talked about the 14 districts who get a perfect score, one of the things they have done is change the system of scoring so it has become a great deal more subjective than it ever was.

Does that have anything to do with No Child Left Behind?

NCLB is a joke. I have admired the Congress the last few years with their ability to come up with fancy titles which they stick on barrels of garbage and expect us to all ooh and aahh.

NCLB is perfectly good motivation – but pay for it – they don’t have any idea what it means. And then they turn around because of the pressure and let each state make their own determination of their success so everybody ran right out and dumbed down all of their standards so they could show progress.

I went to Faxon and Paseo and graduated from Southwest. It was pretty much a middle class community at that time. It was a different environment if for no other reason than the economics of it.. The general population was middle class. We have a situation now where 70 percent of the kids in our schools are free and reduced lunch. That certainly says something about the people who are living in the community and creates a point of stress that nobody addresses.

If you poll the average American citizens and ask, “Is education important” Oh yes. “Should teachers be paid a lot of money?” Oh yes. “Would you add ten dollars to your tax bill?” Oh no.

When was the last time we passed a bond issue in Kansas City?

Hah, if it were not for the deseg(regation) orders we would be out of business. The real problem with the state funding is that we are losing students and you get aid on a per capita formula. Unless we start doing some serious reorganization, we are not going to have enough money one day to run the system.

One of the things that I tried to work on, to no particular avail, was creating a process by which we conducted a long term methodical study of the budget and its process on an annual basis. So we could know what we were doing and what our expectations where and the problems we had to deal with. I don’t know if it was (Board member) Airick (Leonard West) or Duane who talked about closing schools and everybody got up in arms, seven schools or something.

Hale Cook is right up the street here – and right now it’s a pre-K and Montessori training school. And it doesn’t draw much from the community – there are 260 kids in the neighborhood and only six of them attend. And I said “Why is that?” Are people not aware?

If you have a basic set of services in an elementary school you can do a lot of good things with the kids and the risk is pretty small, even if it is the Kansas City District.

It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives; I have heard that the average parochial school is about $900 (per month) so we ought to have a big billboard that says “Save $10,000 – send your kids to public school.”

I said (at a board meeting) “We have an attraction – you told me that you were going to staff this school up and sell it to the community.” But we haven’t, we are just going to close it.

They were talking about closing Longfellow. Longfellow is a feeder school for The Paseo Academy of the Arts. And I said “Why are you going to do that – you talk about having an Arts program supported and then you are going to close the feeder school??” So after about a half hour of conversation, my voice not alone, they gave it up.

We have a neighborhood school theme, but we don’t have buildings open, so you have that stress on one side and the economics on the other. Nobody pays enough attention to it, we have an interim superintendent so it’s not a battle anyone has wanted to fight.

There are all kinds of things that flow along just under the surface that the public doesn’t want to know about or get involved in – they say we should close schools – but not theirs.

Another example of that, we know that the state formula is per capita and our enrollment is going down, and we don’t have an out-year budget.

What does that mean?

That means we don’t have a budget for the year 2010. We don’t know what we are going to get in 2010, which is coming up. We have never had an out-year budget.

So there is no long-term planning?

That is correct. It’s a captive of two things: one is the anecdotal demands of the district and the population and the other is the mechanical impositions of business by your administration. You have a Finance and Audit meeting and you may have 20 board items you are going to spend about 2 hours, and you ask the finance people how is this going to affect the budget, and they say – well I have that I my office, I didn’t bring it.

In one sense we don’t’ have the horses to function the way we ought to on the administrative side. We don’t have people in the right places. We don’t have a deputy, we don’t have a Chief Financial Officer, our facilities director is interim, HR has been contracted out for the 2nd time in about four years. We don’t have a Chief Operating Officer; we don’t have a Chief Academic Officer, because from Amato to today we haven’t had anybody to concentrate on filling those roles.

The district’s problems seem so overwhelming.

I am firmly convinced that the job can be done. It’s not an impossible task. It just takes focus and energy and at this point it’s pretty fragmented.

For one thing we don’t have systems in place to tell us what is going on. We test internally, but nobody tells us about that. I tried to set up a system a year or so ago in the long range planning committee that I chaired with Dave Smith. Ms. Simmons took those functions and gave them to the education committee and I don’t think they have done anything with it. But we need to have a way in which the administration shares with us the data about what is going on in the district.

For example there was hoop-te-do about teachers who were absent Mondays and Fridays – and we tried to get a handle on that and they gave us an occasional statistic and then everyone lost interest. You can’t run a system very well if some of your teachers don’t show up one or two days a week on a regular basis. There are all kinds of things like that.

To get back to the question you raised earlier about population. We have lost some of it to charter schools – I have to be ironically amused by charters schools. The state says “Oh yeah, they are wonderful, but only St. Louis and Kansas City can have them.” If they are that good why can’t the whole state have them?

The truth is that the legislature doesn’t really care much about the Kansas City or St. Louis District and you get all of these competitive interests that drain our resources without adding anything. By and large, with few exceptions like Academie Lafayette, they don’t do any better than we do. It’s not just governance, or the teachers, it’s the whole thing.

We have 2,000 children in the district with IEP (Individual Educational Plans) that means they have serious learning disabilities – and 20% of our population is English language learners. There is 20 percent of your population that have special needs; the charters don’t even have to deal with that.

The biggest problem is that there is a notion that there is a magic bullet out there. The truth is that there is no magic bullet, it’s just hard work and if you don’t do the hard work you are not going to succeed. And that’s top to bottom, everybody’s got to play. If they don’t then it doesn’t work.

When I was on the City Council and you wanted to do something, like put a quarry next to a park like they did in Independence or you have this refinery in Sugar Creek and we wanted to pave the street or whatever, you get a bunch of neighborhood leaders and they come down and yell at you – and then we went ahead and did it anyway. In the school district, if people don’t participate it doesn’t happen, it’s not like paving the street and putting in a sewer or even locating a public nuisance next to a residential area. All of those things don’t require the cooperation of the entire community, but education does and we don’t have it.

Are you encouraged about the apparent increase in public interest recently – 26 people applied for the two open board seats.

These are at-large seats – it’s good to have that kind of interest. We have this shadow group that Bill Eddy put together and they watch us, but they are looking at the wrong end of the telescope and I tell them that. I said you know you come to the board meeting, nothing happens at the board meeting – it’s not where it is going on.

Where does it happen?

If it happens at all it happens at committee meetings, at principals meetings at the school level where nobody goes, nobody watches. Duane says you need to go into the classroom. I have taught, Sunday school, in the military, I taught law school– I know what it’s like to teach and you have kids that don’t care. It’s good to be on the ground, but that’s not the answer you can’t just do that.

You need to have people who have some educational experience, it’s good to have some people with children in the district, but you need to have some people who know how to run a $400 million organization.

Coming from the corporate world myself, I have always thought that the administration needs a true management change specialist to come in and shake things up to achieve real change.

Yes, there is no question about it, we have a bunker mentality down there because everybody figures that if I just last a little longer then there will be another change at the top and they won’t bother me and that’s true to a large degree.

How do we make that happen?

I think to some degree you have to convince the board that this is the kind of change we need. We are working on a turnaround plan which (Board Vice President) Arthur (Benson) and (Board President) Marilyn wrote about in The Star last wee in response to the MSIP (Missouri School Improvement Plan).. That has some features of management change.

The real change is to get a Superintendent who either understands business and education or admit that he doesn’t and hires people who do. I have seen three superintendents, and they were good people and they knew a lot of things but they didn’t necessarily acknowledge that they didn’t know everything and do something about it.

I think until there is a public demand for better services, we are going to continue with this revolving door process with people trying to do their best and not getting the kinds of responses or encouragement they need and then they settle for less.

Are you going to run again when your term is up in April?

I haven’t decided.