It was dysfunctional. It was failing. It was a ridiculous excuse for a school district and had been for years. It was a small school district surrounded by other school districts, pretty much all or mostly in the same city--Houston. There's Houston ISD, but Houston also has Aldine, Alief, and a few others. (It's not like where I grew up, where school districts and counties are coterminous, and Baltimore isn't part of a county at all so it has its own school district. The KCMO district was coterminous with the KC boundaries, but long ago before numerous annexations and a kind of quasi-split with the Independence district.)
The school board of North Forest and its administration fought tooth and nail for years to preserve their independence. Nothing got better for the kids. Accreditation? If a college loses it, the degrees aren't necessarily worth much; the stakes are lower (and nearly non-existent) for public schools. The North Forest parents were up in arms because of school tradition and because of horror stories they'd been told would come to pass if they were "sold" to others. This is a district that is pretty much all minority, majority African-American.
Their last defense was the Voting Rights Act. Because the school board was elected, the State's abolishing it and merging North Forest with Houston ISD would constitute a revision in electoral boundaries that needed Federal approval. Yes, the school board and administration was so insistent on retaining political power and financial control that they, in the end, resorted to a purely political argument.
One fallout of SCOTUS' recission of that provision of the VRA was that North Forest lost all standing to make the argument. The district was merged. Nothing horrible happened. It remains to be see if the takeover helps students in any way (which would mean that all the wrangling to preserve elected offices and administrative positions failed to hurt students in any way).
It's similar in KCMO. Dysfunctional, failing school district, with a school board and administration fighting not so much for students, who putatively would be assisted by being transported to surrounding districts, but for their own job security. The students would be benefitted by being bused to surrounding districts, except to the extent that being in the peer group motivates them to academic success. Nothing's compelling busing. (And, in many cases, peer groups don't motivate to success.)
Sometimes the difference between politicians and corporatists is very, very fine, mostly because both are human and humans like to preserve power and income. They also like to insist that they really have their charges' best interests at heart. Whatever the consequences for the charges. Monsters are typically convinced they're really quite good, reasonable people. I rather enjoyed reading Allilueva's "Only One Year" a while back (much more than just 1 year ago).
I'm willing to venture that the MO governor is looking for an alternative as much to keep the surrounding 4 districts from being swamped by KCMO students as to placate KCMO parents. And that the wishes of the school board itself count for pretty much nothing.
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