Can you imagine an inner-city high school in Kansas City where most of the kids are black and hispanic, almost all come from impoverished backgrounds and qualify for free or reduced lunch and yet nearly everyone graduates and goes on to college? Well, there is such a school. It’s called Cristo Rey, a four-year Catholic college prep high school where students help pay for their education by working a job once a week.
As part of KCPT’s Difference Maker series, producer Cara Meyers profiles Cristo Rey, which you’ll find one block east of Broadway on Linwood boulevard in the heart of the city.
By the way, working one day helps pay for about 60 percent of the students’ education. The rest is picked up through generous scholarships. Most families pay between 10 and 30 dollars a month for their child to attend the school.
Kansas City has never had a major children’s musuem like a lot of big cities although there have been plenty of people over the year’s who have advocated for one and still do.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t places you can go NOW in our metro where kids can experience the wonder of discovery. We take you to a converted elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas where they’ve been filling kids with “wonder” since 1989. They call it Wonderscope.
In 1988, the Johnson County Commissioners established a task force to study programs and activities available for children and their families in the local community. The study concluded that there was a shortage of hands-on, interactive programs of interest to entire families. In response to that unmet community need, Wonderscope Children’s Museum was founded in 1989, offering exhibits and programs in a former elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas.
Also in 1989, Children’s Museum of Kansas City opened to its first group tours in the Carriage House of the Kansas State School for the Visually Handicapped. Marty Porter, the museum’s founder and executive director, had started conversations about a children’s museum in Kansas City, Kansas in 1984. In 1990, CMKC moved into the Indian Springs Shopping Center, offering exhibits, programming at the museum and through outreach, and the Recycled Materials Center.
In 2003, Beyond the Book incorporated to serve children and families with a unique hands-on approach to teaching children about the arts and sciences through literature. Beyond the Book was also committed to creating a leading-edge children’s museum experience in Kansas City.
In spring of 2006, the respective boards of Wonderscope and Beyond the Book agreed that it would be in the best interests of both organizations and the community to explore the potential for a collaborative approach to achieving the common vision for a large-scale children’s museum. In May 2007, Beyond the Book merged into Wonderscope, creating one combined entity, with a combined board, combined leadership and integrated programming. The merged organization began conversations with Children’s Museum of Kansas City. In May of 2008, Children’s Museum of Kansas City merged into Wonderscope Children’s Museum to become Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City, operating out of Wonderscope’s site in Shawnee. This merger effectively brought all of the children’s museum interests in the metropolitan area together to achieve the vision of developing a world-class children’s museum for Kansas City.
You probably don’t realize how much time is spent trying to figure out how to pay for education in Kansas and Missouri.
Did you know for instance, that in Kansas last year, 62 percent of the entire budget went to fund schools and universities? It’s so important that even the courts have got involved setting up one of the most contentious fights in this legislative session.
But should judges be telling lawmakers how much they should be spending in the classroom? As Sam Zeff reports, its an issue you could soon be deciding at the ballot box as the clash over education funding turns into a battle over how the state picks its judges.
Lead funding of KCPT’S reporting of education issues is funded in part by a generous grant from the Kauffman Foundation and additional civic funders.
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At first glance, you might not see much of a connection between the building of electric cars and at-risk, high school-aged kids, but MINDDRIVE, a Kansas City, Missouri-based non-profit, is making one. Producer Cara Myers profiles this local non-profit, where at-risk teens are not only building innovative electric vehicles, but they are also being inspired to learn and expand their vision of the future. When we’re so often told about the problems of young people, here’s a positive story for a change.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gordon Parks who is recognized as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
While the Fort Scott, Kansas native is best known for his iconic images in Life magazine, Parks, the youngest of 15 children was also a novelist, co-founder of Essence Magazine and a successful filmmaker.
When he passed away in 2006, he was eulogized as a true Renaissance man who constantly pushed boundaries and broke stereotypes.
Over the weekend here in Kansas City, Gordon Parks Elementary School threw a centennial celebration to honor the trailblazing artist at the historic Gem Theater. And Parks’ daughter, Toni Parks, flew in from London to join the musical salute to her late father.
At the Gem Theater, students from Gordon Parks Elementary performed the prologue of a new musical honoring the life of the school’s gifted namesake. The world premiere will be next June and the school hopes to perform it every year.
While we remember Parks’ photographs, he was an accomplished novelist and poet, and director of countless films, including the 1969 drama The Learning Tree which recounts his own experiences of racial discrimination growing up in rural Kansas.
Next week on KCPT, you’ll have the rare chance to take an intimate journey inside an American high school. With unprecedented access to students and teachers, 180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School explores a public school in Washington DC, one where only 7 percent of the students are deemed proficient in math, and the dropout rate is through the roof. Kansas City school superintendent Steve Green is facing many of the same challenges, and we’ll hear his reaction to this PBS series. But first here’s a sneak peek.
The Kansas City Star reported this week that the head of Johnson County Community College is retiring. We’re trying to book Terry Calaway on The Local Show. Along with increased enrollment during his five year tenure, Calaway is credited with bringing a lot of novel programs to JCCC which is consistently ranked as one of the best community colleges in the country.
People no doubt have heard about the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art which was added during his watch, but also, according to the article, they’ve also now got an on-campus farm. It supplies food for the campus cafe and its culinary program. And produce grown there also is sold to the community.
It’s part of the President’s big push to be more environmentally friendly including adding sustainability programs to the curriculum at the college.
As part of a new partnership of our own here at KCPT with broadcast students at JCCC, we get to take you to the farm this week.
This segment is the work of executive producer Amy Follmer and videographers Jordan Renzelman, Matt Lepley, Elizabeth Seidel, and Josh Browning.
If you would like to get your hands dirty, learn from urban farmers or lend a hand to your local farm, there is a community event on Saturday, November 10 from nine until noon. The location is the Gibbs Road Farm at 4223 Gibbs Road in KCK. Contact ami@cultivatekc.org for details.
Recently on the Local Show, we asked where the Garmins and the Cerners of the future would come from? We took you inside the Blue Valley School District’s 12 million dollar CAPS (Center for Advanced Professional Studies) building where the next generation of engineers and life science researchers are getting a head start while still in high school.
Believe it or not, students in the CAPS program have also created dozens of businesses and products…everything from rechargeable cell phones to a prosthetic knee brace. When the Chamber of Commerce talks about making Kansas City America’s most entrepreneurial city, is this where the next generation will come from?
Lead funding of KCPT’S reporting of education issues is funded in part by a generous grant from the Kauffman Foundation and additional civic funders.
Travel with us now to the Flint Hills of Kansas. Producer Sean Holmes recently joined Paul Dorrell of the Leopold Gallery in Brookside and a group of Paseo Academy student artists on a journey of creative inspiration.
Where will the next Garmin and Cerner of the world come from?
Growing entrepreneurs starts young. In the Blue Valley School District, it is starting in an innovative $12.5 million building where the next generation of entrepreneurs, engineers and life science researchers are getting a head start while still in high school.
It’s called the Center for Advanced Professional Studies or CAPS. While many high school biology students are learning about DNA from textbooks, there are teens here actually extracting it from the saliva glands of fruit fly larva.
More than 500 Blue Valley juniors and seniors are getting this opportunity in a program that’s fast getting national attention Producer Rich Miller takes us inside in the first of two parts about this program.
Believe it or not students in the CAPS program have also created dozens of businesses and products…everything from rechargeable cell phones to a prosthetic knee brace.
Some of these teenagers even have patents on their products. Next week on the Local Show, we meet some of those enterprising students.
Lead funding of KCPT’S reporting of education issues is funded in part by a generous grant from the Kauffman Foundation and additional civic funders.
