KCRag Forum

KCACJef wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:22 pmInteresting how these lines were fuzzy back then.
Where I live now they don't allow any out of district admissions and have prosecuted some people for breaking the rules by registering children at a relatives house.

herrfrank wrote: ↑Wed Oct 26, 2022 9:58 am

KCACJef wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:22 pmInteresting how these lines were fuzzy back then.
Where I live now they don't allow any out of district admissions and have prosecuted some people for breaking the rules by registering children at a relatives house.

The lines weren't fuzzy between districts usually -- Blue Valley always started at I-435; Olathe was west of Pflumm (I think). But when the JC Nichols company decided, back in the early 1920s, to include a chunk of Kansas in the boomtown residential district being laid out, "the Country Club district", they had several perception problems among KC citizens. Kansas was perceived as hayseed and hicksville. The Missouri side was more sophisticated. Plus the geography of the Missouri part -- the plateau from Sunset Hill south to Waldo, gave itself to a broad north-south residential axis along Ward Parkway, whereas the Kansas part was hilly interspersed with extensive waterways.

Nichols' main problem was the Missouri land was too good for the several golf courses he wanted to include, so he needed to expand into Kansas and use the lowlands by the creeks. Fun fact: today's Carriage Club was the clubhouse for drinks and dining for JCN's first golf course in the Country Club district (now Mission Hills CC). Johnson County was still dry when MHCC opened, so golfers had to cross State Line for the 19th hole. The county's alcohol rule was changed by the time KCCC opened (and I wager JCN had lobbyists working that angle throughout the 1920s).

Anyhow, the secondary problem was this perception among Missouri peeps about Kansas. So Nichols decided to make the Kansas enclave grander -- larger lots, more like country estates, and he incorporated it as its own city, Mission Hills. He also ensured that the schools serving Mission Hills residents (Prairie School and what is now called SM North HS) would allow kids to remain among their Missouri confreres (at Border Star and Southwest HS). That arrangement was reciprocal, probably at Topeka's insistence, but a modest tuition was required.

Anyhow, some famous Mission HIlls, Kansas residents went to Southwest HS in Missouri in the 1930s and 1940s -- the writer Evan Connell notably, who lived on Drury Lane. By the 1960s, when SME was built and the SMSD had come into its own, this reciprocal arrangement was rarely used, but it remained in place. Then the riots happened, and Southwest had its famous decline. In the 1970s and 1980s, dozens of kids were attending SME every year under the reciprocal arrangement. And it was in the end the Kansas side which shut it down, presumably because the cost was now going onto Kansas books rather than KCMO books as the flow had been in earlier decades.