5

CONFLICT IN SUBURBIA

Localism, Race, and Education in Johnson County, Kansas

In February 1966 Donald Sewing moved his young family to the tasteful J. C. Nichols community of Fairway in Johnson County. A thirty-five-year-old college graduate and Korean War veteran, Sewing had become a successful realestate broker and banker in Wyandotte County and wanted a better home and superior schools for his children. Like thousands of other parents who decided to settle in the area, he was seeking an improved standard of living and a chance to provide for his family’s future. But in one important respect the Sewings were different from their neighbors in Fairway and adjacent communities: they were African American.1

Donald Sewing’s decision to purchase a home in suburban Johnson County, Kansas, caused quite a stir in the normally placid pace of life there. A “traffic jam of cars driving past” quickly ensued, and a single picketer appeared in front of the house, who was invited in for a soda. But Fairway mayor Neale Peterson ordered the street blocked off and posted a police watch to ensure the family’s safety. Eventually life returned to normal, and Sewing later opened a real estate office in nearby Overland Park, although it closed before long owing to lack of business. He had purchased the Fairway home directly from the owner to avoid obstacles that blacks typically encountered from banks and real estate agencies. Sewing saw himself as “one of the active spearheads” of a movement to integrate suburbia, but his efforts ultimately had little effect on the racial composition of Johnson County. Despite his determination and a relatively small number of like-minded African American residents, the area remained overwhelmingly white.As a consequence, local controversies over schooling did not revolve around race as a major issue in that particular corner of metropolitan Kansas City.2

While discord focused on questions of segregation and inequity on the Missouri side of greater Kansas City, schools on the Kansas side became embroiled in a somewhat different set of problems. It was not that race lacked salience as a social issue there, as Sewing’s experience suggested, but rather that it did not pose an immediate challenge to local schools. Instead, suburbanites in affluent Johnson County struggled to find unanimity on a range of other questions, not least the need for a large and comprehensive school system. As in other wealthy communities, education became a critical element in suburban struggles to create and sustain distinctive local identities. These developments paralleled events elsewhere in the country, perhaps most notably in Southern California, when suburbanites asserted their independence as property owners in order to control neighborhood institutions. Such conflicts became perhaps the clearest manifestation of “localism” in suburban political culture when race was not an immediate or predominant concern.3

The Shawnee Mission School District (SMSD) in metropolitan Kansas City offered a window on these questions as it became a rapidly growing and widely admired school system during the postwar era. As noted in chapter 2, SMSD is located in Johnson County, Kansas, just over the state line from the affluent Sunset Hills neighborhood in southwest Kansas City, Missouri. Embracing communities such as Mission Hills, Fairway, and Prairie Village—all planned by J. C. Nichols, Kansas City’s legendary suburban developer—along with parts of Overland Park and other municipalities, it became both large and wealthy. It also contributed directly to the county’s rise as the region’s premier site for residential development.4 All was not well in SMSD, however. Many of its residents resisted the district’s consolidation as a unified school system in the 1960s, before a special act of the Kansas legislature finally compelled its formation in 1971. The struggle over the district’s organization yields insight into the politics of suburban schooling at the very time that it was becoming predominant across the country.

The Shawnee Mission schools provide a telling case of these dynamics in metropolitan Kansas City. A dozen small elementary districts served the various municipalities that Nichols and other builders had founded as separate housing developments, most launched with neighborhood associations that eventually became formal or informal branches of local government. These communities opposed efforts to create larger administrative units in the 1950s, expressing a preference for local control and an aura of exclusiveness that many strived to maintain. The Shawnee Mission High School District had long served the area, a source of immense local pride and positive publicity, not to mention high property values. But creating a single, large school system out of the area’s smaller elementary districts threatened the sense of intimacy and proximate influence that many SMSD residents prized. The subsequent disputes point to the conservative, inward-looking political culture of the area’s well-heeled communities. Nichols helped to foster a lifestyle that featured an ethos of neighborhood control and status consciousness that militated against the authority of larger governmental entities. For those concerned with maintaining a sense of privilege and extending advantages to their own children, the creation of a single school system spanning multiple communities threatened “bureaucracy at its worst.”5

Nichols’s upscale developments had appealed to growing desires to escape the city, creating a “bourgeois utopia” that contributed directly to the area’s growth.6 In the postwar era there can be little doubt that many Johnson County residents settled there to avoid the growing black and working-class population in the two Kansas City municipalities, one across the state line to the east in Missouri and the other just over the county line to the north in Kansas. These boundaries helped to shelter the suburbs from desegregation litigation in the 1960s and ’70s, and the area remained predominantly white.7 For all practical purposes, race was not a major factor in the school controversies that eventually afflicted northeast Johnson County.

Apart from distancing their suburban enclaves from nearby urban centers, the most affluent residents of SMSD also were concerned about maintaining status distinctions between themselves and neighboring suburban communities. Like suburbanites across the border in Missouri, they saw public schooling in proprietary terms, a limited resource to be supported and controlled for the benefit of residents in its immediate setting. This, of course, differed from the views of urban educators, planners, and political leaders, who had campaigned in earlier decades for greater bureaucratic control of schools and the development of centralized systems of governance and administration. Once ensconced in the suburbs, it seems that wealthy patrons of public education became devotees of home rule and the virtues of neighborhood institutions.8 They rejected the idea of larger, bureaucratically organized school system when it became a threat to their personal interests. Suburban fragmentation, after all, required more than just antipathy toward the big city; it also meant that some suburbanites had to distrust their neighbors. Creating large suburban school systems, consequently, was not always easy; as the history of SMSD demonstrated, it was sometimes fraught with conflict.

Suburban Development in Northeast Johnson County

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, Johnson County, Kansas, remained a largely agricultural enclave abutting the southwest border of Kansas City, Missouri. With the emerging industrial city of Kansas City, Kansas, immediately to the North, its truck farms served the region’s growing urban markets. Johnson County also presented a tempting prospect for developers seeking fresh territory to accommodate Kansas City’s growing middle- and upper-class population seeking refuge from the rough-and-tumble city. As a 1919 advertisement for Merriam, Kansas, put it, “If you desire a quiet, dignified home for yourself and family with pure country air, sunshine, shade and removed from the dirt and noise of industrial life and from the nervous strain and confusion of business centers and commercialism, this is the place for you.”9 Jesse Clyde (J. C.) Nichols was among the speculators selling such visions, a native of nearby Olathe, Kansas, who found the idea of developing suburban tracts in unincorporated Johnson County quite intriguing.10

Nichols eventually became well known for developing the “Country Club” district in southwest Kansas City and the Country Club Plaza, a retail showcase and one of the nation’s first shopping malls. He began building homes in Johnson County in 1909 and launched his first major development there in 1913, Mission Hills. Bordering Kansas City and just a short distance from the Ward Parkway mansions he was erecting for the Kansas City elite, it was intended to offer the appeal of living in “a restricted residence” neighborhood on the Kansas side of the border. Nichols planned Mission Hills to conform to the somewhat variegated contours of the land without a conventional street grid, unlike developments in Kansas City. He also built it in conjunction with a country club and golf courses, with memberships linked to home purchases. This became an inducement to the wealthy, and Nichols offered some of his most expensive and expansive homes in Mission Hills. Working with landscape architect Sid J. Hare, he “created a wonderland of irregularity” with pedestrian walkways, statuary, and abundant trees and other plantings. By the 1920s it was a great commercial success and opened the door to the development of other communities to the west and south in Johnson County in years to follow.11

Like other leading developers of his time, Nichols recognized that building successful “exclusive” communities involved at least two critical steps: getting the right people to purchase homes to start, and protecting property values once they did. This meant keeping the wrong people out, as Nichols had seen many Kansas City neighborhoods decline in value when less socially desirable groups began to settle nearby. He became a pioneer in the use of restrictive covenants written into property deeds that dictated building standards and forbade sales to blacks, Jews, and certain other ethnic or religious groups. Perhaps even more importantly, he insisted on membership in local neighborhood associations for all residents of his developments, a key enforcement mechanism for covenants and other exclusionary measures, including zoning provisions. While Nichols may have been a bit more open-minded than some of his real-estate magnate peers, occasionally selling homes to upstanding Jewish families, he was resolute in the principle of defending new developments from any threats to future market viability.12

Ringed by golf courses, Mission Hills was shielded from the possibility of encroachment from bordering communities. But Nichols left little to chance and soon moved ahead with plans to develop new communities to the west and south. These included Westwood, Fairway, and Prairie Village, all somewhat less extravagant than Mission Hills but with costs still well above average for the metropolitan area. Here, too, Nichols made restrictive covenants a key element of the development process, and apparently it helped to spur home sales. The association with Mission Hills and Nichols’s reputation for high-quality houses and planned development also contributed to the company’s success. It won national acclaim for community planning and design in Prairie Village, the last of these developments and by far the largest. Launched after the Great Depression, it grew rapidly in the initial postwar housing boom.13

Nichols stressed the importance of home rule, and initially this fell to the neighborhood associations he required home buyers to join. To one extent or another, these groups eventually gave rise to local governments. By design, they focused almost exclusively on domestic concerns, especially matters linked to the future attractiveness of the community.14 This came to have important implications for the schools, as neighborhoods became linked to particular institutions, and residents often identified closely with them.

Nichols’s communities in northeast Johnson County helped to set the tone for the area’s subsequent development. With Westwood and Prairie Village, he contributed to an image of affordable distinctiveness that came to characterize much of the area. Not everyone could live in Mission Hills, after all, but communities immediately around it benefited from its proximity. Judging from studies of the local social register, a very high proportion of the greater Kansas City elite lived in Nichols developments.15 Other builders followed his lead in launching similarly attractive developments in the vicinity, particularly the Kroh brothers, who established Leawood to the east and south of Prairie Village. In the years following World War II, thousands of families poured into the area, filling out these communities, but also neighboring Roeland Park, Mission, Merriam, Shawnee, and other small municipalities and unincorporated areas to the west.

While almost all these communities were predominantly white and middle class, there was a good deal of perceived and real status distinction as well. Some were former farm villages, and others were elegant and relatively new suburbs.16 Table 5.1 offers statistics on adult education levels, the proportion of men in professional and management jobs, and median household incomes, and they are quite telling. A range of differences are readily evident: residents of the Nichols communities and Leawood were clearly better educated, more likely to hold high-status jobs, and enjoyed higher income levels than their neighbors to the west. In the area’s older communities, such as Mission, Merriam, and Shawnee, income and education levels were well above those of urban areas across the state but substantially below those of the wealthiest neighborhoods.17 In short, the area embraced a range of social and economic categories, creating the possibility for dissension. One feature that all its residents shared for many years, however, was a single public secondary school.

TABLE 5.1 Social status indicators, select Johnson County communities, 1960

Source: United States Census Bureau, Census of Population: 1960 Kansas, vol. 1, pt. 18, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), section 4: General Social and Economic Characteristics.

*The published census tables in 1960 did not provide median income figures above $10,000 (about $73,000 in 2010 dollars).

Shawnee Mission Rural High School

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Johnson County offered few opportunities for secondary schooling. Some students living near the northern county line attended the large, well-respected public schools in Kansas City, Kansas, particularly Wyandotte High. Smaller, somewhat makeshift institutions served districts to the south. Families living in Mission Hills often sent their children to private schools, which Nichols had helped to establish, mostly on the Missouri side of the border. Eventually many attended Southwest High, located in Nichols’s nearby Sunset Hills neighborhood and the jewel of the Kansas City, Missouri, system. What the developing northeast portion of Johnson County lacked, however, was a comprehensive high school of its own.18

This void was filled in 1922 with the opening of Shawnee Mission Rural High School, established by a slim majority of local voters a year earlier in a special election. The school’s name reflected the two principal communities it served, Shawnee and Mission, and not the nearby site of the county’s original Shawnee Indian settlement, as students often imagined. The school was established as a rural secondary district serving a number of smaller primary districts scattered across the area, most with just a single school. This was a conventional approach to providing secondary schooling in rural parts of the state and elsewhere in the Midwest.19 What was unknown at the time, of course, was that northeast Johnson County would eventually experience rapid residential development, leading to calls for a larger, unified school system.

Shawnee Mission Rural was somewhat small at the start but eventually grew to more than a thousand students as enrollment mounted gradually through the 1920s and ’30s. The number of students began to increase rapidly, however, with the area’s development following the war, especially the Nichols communities to the west and south of Mission Hills. A student petition drive led to the “rural” designation in the school’s original name being dropped in the late 1940s, although it continued to appear in state reports. By the early ’50s the school was running a double shift, and there were discussions about the need for expansion.20 Within a relatively short time, the question of how best to organize the area’s rapidly growing schools demanded immediate attention.

In 1944 Howard McEachen arrived to serve as the rural secondary district’s leader. He was an admirer of progressive superintendent Carlton Washburn’s work in suburban Chicago, and local businessmen recruited him from down-state Pittsburg to strengthen local schools and promote the area’s development. McEachen remained the district’s superintendent for nearly a quarter century, overseeing its expansion and marshaling support for its eventual consolidation with local elementary schools. He was an experienced administrator interested in building a well-organized school system out of the area’s patchwork of districts. From the beginning, it seems, he realized that the task would not be easy, but he had big plans and set about energetically pursuing them.21

Among the first problems McEachen faced was rapid expansion in the area’s population. He had studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, and in 1952 he arranged for a team from that institution to conduct a survey of the district and make recommendations for its future. The visitors from New York examined many aspects of the local schools but focused on the area’s growth, especially the many “households with small children.” Moreover, they commented on the type of people who were moving to the district, and what it meant for the schools: “The people who have moved to Shawnee Mission have not done so because they sought the lowest cost housing and living conditions; they wanted something better. This desire for a higher standard of living should carry over to the school system, and from present evidence the people want exactly that.”22

Calling on experts from afar, of course, was a tried-and-true strategy for tilting local opinion in favor of greater investment in education, but it was only partially successful in the case of Shawnee Mission. As McEachen no doubt anticipated, the Teachers College team called for integration of the existing twelve school systems into a single district, arguing its necessity for purposes of efficiency and consistency in programming and standards. Certain elementary districts rejected the idea, however, as an abrogation of local control, reflecting the long-standing principles of home rule that Nichols had promulgated. Other recommendations received a more positive reception. McEachen’s former adviser Paul Mort led the team, which recommended establishing junior highs to relieve secondary enrollment pressure, and the eventual building of an additional high school as numbers increased.23 After a period of discussion, local voters approved the junior high proposal by a 3–1 margin, including construction bonds totaling more than $6 million, and within a year the plan was put into action.24 Shawnee Mission thus entered a period of rapid physical and geographic expansion, a time when it also would begin drawing national attention as a highly successful suburban school system. As suggested by reactions that greeted the recommendation to form a single district, however, finding a consensus on just how to organize such a system would not be easy.

Race, Education, and Suburban Affluence

The state line may have sheltered residents of Johnson County from racial strife on the Missouri side of greater Kansas City, but there was a history of local controversies over race and inequality to consider as well. African Americans had lived in the area since the nineteenth century, working on local farms and as domestics in more prosperous white households. While black and white children attended the same school for many years in Johnson County District No. 90, such integration ended in 1912, when whites moved to a larger, newer facility. As a result, the old building, named after businesswoman C. J. Walker, became the area’s only segregated black institution. By the latter 1940s it served more than forty students in two classrooms, one of which was taught by an uncertified teacher. When the district built an even larger and more modern building for whites in 1947, the local black community objected to its much older, dilapidated facility. Boycotting the Walker School for more than a year, they enlisted the assistance of Esther Brown, a local Jewish housewife, who helped them to raise money and eventually take their complaints to the Kansas Supreme Court.With assistance from the NAACP, in 1949 the case of Webb v. School District No. 90 was decided in favor of the plaintiffs, ending segregated schooling in Johnson County and establishing an important local precedent for the Brown v. Board decision five years later.25

The successful challenge to segregated schooling in Webb soon meant that the Shawnee Mission Rural High School District became modestly integrated, to the extent that the one hundred or so black families who lived in the area represented a substantial minority population. But it did not mean that everyone was happy about it, or willing to abide by any measure of integration in other aspects of community life. It took nearly a decade for the city of Merriam to incorporate the African American neighborhoods, providing them fire and police protection, and they still had to petition to be included in the local water district. Black students interested in attending high school were bused to Sumner Academy in Kansas City, Kansas, until the Webb decision; by 1950 some twenty of them were enrolled in Shawnee Mission High. This was a small fraction of the school’s student body, but more than could be found at most other suburban secondary institutions in the region. In this respect Johnson County was also a leader, however ambivalently. The area’s black population did not grow appreciably in years to come, signaling continued opposition to residential and social integration; African Americans generally were not welcome.26

A revealing case of such racial exclusion occurred in Westwood, a small, middle-class enclave in the northeast corner of the county, set between affluent Nichols neighborhoods and Kansas City, Kansas. A black couple, both teachers in the Kansas City, Kansas, schools, purchased a home there in 1964 with the assistance of a third party. While they were moving in, several men approached and asked what they had paid for the house, and offered to buy it for more than twice the original cost. They were reluctant to comply but soon learned that they were required to live within the school district where they worked in any case. They subsequently sold the house to another black family, who eventually agreed to accept the terms extended to the previous buyers. Although the details of this transaction were not fully reported in the press, it was almost certainly the work of a local neighborhood association determined to prevent African Americans from moving into the area. The fact that the original buyers were solidly middle class and college educated apparently did not matter. The opposition they encountered involved neither threats of violence nor public protest. Instead, it was quiet but also quite effective. It was a clear example of how African Americans who might have imagined that Johnson County could be welcoming were met with determined opposition from local white homeowners. Judging from the area’s very small black population throughout this period, less than 1 percent of the total, this approach to exclusion seems to have proved very effective.27

An incident such as this also sent a message to local real estate agents. If they were interested in remaining involved in the lucrative Johnson County housing market, they could not afford to represent African American home buyers. The Kansas City Star reported in 1968 that black families could not find a real estate agent to show them homes in Prairie Village or Mission, and those who managed to settle in other parts of the county were ignored by their white neighbors.28 In 1970 Donald Sewing opened his office in Overland Park. Located in a bungalow, it quickly became an object of controversy. He reportedly received threats, and a smoke bomb was tossed through a window, causing little damage. Sewing managed to sell homes to a small number of black families in the area but ultimately proved unable to persuade enough white homeowners to list their properties to make the office viable. While hardly a major event in local history, this episode underscored the perception of African Americans that Johnson County was not a hospitable environment for them.

Although local authorities may not have exhibited the sort of explicitly antagonistic attitudes associated with certain communities across the border in Missouri, they clearly did little to encourage blacks to consider settling there. The area’s comparatively high cost of living and its lack of proximity to black settlements on either side of the border certainly did not help. As a consequence, Johnson County, Kansas, remained overwhelmingly white throughout the long postwar era, without significant controversy over racial questions during the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s. This, of course, was yet another factor that doubtlessly added to its appeal among prospective home buyers, particularly those new to the area and with children.29

A Local and National Leader

From an early point in the postwar era, Shawnee Mission High School began to gain a reputation for excellence, as did other schools in the communities it served. This may have been partly due to McEachen’s leadership and publicity surrounding the Teachers College survey. Mostly, however, it was probably due to the school’s association with such desirable communities as Mission Hills and Fairway, among others. As indicated in chapter 2, the area featured the highest concentration of college-educated parents in the region, which accounted for much of the success of its students. This was clearly evident as early as 1960, which means it had been building during the preceding decade. Those fortunate enough to attend the high school would rub shoulders with the sons and daughters of the affluent and socially prominent families in the premier Nichols developments. It did not take long for the real estate industry to recognize the potential appeal of this to prospective home buyers. Home advertisements in the Kansas City Star featured references to Shawnee Mission High more than any other school from the latter 1940s through most of the following decade. As one real estate agent put it in 1958, “Johnson County has the tops in schools.”30

The rapid growth of area schools in the wake of suburban development gained attention across the metro area. In January 1955 the Star ran a story about the completion of Shawnee Mission’s four new junior highs and the expansion plans of many of the area’s elementary school buildings, also mentioning high school plans for the local parish in Roeland Park, St. Agnes.31 Three years later another Star article described plans to add a second high school, highlighting the local support Shawnee Mission experienced at the time. Noting that the Nation’s Schools, a trade magazine, had featured the district, the Star reporter marveled at the willingness of local residents to pay higher taxes and vote for bonds, and a dozen districts collaborating on a junior high curriculum. “They establish high standards of quality, space and design for their school buildings,” he exclaimed, “and still pay all of their teachers and administrators top salaries.”32 In other words, education meant a great deal in this segment of metropolitan Kansas City, and its residents were prepared to support it generously.

The high level of fiscal support for schools in northeast Johnson County reflected the area’s considerable wealth. As the Star noted, the district’s assessed valuation was fourth-highest in the state, and it was increasing. Local household income at the end of the 1950s, the highest in the five-county metropolitan area, was nearly double the national average. The district’s residents had higher levels of education, more white-collar workers, and greater home values than any other comparable area in the region. Located less than ten miles from downtown Kansas City, its communities attracted thousands of managers, professionals, and businessmen who commuted from the city center. Johnson County was the most rapidly developing residential area in greater Kansas City.33 These were conditions that many people were beginning to associate with highly desirable suburban schools, and Shawnee Mission certain seemed to fit the bill.

If there was any doubt about the quality of Shawnee Mission as an educational institution, it was dispelled in the fall of 1957 when both Time and Newsweek magazines declared it one of the best thirty-eight high schools in the country, based on the number of Merit Scholarship finalists it enrolled that year. With twenty-one students in this category, Shawnee Mission tied with Kansas City’s Southwest High, which was only about half as large, and had one more than Topeka High in the state capital, also featured on the list. Regardless of the proximity of these other institutions, Shawnee Mission’s inclusion in this exceptional national group added significantly to its luster. It was a distinction that no other suburban institution in the metropolitan area could claim.34 This could only make the district even more attractive to prospective home buyers interested in finding the very best schools for their children.

The year after Shawnee Mission received this recognition marked the end of an era, as the district opened its second high school in 1958, Shawnee Mission East. There was a debate about the name of the new school, with Shawnee Mission students petitioning McEachen and the board to give the new school a different name. They did not want their own institution to receive a new one, Shawnee Mission North. McEachen, on the other hand, argued that the new school would benefit from association with the Shawnee Mission reputation, and that his goal was to maintain the same level of excellence throughout the district. Consequently, the original high school became North, and its new sibling institution served the area’s wealthiest communities, including Mission Hills and much of Prairie Village. With this development the high school district lost some of its cohesiveness, an eventuality that McEachen hoped to forestall with a common point of identity.35 The dispute about school names, however, was yet another sign of rifts that would pose challenges in the years ahead.

Rapid growth characterized the years to follow. By 1960 the Shawnee Mission High School District enrolled more than eight thousand students and served an area population of over one hundred thousand. In two years enrollments increased by nearly 20 percent, as more families poured into the district’s growing communities, especially to the west and south of the historic J. C. Nichols developments. A third high school, Shawnee Mission West, opened in 1963, and two others were established in 1966 and 1969, South and Northwest. By the latter date the general population of the district had doubled, and more than forty thousand students were enrolled in all of the area’s public schools, nearly half in Shawnee Mission junior or senior high buildings. Altogether, the district embraced some seventy-four square miles, spanning the fashionable Nichols communities to the northeast and less exclusive, sparsely settled developments at its western edge. Although there was a long-standing pocket of black residents near the district’s center, the entire area was overwhelmingly white and middle class.36 Map 5.1 offers a depiction of the district at the peak of its enrollment in 1970, including its constituent communities and their schools.

There can be little doubt that the excellent reputation of the Shawnee Mission schools contributed to the area’s growth. In 1970 a local newspaper reported that Shawnee Mission East was among the top ten schools in the country for National Merit semifinalists, and that nearly eight out of ten district graduates went to college. In the years to follow, the district enrolled more than three out of four Johnson County students, and some observers suggested that the schools added as much as 20 percent to local property values.37 Only Wichita counted more high school students in Kansas, and Shawnee Mission had much higher taxable income and assessed valuation. Just two Kansas districts had greater household income levels, and both enrolled fewer than one hundred students. Household income also was higher than in any other Kansas City metropolitan district, on either side of the border. Even within Johnson County, Shawnee Mission income levels were double those of other districts.38 From the standpoint of financial and academic resources, it was in a class by itself.

MAP 5.1 Communities and schools upon formation of the Shawnee Mission District, 1971. Heavy lines demarcate high school attendance areas, reflecting the more sparsely populated communities to the west.

By the 1960s, real estate ads in the Kansas City newspapers featured fewer mentions of Shawnee Mission schools, perhaps because their reputation was so well known, and quality seemed similar throughout the district. This pointed to the success of McEachen’s strategy of establishing Shawnee Mission’s association with educational excellence. The district’s standing was evident in teacher applications; in 1961 more than fifteen hundred applicants vied for forty-eight positions.39 It was widely seen to be the best school system in the metropolitan area. Despite rapid growth, SMSD approached the pinnacle of achievement for an American suburban educational system. This was reflected in the local press; in 1967 the Kansas City Star ran an effusive six-part series on “the schools of northeast Johnson County,” describing their many advantages and posing questions about their success.40 Among the biggest problems, however, was the fact that they still had not achieved the status of a unified school district. The well-known high school district served an area with more than a dozen public educational agencies, posing questions about coordination in programs, hiring practices, and facility management that remained unanswered.

Trouble in Shangri-La: The Dilemma of District Unification

One of the major problems facing postwar Kansas, like many other midwestern states, was school consolidation. The state had undertaken one round of school reorganization immediately after the war, but by the latter 1950s it still counted nearly twenty-eight hundred separate districts, most of them single elementary buildings with rural constituencies. Separate rural high school districts served these districts, typically in sparsely populated areas. Following a failed attempt in 1961, the state legislature passed a measure calling again upon districts to consolidate. The goal was to make all of them larger than four hundred students, less than two hundred square miles in size, and with at least $2 million in assessed valuation. It was an act clearly aimed at the state’s many tiny rural districts, but it also held important implications for northeast Johnson County.41

The school consolidation legislation required that all proposed mergers be approved by a majority of registered voters living in affected districts. This was meant to protect smaller districts from being compelled to join larger ones against the wishes of their constituents. In practice, it became a form of veto power in the hands of opponents to consolidation, but the state legislature made it clear that only unified school districts would be eligible for additional state aid. This proved a powerful incentive, and despite considerable opposition in the state’s western districts, most did merge with others, reducing the total to just 311 by 1969. As a consequence, the average size of a Kansas school district rose from 167 students in 1958 to more than 1,700. By the later 1960s, enormous progress was made in bringing greater efficiency and uniformity to the state’s public schools.42 The principal exception, however, was the twelve districts in northeast Johnson County, all operating within the attendance boundaries of Shawnee Mission’s secondary schools.

School consolidation was controversial in rural areas, and not just in Kansas. Historians have documented the bitter disputes that it sparked in Iowa and other states.43 But northeast Johnson County was quite unlike the rural districts that typically resisted such measures. As indicated earlier, many of its residents were affluent, highly educated, culturally sophisticated, and likely familiar with the principles of efficiency and standardization associated with school consolidation. The values of localism and home rule, however, became a counterweight. A study group of superintendents from the district had considered changes for the future in 1962 but expressed considerable skepticism about unification. “We do not agree,” they wrote, “that weaknesses or inequities exist in all schools because of the reasons given in the state survey.” They also rejected the idea that greater coordination was necessary to connect the area’s high schools to the elementary districts, asserting “we fail to find in the schools of the Shawnee Mission District, any interruption in the educational program as children pass” from one level to the other.44 Even though the report was only informational, such statements were a troubling portent.

The Kansas legislature took up school consolidation again in 1963. New regulations called for a planning committee in each of the state’s counties, and a special one for the Shawnee Mission area, making a total of two in Johnson County. These were groups of local citizens, typically excluding educators and board members, charged with drawing up proposals for consolidation that voters could decide on. In the case of Shawnee Mission, the planning committee drafted a proposal to merge the area’s twelve elementary districts with the Shawnee Mission High School District, and to call the newly consolidated system the Shawnee Mission School District. Despite objections from certain elementary boards and misgivings on the planning committee, recommendations seemed to proceed smoothly, and the local election was scheduled for June 2, 1964, in conjunction with similar ballots across the state.45

On the eve of the voting it was difficult to predict the outcome in northeast Johnson County. The report of the planning committee noted the variability in programs and resources that existed across the twelve elementary districts, arguing that consolidation promised greater uniformity and coordination of resources and curricula. Supporters of the plan included Shawnee Mission district leaders, naturally, but also several area elementary boards, the League of Women Voters, and the Kansas City Star. On the other hand, at least five of the elementary boards passed resolutions opposing the plan, claiming that it did not make a clear case for the advantages of unification, and additional critics raised other objections, including concerns about rising costs. The Star reported that some observers predicted that the proposal would fail, noting the spontaneous applause that its opponents received from mothers at local information meetings. Despite this, there was no organized opposition spanning the area, and Shawnee Mission officials suggested that unification was unavoidable even if local voters rejected it, because of sentiment in the state legislature. Once a majority of counties approved local plans, they believed it was only a matter of time before unified districts would be mandated everywhere.46

Local school leaders may have been prepared for a defeat in some of the area’s elementary districts, but they doubtless were surprised by the one-sided tally when all ballots were counted. In a rather light turnout, voters rejected the plan to create a single school district by a nearly 2–1 margin, 5,733 to 2,954. While the vote was close but favorable in some of the western elementary districts, along with the older communities of Shawnee and Merriam, it failed heavily in others, including those where boards had opposed it. The local press provided daily coverage of the election but revealed only glimpses of the opposition. Much of it reportedly involved fears about loss of local control over the elementary schools that served the area’s many separate municipalities. Some residents also expressed concern about the creation of a large district comprising more than forty schools and forty thousand students, fearing loss of “special programs” and “rapport between mothers and school officials.” It was a big change from the highly localized, personal, and treasured experiences of schooling that many associated with their immediate communities. As much as residents valued the advantages of the Shawnee Mission’s secondary schools, many felt no compelling reason to heed the call for system building.47

Given the criteria used by the state to guide consolidation, most districts in the area met basic requirements for independence in terms of enrollments and expanse and hence probably felt little urgency regarding unification. They all had sufficient resources, but some residents reportedly feared that joining the high school district would result in higher taxes by bringing all personnel under a single compensation plan. It is telling, however, that the core of opposition to the unification plan was located in the Roesland, Corinth, and Prairie elementary districts, along with District 110, which all served communities established by J. C. Nichols in the northeast quadrant of the area. This included Mission Hills, Prairie Village, Fairway, and Westwood, among others.48

These communities had a history of resistance to other forms of governmental unification and reorganization. A decade earlier citizens of Mission had resoundingly voted down a proposed merger with Roeland Park, which county officials hoped would lead to larger municipalities in the area.49 In 1956 the mayor of Prairie Village rejected the idea of merging with other communities, noting that “Johnson County residents moved to escape large cities.” Another proposal in 1957, to combine water districts, met “vigorous opposition to consolidation from councilmen in Mission Hills, Prairie Village, Fairway and Mission Woods.”50 Many residents of these areas preferred government on a small scale and rejected efforts to create larger administrative entities, sentiments that apparently extended to the schools.

Elsewhere in the state, school consolidation met the greatest resistance in rural districts faced with the prospect of merging with adjacent urban areas. Voters in these areas often balked at paying for upgrades to local institutions in order to meet higher standards. On the other hand, consolidation succeeded in areas that had undergone significant population growth, and where the number of school districts was high, similar to system-building campaigns in the cities in earlier years.51 Johnson County was the principal exception to both these rules. In the case of the proposed Shawnee Mission consolidation, it was the oldest, most urbanized areas that rejected unification and not the least-populated districts. Johnson County had more separate school districts (thirty-nine) than any other comparable part of the state, and one-third of them were within the boundaries of the Shawnee Mission High School District. Its population also was growing very rapidly. Given these circumstances and responses elsewhere, unification should have been approved handily.52

But despite complaints from planners and school officials, most people in the wealthiest portions of the proposed Shawnee Mission district were quite happy with the existing order of things. They apparently saw little advantage to creating common standards and expectations across area schools, or reorganizing administrative systems for greater uniformity. And some worried that consolidation would mean loss of control and a new school bureaucracy, a big change from the intimate connections that many felt with local institutions. Boards of local residents governed the elementary districts, fostering a sense of familiarity and informality that many in these communities did not want to lose.53 Notwithstanding arguments about the need for a more coherent organization of schooling, they had little interest in pursuing a best or better system. Their affluence undoubtedly made the prospect of state aid for area schools less alluring as well.

The lopsided negative vote appears to have caught school leaders off guard, creating considerable uncertainty about just how to proceed. Initially there was talk of holding another election, but the state attorney general’s office ruled that a second ballot would have to consider a different proposal, such as organizing the district some other way. Some voices called for breaking the secondary district into pieces, perhaps four or five, each with its own high school, to form smaller unified districts. “We all wanted more local control,” declared one representative of an elementary district, “and [this plan] comes closest to that.” Expressing a fear of centralized control that would have been quite uncharacteristic of affluent school patrons fifty years earlier, she added, “in my opinion, a 9-member single unified board puts too much power in the hands of too few people.” Other opponents of unification were more plainspoken, outraged at the prospect of having their views ignored. “We’re having unification rammed down our throats,” declared one, “and we should have a chance to vote whether or not we want it.” When the local election’s negative vote did not settle the question, it seemed that the democratic process had been thwarted, contributing to indignation. But no one seemed to know what to do next.54

The unification planning committee rejected the idea of breaking the district into pieces, as did Shawnee Mission’s board and administration, along with other proponents of the original unification plan.55 The result was an impasse that lasted for several years. Many observers dismissed the idea of a second vote, describing it as “doomed to defeat,” and an alternative plan was slow to develop.56 Opponents of unifying the area’s elementary districts with Shawnee Mission had succeeded in blocking the initial proposal for a single school system. Whether they could ultimately prevail in staving off consolidation altogether, however, was another question.

The initial wave of school consolidation ballots across the state of Kansas in 1964 turned out to be momentous, as voters in thirty-four counties approved the formation of unified districts. The other districts in Johnson County unified quite readily. Elsewhere patrons of particular schools objected to consolidation plans and eventually negotiated more acceptable terms of unification, and in some instances unification proposals—as in Shawnee Mission—were rejected outright.57 The direction of change was clear, however, and within several years the vast majority of the state’s districts had been reorganized. These new school systems were assigned the title Unified School District (USD) with three-digit numbers starting with 100 and counting up in order of their dates of formation. As more districts moved ahead in the process, it appeared that the plan for rationalizing and simplifying the state’s educational system was a success.58 By 1968 just a few areas had managed to avoid consolidation, and the largest one by far was in northeast Johnson County.59 Shawnee Mission was the last big piece preventing the school organization puzzle from being completed, and it turned out to be a complicated one.

Given the resoundingly negative result of the SMSD unification ballot, the state legislative delegation from Johnson County was reluctant to endorse a move by the legislature to require unification of area districts. Local resistance continued to be evident in 1968, when a bill was introduced to force the remaining unconsolidated districts in the state to complete the amalgamation process. At least two elementary districts, Prairie and Roesland, issued statements calling for another election to approve new consolidation plans. Proponents of alternative proposals bandied them about, but none could gain support of a majority of the districts. Like opponents of unification elsewhere, protesters complained about the idea of a single district being “forced” on them.60 Once again, they expressed fears about “losing identity in a larger district,” and rising taxes, especially for funds to pay for schools in other communities.61 Local legislators heard appeals for one plan or another, sharply dividing some communities. But others in Topeka were losing patience with the “emotionalism” opposing unification in the last major area in the state to complete the process.62

As legislation to require unification moved forward in 1968, Shawnee Mission leaders asked for additional time to commission a study. They feared that simply mandating consolidation could inflame its opponents, creating bitterness that would last for years. Consequently, a “national consulting firm” conducted a survey to make recommendations about how best to organize the local schools. The final report, written by Emerson Mitchell, a New York expert on school board organization, called for the formation of a single unified district, quite similar to the proposal voted down in 1964. Although opponents of unification criticized it, the report provided local legislators with a rationale to go forward with consolidation.63 A complex process of negotiation resulted in a “compromise” plan, calling for a board elected partly from five attendance areas and establishing “local advisory boards” to ensure greater “neighborhood voice.”64 This unique governance structure proved acceptable to a number of opponents to consolidation. Although considerable unhappiness about it still existed, there was little the opposition could do. The acceptance of unification elsewhere, the failure of alternative proposals, and action in the state legislature all contributed to a sense of inevitability in the decision. Finally, in 1971, a special act of the legislature created the consolidated Shawnee Mission School District, USD 512—the highest-numbered public school district in the state.65

Unification took longer to accomplish than local leaders had planned, but the new district emerged as the leading suburban school system in the metropolitan area and probably the best in Kansas academically. Skeptics continued to express doubts about the wisdom of turning their cherished local schools over to such a big organization, and predictions of tax increases turned out to be prescient in several of the elementary districts, as teacher and administrator pay scales were standardized and facilities were improved. Howard McEachen retired in 1967, and it is possible that his departure defused some of the controversy over unification. His successor, Arzel Ball, brought a somewhat different style of leadership and a sense of openness to innovation.66 The district remained one of the wealthiest in the nation, and overall levels of satisfaction with its schools were high. The years to come would bring further change, and although few may have realized it at the time, unification was just one step in an ongoing series of conflicts. New challenges lay ahead.

The End of an Era: Decline and Displacement

Despite predictions of continued growth that alarmed opponents of unification, Shawnee Mission experienced declining numbers of students during the 1970s, along with controversies over school closings and reductions in staff. This occurred in other districts too and was principally due to the end of the baby-boom era, when diminishing birthrates led to smaller school-age cohorts.67 It was a new experience for most residents of northeast Johnson County, however, as their numbers had increased for more than twenty-five years, often rapidly. Perhaps even more disconcerting, new residential development shifted south of the district, especially after large office complexes appeared there in the 1980s. The rise of Overland Park as the county’s principal economic engine, with a growing downtown business center just beyond the district’s southern boundary, signaled a new chapter in local history.

These changes, however, did not alter the concerns that opponents of the district’s unification had expressed, and rancor continued to exist. In 1973 Representative Earl Ward of Mission Hills introduced a bill in the legislature to break the district into five smaller ones, each with a high school. “There are a lot of people living in the district who think they don’t have control over their school matters anymore,” he declared, and he also reported considerable unhappiness with rising taxes. Superintendent Ball intimated that Ward’s constituents were concerned about paying for schools in the growing western reaches of the district, highlighting tensions that had long existed. But the controversy also pointed to the aging population in the wealthiest communities, perhaps contributing to less interest in the schools.68 Eventually the emergence of the Blue Valley School District to its south would challenge Shawnee Mission’s status as the region’s premier school district. Serving much of Overland Park and Leawood, Blue Valley began developing a reputation as the metropolitan area’s most academically high-performing system in the 1980s.69

Enrollment losses are always difficult for school systems, but the experience turned out to be especially trying for Shawnee Mission. Many of its patrons continued to view schools as vital local institutions, and this provoked sharp opposition to school closings. In particular, area residents aggressively resisted the suggestion that neighborhood schools should be shuttered. Protests of school closings are commonplace, but in Shawnee Mission it was particularly contentious. As before, the reaction appeared most visibly in the district’s older, more affluent neighborhoods. Residents filed lawsuits to prevent any buildings being closed without a vote of affected patrons, which would effectively block the closings. It turned out that the legislation creating the district did not clearly establish its authority to close schools without such votes, and the threat of legal action was successful in blocking district plans.70 Protesters were unmoved by arguments citing the inefficiency of low-enrollment schools, some noting that enrollments had been low before the district’s unification, and no one had suggested closings then. They also argued that smaller classes contributed to a higher-quality educational experience. When the district suggested that some facilities were outdated or in ill repair, parents hired their own consultants to evaluate the buildings and disputed the board’s claims. Once again, there was a strong tendency to view local educational institutions in largely proprietary terms and to depict district leadership as a threat to neighborhood prerogatives.71

Eventually district leaders had to turn again to the state legislature for a special bill authorizing them to close schools without a vote of local constituents, a power normally granted to urban districts but not rural ones. Here, too, the tentativeness of legislators pointed to the range of reactions these questions spawned in particular communities. Constituents felt protective of neighborhood institutions and often viewed the district as usurping local authority. In the eyes of some, it was an example of big government at work on a local scale. If they were being asked to pay such high taxes, many asked, why were they being told that their schools had to be closed? As a board member pointed out at the time, the closings affected less than 3 percent of the district’s students, yet the protests effectively stymied the district’s authority. It took several years for Shawnee Mission to finally gain approval to close schools without a local referendum, once again through special legislation in Topeka.72

Yet other signs of restiveness appeared. In the 1980s a levy ballot was somewhat close for the first time in district history, apparently because older residents in wealthy Mission Hills and surrounding communities voted against it. Many of these households no longer had children living at home or attending public schools, and some doubtless were disenchanted with recent conflicts over school closings. New superintendent Raj Chopra noted that younger families with children were moving into neighborhoods to the south, particularly the more rapidly growing developments in Leawood and Overland Park, mostly served by Blue Valley schools.73 Once the premier school system of the region, Shawnee Mission was racked by conflict and dissension and was losing population to neighboring districts that did not have to contend with such contentious issues.

Despite these problems and reports that the district was losing status, it had not declined as much as some constituents may have feared. Its schools were still widely admired, and even after the school closings they were widely considered to be among the best in the region. In the early 1980s the district won national recognition for its board and leadership, and three-quarters of its students exceeded national norms on achievement tests.74 But there can be no question that other parts of Johnson County began to rival it, both in terms of school quality and in general measures of community affluence, civic involvement, and political influence. The political infighting had done little to advance the district to new heights of distinction, and as Johnson County’s population continued to expand in the 1980s and beyond, new centers of scholastic excellence were destined to emerge.75

The Shawnee Mission Experience in Perspective

Northeast Johnson County developed as a patchwork of communities, reflecting a variety of income and social status positions ranging from very affluent to merely middle class. It also was a hodgepodge of small school districts, dating to the years when the area was principally rural and agricultural. This system of highly localized governance and community control contributed to high levels of financial support for the schools and parental involvement in education. But considerable inequality existed between communities, and this created the possibility of dissension as well; status distinctions divided the district. As communities grew in the 1950s and ’60s, both because of rapid in-migration and the baby boom, schools expanded and new buildings were erected to keep pace. But not everyone agreed that creating a single comprehensive public education system was desirable. High-status residents of the J. C. Nichols communities apparently had doubts about it, even though they included significant numbers of the greater Kansas City social and economic elite. As controversies over district unification and school closings suggested, the size of the system and loss of control proved disconcerting to many area residents, especially those who valued local prerogatives. Unlike earlier generations of metropolitan elites, they were not proponents of bureaucratic efficiency and expert control. They preferred local authority in school affairs and resisted plans to establish a highly centralized and professionalized administrative structure for the district as a whole.76

As reported in chapter 2, sociologists Basil Zimmer and Amos Hawley found that affluent suburbanites in large urbanized areas during the later 1960s experienced a “localization of daily life” that influenced their attitudes about consolidation of governmental authority. Compared to city residents, or even suburbanites in less affluent communities, those living in wealthy areas like northeast Johnson County expressed the greatest opposition to the consolidation of local institutions or service organizations. This was especially true regarding schools, an issue that produced the greatest divergence in urban/suburban attitudes measured by Zimmer and Hawley’s survey. Highly educated, affluent suburbanites heavily favored local control of schools, without state or federal involvement, and were willing to pay higher taxes to support them.77 As the Shawnee Mission experience demonstrated, they even resisted consolidation with other suburban schools. They preferred small, intimate education organizations, where direct involvement and influence in academic issues could be realized most easily. For many of these suburbanites, schools became an amenity reflected in the price of a new home, analogous to a membership in the local country club. Consolidation threatened that, even if it promised to strengthen the educational system and ultimately improve outcomes for greater numbers of children.

As suggested earlier, the controversies in Shawnee Mission exhibited political dynamics similar to those described by historians in other suburbs during this era. Like the affluent suburbanites who expressed outrage at the prospect of their children being bused in the South, or the “suburban warriors” who dominated school board elections in Southern California, they viewed the schools as part and parcel of the life they purchased in these communities. They actively opposed proposals that appeared to threaten or compromise local control of these resources, including racial integration on a large scale. The resistance of area school leaders to the 1977 metropolitan school coordination plan offered by the Kansas and Missouri advisory committees of the US Commission on Civil Rights was yet another example of this type of response. As such conflicts demonstrated, these suburbanites had little interest in suggestions that schools should serve such larger purposes as promoting greater social understanding or bridging the racial and socioeconomic divisions that fractured most metropolitan areas.78 They were even opposed to arguments based on the need for creating uniform standards of performance and greater efficiency, ideas that had animated earlier generations of affluent metropolitan residents. Instead, they favored local autonomy, the preservation of neighborhood values, and the full utilization of proximate resources for the schools, even at greater cost. At bottom, it was an attitude fundamentally at odds with the ideal of “equality of opportunity,” reflecting wider conflicts in American culture at the time. It also was a repudiation of bureaucratic, professional principles that had guided the development of American public education for most of the twentieth century, even if it did not ultimately succeed in the case of Shawnee Mission.

In the end, the development of SMSD was symptomatic of social and cultural forces then shaping the development of high-status suburban school districts. Howard McEachen’s insistence on maintaining a common Shawnee Mission identity for all the area’s secondary schools, and the importance of the district’s reputation for local residential development, established a logic of consolidation that promised to extend benefits to some areas at the expense of others. Those with the least to gain from this change, the prosperous communities whose educational and cultural advantages were already clearly established, resisted it the most. Some objected to paying for schools in neighboring communities and may have resented sending money to Topeka to support schools elsewhere. And they were often unhappy with a district leadership seen as remote and bureaucratic. These constituents rejected the administrative cult of efficiency, wanting to maintain a suburban idyll that preserved localist privileges. The fact that they failed to stop the district’s formation does not diminish the significance of their resistance. Their dogged commitment to localism signaled a distinctive logic regarding public education, linking it firmly to a particular place and proximate control.

Shawnee Mission may have been unique in the state of Kansas, both with respect to its degree of wealth and the severity of local opposition to consolidation, but it reflected impulses that were evident elsewhere in greater Kansas City. Localist initiatives surged in other local suburban districts. But a state legislature focused on rural school consolidation, and unwilling to countenance affluent suburban preferences, constrained resistance to change in Johnson County. Even so, conflicts along the lines of social class and income continued to be evident for many years, reflecting community distinctions that J. C. Nichols had established decades earlier. As indicated earlier, race did not appear to have been a critical factor in these events, despite the significant role that racial exclusion played in the immediate area’s development. Indeed, the foregoing suggests that racial conflict was not a necessary component of localist perspectives on schooling in the suburbs.

Many observers celebrated the success of Shawnee Mission’s schools, but gaining consensus on the district’s policy priorities and any number of other questions proved extremely difficult (and often remains so today). Shawnee Mission suffered from a fractured education polity, defined by the particular cultural and economic identities of the places its residents called home. This, of course, was contrary to long-standing principles of shared public responsibility in schooling and the democratic ideals of the common school, not to mention the mechanisms of bureaucratic control and centralized authority. As such, it foreshadowed the widening social and economic inequality that came to increasingly characterize education in American metropolitan life in years to come.