This spring there may be two Jewish faces on the Kansas City (Missouri) Public Schools (KCPS) Board of Education following the election set for April 2.
Rita Cortes, 53, who is the director of Menorah Heritage Foundation and is also licensed to practice law, is running in Sub-district 1 against incumbent Matthew Oates.
Mark Wasserstrom, 69, is a retired lawyer who is running against D. Jensen Adams in Sub-district 5. There is no incumbent.
Neither candidate has relatives in KCPS, but both are passionate about Kansas City and its public schools.
Cortes’ district roughly covers the area from 31st to 85th and State Line to Oak — the southwestern corridor. She grew up in this district at 70th Terrace and Ward Parkway and attended Barstow and what is now Pembroke Hill. She now lives between Brookside and the Plaza.
Wasserstrom said about a third of his district is west of Troost — basically the Southeast High School area. His district goes from 43rd on the north to 85th on the south, and from Brookside Boulevard to Blue Ridge Boulevard. He has lived in a house east of Troost for the last 20 years.
Rita Cortes
“I have always believed that people in healthy communities care about each other’s kids and want every kid to have access to a quality education,” she said.
She believes one of the challenges facing the school district is staying on the positive trajectory to reinstate full accreditation of the district. She said the most recent information from the state indicates the district is on the right path.
“Full accreditation is a fundamental expectation of the school district; and it’s not the end, it’s the beginning,” she said.
Another big challenge according to Cortes is making the community aware of the great things that are happening in the district. She said the district does a good job of communicating with parents and students, but there seems to be a disconnect between the sense of the community about the school district and the reality of what’s happening there.
“There’s a really positive opportunity to let the community know more and as a result probably be more supportive of the direction they’re headed,” she said. “There are some really great things happening within the district, but more often than not what you see is negative news.”
Cortes also said education innovation and finding a path to collaboration and partnership with some of the charter schools is important.
“The numbers suggest that charters continue to significantly impact the district, so from a board standpoint it’s really about empowering and encouraging the superintendent to pursue some of these opportunities,” she said.
If elected, Cortes said she hopes to be the type of board leader that will empower the superintendent and hold him appropriately accountable.
“Being superintendent is an incredibly difficult job and one of the things you hope as a strong board member is to create the groundwork for your professional leader to take some risks, to innovate, to seek out partnerships that traditionally have been avoided or were less preferred,” she said.
Cortes has held many leadership roles over the past 30 years, which she said has given her the tools to be that kind of board leader. She served on the board of Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy for about 10 years and was on the boards at Notre Dame de Sion and Pembroke Hill. She also served on the board at Truman Medical Centers, chairing their capital assets committee.
In addition, she spent 20 years running the family construction business, Hoffman Cortes Contracting Co.
“One of the things I’m often recruited to be involved with is capital asset committees or facilities committees, and in a complex organization like the public schools that’s certainly an area of significant oversight by the board as well — the physical plant, how assets get maintained and how you manage the economic needs to keep those facilities in good order. Particularly in the public schools; you’ve got a lot of aging facilities,” she said.
What Cortes would like to see is young people coming back or staying in Kansas City, whether downtown, on the east side or the southwest corridor, and seeing the public school system as a viable option when they get ready to educate their children.
“From a citywide perspective the health or quality of our public schools is the ceiling for our growth as a city. So let’s make that ceiling high,” she said.
Cortes tutors Bar and Bat Mitzvah students, sits on the board of the Midwest Innocence Project and is on the advisory board of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, which was part of her Jewish education growing up. She is a member of Congregation Beth Shalom.
Mark Wasserstrom
“Of all the problems we have in our society, there are a couple of problems that have been around ever since I’ve been alive. One is race,” Wasserstrom said. “Kansas City has historically been as racist a community as there is in the United States.
“I’m not saying the people here are bad; I love the people in Kansas City, but it’s just that part of the territory is that we’re a racist community,” he said.
Wasserstrom said no one has a magic answer to solve racism, but if you want to do something meaningful about race, the place to start is by having lunch with black people, socializing, going to movies with them, going to services with them and including them in your network of co-workers and friends.
“By working on the school board, among other things, I’ll be working with my share of black people in the community. That’s a positive thing by itself,” he said.
He believes schools have always been important, but thinks the schools in Kansas City are “pitiful.” He said the one thing they’re good about is propaganda, touting how wonderful the schools are.
“If they’re so good, why is everybody fleeing, and the school population has dropped from 70,000 students to 15,000,” he said. “None of this is a secret, but people just don’t like talking about it. I don’t know how productive it is to moving forward in a positive fashion if you’re not dealing with problems openly and honestly.”
Wasserstrom said in order for KCPS to attain full accreditation, it has to meet the criteria of the state three consecutive years, yet the state changes the criteria every year.
“You can say the first thing is to get Kansas City fully accredited and in some sense that should be the number one priority, but in a larger sense I look at the role of schools as forming citizens, of building character, of building a community, which is a higher purpose — perhaps the highest purpose of education,” he said. “We cannot shape a community unless the schools include the entire community. And a good portion of the community has decided not to use the public school system.”
He said Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell has said that the buildings are in serious disrepair. Yet after having spent $2 billion to build new buildings, nobody has bothered to maintain them and they’re about to fall apart.
“(Dr. Bedell) mentioned in passing last month at a board meeting that he’s going to ask for a half a billion dollars to do some necessary maintenance for the schools,” Wasserstrom said. “I’m not too sure how excited the voters in Kansas City are going to be to spend a half a billion dollars to repair some schools they’re not using.”
Wasserstrom would like to see more neighborhood schools in the district — not magnet schools or ones where students are bussed, but ones they can walk to. He said it would free up students’ time to do more extracurricular activities.
“The issue is having Kansas City be a vibrant community where all parts of a community come together and it’s difficult to have an integrated school system unless you have full participation of the white community in the public school system,” he said. “I’d like to do my part to try to make sure that kids who go through the public schools get a good education.”
Wasserstrom attends services at The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah and Temple Israel. He also “attends” an internet synagogue out of Loveland, Ohio. He is president of B’nai B’rith Kansas City Lodge 184. For many years, he was active in B’nai Jehudah’s Brotherhood.
