Missouri’s education commissioner will recommend that the Kansas City school district remain unaccredited.
The district had requested that it be provisionally accredited after two years of academic improvement, but Commissioner Chris Nicastro said that the improvement was still too tenuous to change the district’s accreditation status.
The stakes are high: Missouri has a statute that allows an unlimited number of students to transfer out of unaccredited districts and requires those district to pay their tuition. That law, passed in the early 1990s but only implemented once before, created chaos in the St. Louis area this summer and could potentially bankrupt districts there if it is not revised.
Whether or not students will transfer out of the Kansas City district will be determined by the outcome of a state Supreme Court case involving the law, which will be heard this fall. The courts upheld the transfer law in the St. Louis area this summer.
