Fall 2021 Journal

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JOURNAL

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V O L U M E 13 •

ISSUE 4 •

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Making a Home for

FAT H E R K A PA U N

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PHOTOGRAPHY

(Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation.

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com

The Kansas Leadership Center equips people with the ability to make lasting change for the common good.

KLC focuses on leadership being an activity, not a role or position. Open to anyone seeking to move the needle on tough challenges in the civic arena, KLC envisions more Kansans sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good.

KLC MISSION

To foster civic leadership for healthier Kansas communities

JOURNAL

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CONTRIBUTORS

MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Green 316.712.4945 cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Sam Smith 316.712.4955 ssmith@kansasleadershipcenter.org SENIOR DIRECTOR OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Shaun Rojas 316.712.4956 srojas@kansasleadershipcenter.org

BARBARA SHELLY

Contributing Editor

ART DIRECTION + DESIGN

Clare McClaren Creative 816.868.9825 claremcclaren.com

KLC VISION

To be the center of excellence for civic leadership development KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS

David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair) Ed O’Malley, Wichita (President & CEO) Jill Arensdorf, Hays Tracey Beverlin, Pratt Gennifer Golden House, Goodland Ron Holt, Wichita Karen Humphreys, Wichita Susan Kang, Lawrence Mary Lou Jaramillo, Merriam Peter F. Nájera, Wichita Patrick Rossol-Allison, Seattle, Washington Frank York, Ashland

Barbara is a veteran journalist and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri.

She specializes in reporting on education and health care. Her work has appeared in the Kansas City Star, where she worked on staff as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer, and more recently KCUR public radio, Flatland, The Pitch, The Huffington Post, The Week and the Community College Daily.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Stan Finger Kim Gronniger Jerry LaMartina Joel Mathis Mark McCormick Dawn Bormann Novascone Laura Roddy Barbara Shelly Beccy Tanner

STAN FINGER

Contributing Editor

Stan is an award-winning journalist who twice earned nominations for the Pulitzer Prize over the course of a distinguished career at the Wichita Eagle. A native Kansan who grew up on a farm near the hamlet of Rozel, Finger has also written two books: “Into the Deep,” a look at the deadly flash flood in the Flint Hills in 2003, and the novel “Fallen Trees.”

COPY EDITORS

Bruce Janssen Shannon Littlejohn CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Conner Mitchell Doug Oliver ILLUSTRATIONS

Pat Byrnes JEFF TUTTLE

Photography

WEB EDITION

A Kansas native, from Augusta, and a journalism graduate from Kansas State University, Jeff is in his 11th year serving as The Journal’s chief photographer.

He is married to Laura Tuttle, an interior designer. They have two children and one grandchild.

Daughter Erin is a third-grade teacher in Wichita and mother to Calvin, while son Zach is a photographer in Denver. Jeff loves camping, fishing, brew pubs and bluegrass music.

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KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

MARK MCCORMICK

Columnist

A former editor of The Journal, Mark is a New York Times bestselling author with over 20 years of experience as a reporter, editor and columnist. A collection of his columns, “Some Were Paupers, Some Were Kings: Dispatches from Kansas,” was published by Blue Cedar Press in 2017. He served as executive director of The Kansas African-American Museum in Wichita before becoming director of strategic communications for the ACLU of Kansas in 2018.

Contents INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD • VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 4 • FALL 2021 PUBLISHED BY KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

2.

26.

RECKONING WITH

A PRIEST’S STORY BECOMING

A CHANGING KANSAS.

A MAGNET FOR THE FAITHFUL.

BY: CHRIS GREEN

BY: STAN FINGER

4.

48.

Letter from the Managing Editor

A Void in the Classroom BRINGING MORE LATINOS INTO TEACHING. BY: BARBARA SHELLY

Making a Home for Father Kapaun

Thinking Outside the Big Box

Shades of Red, Shades of Blue NONPARTISANSHIP FADES IN LOCAL ELECTIONS. BY: DOUG OLIVER

Blurred Lines IS GERRYMANDERING AVOIDABLE? BY: CONNER MITCHELL

92.

Bridging the rural-urban divide LESSONS FROM SENEGAL. BY: TRICIA GOTT

SOLVING THE URBAN GROCERY STORE DILEMMA. BY: JOEL MATHIS

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82.

60.

After the Study, Comes the Test MAKING JOHNSON COUNTY HOUSING AFFORDABLE. BY: DAWN BORMANN NOVASCONE

72.

Raising the Roofs MAKING A SEARCH FOR A HOME ON THE RANGE EASIER. BY: STAN FINGER

96.

The Back Page HISTORY EVERYONE CAN EMBRACE BY: MARK MCCORMICK

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L ET T ER FROM T HE MANAGING ED ITOR CHRI S GREEN

Reckoning with a changing Kansas

CHRIS GREEN MANAGING EDITOR

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THE L ATEST POPU L ATION F I G URE S F RO M T H E 2 0 2 0 CEN S US PR OVID E AN OPPORT UN I TY FO R KA N S A N S TO A S K D EEPER QU ESTION S ABO UT O UR STAT E ’S F UT URE .

The Kansas I grew up in was a place of wheatfields, windmills and long car rides into Wichita along a 21st Street that stretched past barns and farmhouses.

Some of those fields are now covered in strip malls, big-box stores and fast-food restaurants.

Or they’re filled with housing additions and apartments. I went to a small elementary school in a tight-knit rural area where all of my classmates were white.

Aside from making me feel old thinking about the amount of change that has occurred in my short life, I’m also struck by how starkly my upbringing contrasts with how I live today.

The Kansas where my family and I live now is near the place I was born, Wesley Hospital. It’s urban and diverse. It’s not a place where everyone looks like me, has the same background or even speaks the same primary language. When my son is old enough to attend school, he’ll go to classes in a district with no racial or ethnic majority.

When a massive trove of data such as the 2020 census gets released, as it was this past August, the depth and breadth of the numbers can overwhelm. You might have heard that the U.S. is growing more diverse or that 80 of the 105 counties in Kansas lost population since 2010. Kansas will keep its four congressional seats for now, but clout will shift markedly from rural to urban areas during the redistricting process.

Yet much of what came out of the census probably wasn’t news to many. Kansas is growing older, less white and more urban.

It’s been happening for a while now, and projections suggest those trends will continue.

But when I think about the ways I have lived those population trends in my own life, I start to think about all the stories behind those numbers.

Each one of those 2,937,880 Kansans who got counted is a person, each with their own unique narrative about who they are and what this place they call home is about. So, many of those stories are going to be vastly different from mine.

Even if they aren’t exactly earth-shattering, this year’s census figures solidify for me the sense that Kansas’ next decade will be a pivotal one.

Will we make sense of what these demographic changes mean for our state and chart a path to make our evolving Kansas a healthier and more prosperous one? Or will we struggle to hold on to old ways of doing things or thinking about ourselves that might get in the way of adapting to a new reality?

The census provides us with a lot of crucial data that affects everything from federal funding to whom you get to vote for. But what’s more intriguing might be the significant questions it ought to inspire. Starting with: Where have we been? Who are we now? And where do we hope to go – together?

How we answer those questions – if we choose to tackle them at all – could shape the discussions we’ll be having after the 2030 census, when we may be able to judge whether Kansas rose to meet its moment or simply missed the mark.

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A Void in the Classroom One in five of public school students in Kansas are Hispanic, according to the Kansas State Department of Education. But only about 2.5% of the educators in the agency’s teacher licensure database during the 2019-20 school year identified as Hispanic or Latino.

Educators have long understood that Black and brown students are more likely to succeed in school if they have adult role models who look like them in the classrooms.

Districts in the Kansas City area and beyond are trying to address the challenge, but getting more Latino teachers into classrooms is going to require hard, sustained work.

Jackie Madrigal, a Latina teacher at Shawnee Mission North High School in Overland Park, says supporting Latino students and families – a population that’s too often marginalized – ought to be a prerequisite if school districts are serious about recruiting and retaining Latino teachers.

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BY: BARBARA SHELLY

T

he teenager was headed for trouble, and his mother knew it. He was struggling in school, absent at home and making poor decisions.

The mother speaks mostly Spanish. The only person she could think of to confide in was her son’s homeroom teacher at Washington High School in the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools.

Teacher Alicia Rodriguez-Montanez, a firstgeneration immigrant from Mexico, spent hours talking with the mom and working with the student.

Her connection with the family lasted three years.

“It took us all the way to the beginning of his senior year before I finally realized what I’d done as a team with his mom had worked,” she says.

The student, once a dropout risk, graduated from high school last spring with a community college certificate to work as a mechanic.

As Rodriguez-Montanez begins her fourth year as a teacher, her story illustrates why the presence of Latino teachers in Kansas classrooms is essential.

It also gives a sense of the extra workload that falls on Latino and Spanish-speaking teachers.

And it helps to explain why the teachers who can best connect with Kansas’ growing population of Latino students often leave the profession sooner than colleagues who are white.

“It’s really, really fulfilling,” says Rodriguez-Montanez, who this year is teaching first-year Spanish and a Spanish heritage class and working with the Latinos of Tomorrow club. Besides all of that, she knows she’ll be fielding phone calls from parents desperate to talk to someone in their native language about their kids and the bewildering business of education in America.

“I’m like their source of information about the school,” says Rodriquez-Montanez, who is one of three Spanish-speaking teachers at Washington High School.

“I do sometimes get exhausted and tired,” she adds.

THE SEARCH FOR TEACHERS OF COLOR

Educators have long understood that Black and brown students are more likely to succeed in school if they have adult role models who look like them in the classrooms.

A recent report commissioned by the Latinx Education Collaborative about teachers of color in the Kansas City region summed up some of the research: “When students of color are taught by teachers of color, their math and reading scores are more likely to improve. They are more likely to graduate from high school and aspire to go to college. Students of color and white students are more likely to have positive perceptions of their teachers of color, including feeling cared for and academically challenged.”

But teachers who are Black, Latino and representative of other minority student groups are in short supply. In Kansas, where one in five public school students are Hispanic – the classification used by the Kansas State Department of Education – the task of finding Latino teachers and keeping them in classrooms poses a leadership challenge for schools and communities.

Only about 2.5% of educators in the agency’s teacher licensure database for the 2019-20 school

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A Lack of Color in the Front of the Classroom Hispanic and African American students represent a significant portion of public K-12 students in Kansas but there are comparatively few teachers who look like them providing their educations.

UNITED STATES TEACHERS

year identified as Hispanic or Latino, according to information the department provided to The Journal.

A school staffing survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, with data from the 2011- 2012 school year, put the representation of Hispanic teachers in Kansas even lower – at 1.6%.

In much of Kansas, the goal of hiring Latino teachers is overshadowed by the more pressing task of finding teachers – period.

Consider the Garden City Public Schools, where 70% of students are Hispanic. The district recruits far and wide to get certified teachers in front of its 7,400 students. Only 16% of them currently are Latino.

“Our main goal is to provide quality teachers for all of the students in our district,” says Roy Cessna, the district’s public information coordinator. “We’re recruiting any and all teachers.”

A sharper focus on recruiting and retaining Latino teachers is taking shape in the Kansas City area, in part because of the work of the Latinx Education Collaborative, a new nonprofit that uses a gender neutral alternative to Latino and Latina in its name.

KANSAS TEACHERS

KANSAS SCHOOL DEMOGRAPHICS

“We understand that diversity in education is a huge issue at large,” says Edgar Palacios, the organization’s president and CEO. “We focus on the specific issues related to the Latinx community and why it is that we don’t see as many teachers from our community as we would like in these spaces.”

By teaming up with researchers from the Urban Education Research Center, based at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the collaborative generated a “landscape analysis” of the representation of teachers of color in schools in the greater Kansas City region on both sides of the state line.

The research showed that, in 2018, nearly 40% of students in the region were students of color.

But educators of color made up only 7% of the teaching ranks.

The gap between Latino students and teachers was especially pronounced. In the five Kansas counties closest to Kansas City – Johnson, Leavenworth, Linn, Miami and Wyandotte – 19% of students were Latino, but the percentage of Latino teachers was only 0.5%. The report notes that a third of schools in the Kansas City region don’t employ a single teacher of color.

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In the Kansas counties, the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools in Wyandotte County have the highest Latino teacher representation – about 9%.

“I think where the push and pull comes in is that 51% of our students are Latino,” says Stephen Linkous, the superintendent’s chief of staff and a board member of the collaborative.

She says she was expected to clean and do chores around the home, and be present when family members dropped by.

“They didn’t really know exactly what was expected of me in college,” she says. “I feel like they thought it was like high school, when I was not that busy, and it was not.”

Getting more Latino teachers into classrooms is going to require hard, sustained work.

Rodriguez-Montanez moved on to the University of Missouri-Kansas City to complete her bachelor’s degree. While she still lived at her parents’ home, she wasn’t there much.

A second report by the collaborative and the Urban Education Research Center looked at how many students of color are enrolled in teacher preparation programs.

“The library became my home,” she says. “I would take my lunch. I would stay there until 9 or 10 at night doing assignments. That was the only way I was able to manage my homework and my family.”

“Neither Kansas nor Missouri is making much headway in recruiting more Latinx or Black/African American students,” researchers concluded.

Overall, Kansas’ teacher preparation pipeline saw only a 1.1% increase between 2014 and 2018.

The enrollment of Latino students increased by 1.3% during that period. In 2018, only about 280 aspiring Latino teachers were enrolled in Kansas preparatory programs. That’s just 5% of the total enrollment of 5,442 students.

Family responsibilities and financial considerations discourage many Latino high school graduates from looking at teaching programs at Kansas colleges and universities, says Linkous, the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools administrator.

THE PATH TO TEACHING IS A ‘TRICKY ONE’

The shortage doesn’t result from a lack of interest or love of education, Palacios says. But for many Latino students, especially recent immigrants, the path to teaching is long and difficult.

After graduating from a Catholic high school in Kansas City, Kansas, Rodriguez-Montanez earned an associate degree from Donnelly College, a private college in KCK that focuses on underserved students.

She is her parents’ oldest child and the first in her family to go to college.

“As Latinos, we’re very close to the family and we have a lot of responsibility,” RodriguezMontanez says. “My parents didn’t expect me to leave the house until I was married.”

To overcome that reluctance, his district has entered into a partnership with Kansas City Kansas Community College and Kansas State University. Students in the K-Step Up program earn their general credits at the community college and advance to K-State, where they can complete their education credits online and student teach in the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. About 50 students are currently participating, the district said.

The district has its eye out for aspiring teachers of all ages and backgrounds, says recruiter Cynthia Fulk.

“We really do look at grow-your-own programs,” she says.

One source of potential teachers is paraprofessionals and support staffers who currently work in the district. Another is immigrant parents who may have been teachers in their country of origin. A third is military veterans who may want to use their educational benefits to earn teaching degrees.

Over the course of Jackie Madrigal’s 15 years at Shawnee Mission North, she’s designed one of her own classes, U.S. Latino Literature; collected 600 books for a Latino Literature Library; and helped start the school’s Familia First program for Spanish-speaking parents.

Her classrooms decorations are cultural touchstones.

In preparation for another year of teaching at Washington High School in Kansas City, Kansas, Alicia Rodriguez-Montanez unfurled and hung flags from Latino countries in her classroom.

If someone is interested in a teaching career, the district will make staffers available to talk to them and even offer substitute teaching positions and part-time jobs, Fulk says.

‘FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE TODAY’

But while these programs might help individual districts to some degree, they’re unlikely to move the needle on the broader problem. Many districts have grow-your-own programs, Palacios says.

“They’re inconsistent,” he says. “It’s based on the building. It’s based on the program.”

Olathe Public Schools in Johnson County, where 20% of students are Hispanic, had no Latino teachers in its classrooms when surveyed recently by the Urban Education Research Center.

“We have tons of students who have graduated from our district and want to go into education, but the path sometimes is a tricky one,” says Erik Erazo, executive director of diversity and

engagement. “Not everyone understands college and understands the system. The highest barrier is just understanding the process.”

The Olathe district is looking at its staff of paraprofessionals, many of whom are Latino, as prospective teachers, Erazo says. A recently hired staffer is helping “paras” with the college enrollment process. Two former paraprofessionals recently obtained degrees and are working in the district’s migrant program. Another is a certified teacher and is working in a nearby district.

“We hardly have any (Latino teaching candidates) to pick from. That’s true,” Erazo says. “However, we can’t just fold our hands and say there’s nothing we can do. We have to work with our kids while they’re still in K-12, encouraging our kids who are interested in education.”

Palacios says he hears a lot of school officials bemoan the shortage of Latino teachers and say, “We’re doing all we can.”

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“Yes, Latino teachers are the fastest growing population entering the teaching profession,” the Education Trust, which advocates for equity in education, asserted in a 2018 report. “But they (along with Black teachers) are exiting the profession at higher rates than other teachers.”

Susana Elizarraraz, vice president of educator supports for the Latinx Education Collaborative, hears from teachers who have left the classroom or are thinking about it. She understands their angst. After five years, she walked away from a job she loved – teaching in a Kansas City, Missouri, elementary school with a substantial Latino student population.

“I think leaders really need to start asking the question – on top of how to find people – how do we keep them,” she says. “Because when we’re hearing from Latino teachers or from teachers in general, how much they’re struggling, how overworked they are, how burnt out they are, it’s no wonder that people take a pass on being teachers.”

He looks for district administrations who are willing to make teacher diversity a pillar of their strategic plans, and make staff resources and money available to gain results.

“I don’t disagree that there are great challenges in hiring certified teachers who are ready to go into the classrooms,” Palacios says. “The issue is really, ‘Who is taking the lead to make sure this isn’t an issue one day? We’re fighting for the future today, and that makes people uncomfortable.’”

WHAT DO TEACHERS NEED?

Once a Latino college graduate becomes a certified teacher and lands a job, another leadership challenge emerges – keeping good teachers in classrooms.

School districts in Kansas and many other states don’t consider race and ethnicity when calculating teacher retention rates. But national studies have noticed alarming attrition among Latino and Black teachers.

Elizarraraz was for much of the time the only Latina and the only teacher who spoke Spanish in her building. It fell to her to translate for Spanish-speaking students and their families.

“I was very much willing to do it,” she says. “But there’s no denying that there’s an extra workload.”

In Mexico, her family’s native country, schools are the hub of a neighborhood, Elizarraraz says. “It’s where you go to get resources. It’s where you go to ask questions. But the way we treat education now, it feels that schools are separate from the communities they’re in.”

Elizarraraz, who grew up in the neighborhood where she taught, tried to be that resource, despite what she perceived as an implicit disapproval from her school’s leadership.

“I was staying after school and helping families fill out food stamp applications,” she says. “I was helping students apply for middle schools.

In some instances, when I sought support, I was told that that wasn’t my job.”

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Schools are unusually insular workplaces.

Teachers rarely leave their buildings to grab lunch, meet with clients or sneak in a personal errand.

In such an environment, even minor slights and criticisms from colleagues can seem harmful.

Elizarraraz longed for the perspective of another Latino teacher.

“I get support here at the school because I’ve been in the same building for 15 years, and they know I’m not going anywhere,” Madrigal says. But she’s been rebuffed by her district’s administration and school board. It took years to get her U.S. Latino literature class approved as an English language arts credit.

In her current job, she talks to teachers all the time. Part of the role of the collaborative is to act as a resource and convenor for Latino teachers.

Madrigal’s dream is that someone from her district’s top ranks will reach out to her and other teachers of color and ask what they need.

“I get phone calls in the afternoon after some of our teachers have had a rough day,” she says.

“They’ll say, ‘This happened at my school today.

The LEC should do a program on this.’ A big part of my job is keeping my ear to the ground to say, ‘What do teachers need?’”

“You know, we can’t just keep spinning our wheels and hoping that the district buys into this and says, ‘Hey, let’s support your program. How much money do you need? Let’s hire someone who will plan all this for you, who is bilingual, who is bicultural, who understands this community,’” she says. “That is not happening. And that’s exactly what every single district needs.”

She suggests that leaders in school buildings and school districts take the same approach.

“Let’s give ownership to the teachers who are teachers of color and give them agency to legitimately be the experts,” Elizarraraz says. “I think there’s this pressure on administrators and on policymakers to know everything. And if you don’t know what it’s like to be a teacher of color, you just don’t touch it. Give the space for us to talk. Give the space for us to come in and relate.”

TO RETAIN TEACHERS, SCHOOLS MUST SUPPORT STUDENTS

Jackie Madrigal, a Latina teacher at Shawnee Mission North High School in Overland Park, has learned after 15 years in the classroom that it takes courage and persistence to advocate for Hispanic students and families.

Along with classes for English language learners, Madrigal teaches a class she designed herself – U.S. Latino literature. It tells the history of America’s diverse Latino communities through the voices of Latino writers and their subjects. She’s collected 600 books for a Latino Literature Library. And she helped start Shawnee Mission North’s Familia First program for Spanish-speaking parents.

None of her achievements came easily.

One of the best ways school districts can recruit and retain Latino teachers is to openly and genuinely support Latino students and families, Madrigal says. That way teachers won’t feel burdened to bear the load themselves.

“It’s not just the Shawnee Mission School District.

Every district is not reaching these populations that are marginalized,” Madrigal says.

“They’re just doing business as usual, and it’s not working.”

In her classroom in Washington High School, Rodriguez-Montanez talks to her students often about persistence. A sign on her computer reads “echale ganas.” It’s a phrase that Mexicans use to say “give your all always,” she says.

Rodriguez-Montanez sometimes has to repeat the motto to herself. At the end of the 2019-20 pandemic school year, she was burned out and wondering if a teaching career was her best long-range plan.

Then she received a letter from the mother of that student she supported through his rough patch. “She wrote me this really nice message,” Rodriguez-Montanez says. “Those kinds of things are the ones that push you, that tell you what you are doing is worth it.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. What factors do you see contributing to

Latino teachers being underrepresented in Kansas classrooms?

2. Which of those factors are ones that could be

addressed through the exercise of leadership?

3. What tough interpretations might need

to be considered for Kansas school districts to hire and keep Latino educators?

Alicia Rodriguez-Montanez’s formal duties include teaching Spanish and a Spanish heritage class and working with the Latinos of Tomorrow club. Informally, she’s a well-known contact for Spanish-speaking parents.

(Photo by Jeff Tuttle)

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SHADES OF RED SHADES OF BLUE F O R 1 1 4 Y E A R S , W I C H I TA V O T E R S A N D O T H E R S A R O U N D T H E S T A T E H A V E C A S T B A L L O T S I N L O C A L E L E C T I O N S T H AT D O N ’ T I D E N T I F Y C A N D I D AT E S B Y P O L I T I C A L P A R T Y . B U T B E N E AT H T H A T N O N P A R T I S A N V E N E E R , PA R T I S A N S H I P I N C R E A S I N G L Y C O L O R S T H E P O L I T I C S O F L O C A L G O V E R N M E N T. W H E N A S K E D , L O C A L EXPERTS AND OFFICIALS OFFER CONTRASTING VIEWS ON WHETHER I T M A K E S S E N S E T O S T I C K T O T H E N O N P A R T I S A N P AT H .

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BY: D OU G O L I V E R

Municipal elections in Kansas hit a partisan low point in 1907, when the city of Wichita experienced a rather rancorous and confusing vote for mayor.

(previously elected by each state’s legislature), and the adoption of more professional, manager-run city governments.

The hullabaloo coincided with the flowering of the nationwide Progressive movement, which had ushered in a “good government” wave rebelling against machine politics and the political parties that operated them.

Not all of the movement’s initiatives panned out.

Legislation of this era included the failed experiment of Prohibition and the codification of racial and ethnic discriminatory practices that still affect the country.

In the optimistic fervor of the day, advocates for nonpartisan elections saw an opportunity to clean up corruption, encourage government to be more responsive to constituents and pave the way for regulations to protect the health and safety of workers and consumers.

Two years later, the Kansas Legislature embraced the push and mandated that all municipal and local school board elections in the state become nonpartisan.

Chase Billingham, associate professor of sociology at Wichita State University, says the rise in the late 1800s in the United States of so-called Tammany Hall politics – which got their name from a New York City political organization but came to embrace all machine politics – led to an era of reform at the start of the 1900s known today as the Progressive Era. “The history of nonpartisanship in city elections, including in Wichita, goes back to this Good Government movement in the early 20th century that really tried to focus on local government being about local community and cooperation and getting things accomplished at the local level, where national level political splits were less relevant,” he says.

This era saw the advent of secret ballots, the passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for women, the passage of the 17th Amendment for direct election of U.S. senators

But local nonpartisan elections have, to a large extent, proved to be an enduring legacy of the period. The National League of Cities reports that 22 of the nation’s top 30 largest cities still hold nonpartisan elections.

SHADED RED AND BLUE Fast forward 114 years, and Wichita voters and others around the state will still be casting ballots in the Nov. 2 general election that don’t identify candidates by their political parties. But beneath that nonpartisan veneer, partisanship increasingly colors the politics of local government in Wichita and beyond in shades of red and blue.

A couple of prominent examples: A Republican elephant graces the campaign logo of Mike Czinege, a leading candidate for mayor in Overland Park. The school board race in Manhattan comes down to three candidates backed by the local Republican Party and three supported by the local Democratic Party.

Republican and Democratic operatives played key roles in the 2019 mayor’s race in Wichita, and issues of partisanship have clearly bled into governance. The vote to replace a City Council member who resigned in a disgrace linked to the 2019 mayoral race, discussions of a nondiscrimination ordinance and the passage of an ethics reform package all had partisan overtones.

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To local political observers such as Russell Arben Fox, professor of political science at Friends University, the concept of nonpartisan elections in a political environment where voters increasingly make their decisions based on their party preferences is becoming an unsustainable facade.

Not telling voters the thing they most want to know about candidates is confusing, even to the small percentage regularly turning out for city elections.

devoted to strengthening and advocating for the interests of the cities of Kansas.

“We currently have a system that is designed to hire the best minds to lead the city regardless of party affiliation. A switch to partisan politics would put party affiliation as the first requirement,” says Cocking, who spent 10 years in city administration including more than seven years as city manager in Atchison.

“Everybody knows who’s a Republican, everybody knows who’s a Democrat and everybody knows that they will probably vote that way most of the time, so it seems to be a no-brainer. We already have voters who vote on a partisan basis. That’s how they express their interests,” Fox says.

“All of a sudden, the city manager now needs to be a Democrat or a Republican, depending on the party in control, and unfortunately, when you inject partisan politics, that tends to move further down into departments. This could easily get us back to machine politics. We tried this before in local government (prior to) 1909 and it was corrupt.”

But the corruption that inspired local government’s turn away from partisanship isn’t far from the mind of Trey Cocking, the deputy director of the League of Kansas Municipalities, an organization

Sure, party labels get more people interested in races. But how well are unique local issues served if they become enmeshed with polarizing national topics, Cocking asks.

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“I like people who are elected to do the best policy, not the party policy,” he says.

The approach, Fox says, is rooted in the fact that cities exist through charters by the state government and have no authority other than that expressly granted by the state, a constitutional opinion known as Dillon’s Rule.

“This argument became accepted by many people that cities are just administrative units of the state and not political bodies worthy of home rule. Let’s just hire a manager to run the city and have elections so that the people will be able to make clear to the manager what our priorities are,” says Fox. This is the system in use in Wichita today.

A nonpartisan City Council and mayor hire a professional city manager who employs staff to run the city, ideally working together in harmony to make Wichita a better place for its residents. But Fox senses that system has outlived its usefulness, although there have been no formal proposals in recent years to change it. One candidate for City Council, Mike Hoheisel, questioned the model during a recent debate

FROM LEFT: Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple and his wife, Chelsea, performed their civic duty in the August primary and at the same time gave a civics lesson to two of their children, 7-year-old Adrian and 6-year-old Tristan. Few Sedgwick Countians did the same. Turnout was 6.6%; Low levels of public engagement in local elections – typified by election volunteer Rita Ackerson’s tedious stint at the Glenville Baptist Church in Wichita in the August primary – can have a profound influence on how policymakers tend to sort their priorities.

before the Wichita Pachyderm Club, and he and his opponent, Council member Jared Cerullo, expressed support for replacing current City Manager Robert Layton, The Wichita Eagle reported in October.

“I think that council-manager system is no longer appropriate for Wichita, which has grown large enough and divided enough in terms of ethnicity, in terms of culture, in terms of economics and so forth that we really need to allow the council to act like a legislative body to represent the interests of different parts of Wichita,” Fox says.

But others see an antidote to the partisanship that makes government so tumultuous elsewhere.

Writing in The Eagle in 2017 on the 100th anniversary of Kansas enabling the councilmanager form of government, H. Edward Flentje, professor emeritus at Wichita State University, said: “Take a look around at the cities and counties in Kansas that are governed by locally elected officials in combination with professionally trained managers and celebrate with me the 100-year anniversary of this good government model.”

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PARTISANSHIP BUBBLES UP TO THE SURFACE But most anybody knows the shift in local governance to nonpartisanship and professional management hasn’t snuffed disagreement or clashes between different political and ideological viewpoints.

The Roman writer Terence said, “There are as many opinions as there are people” and this certainly applies in the political forum. For many people, political opinions are held passionately and form the foundation of their worldview.

And, as is human nature, people tend to coalesce around like-minded individuals, people with opinions similar to their own. This makes partisanship, be it on the basis of red or blue or some other factionalism, nearly inevitable.

This nation’s founders feared political factions would tear the country apart and opposed them, right up to the point they created them. Similarly, just labeling local elections as nonpartisan has done little over the past 100 years to change human nature or the contentious political landscape, where various factions fight, sometimes literally, to institute their own solutions.

In 1958, when Wichita had a commission-style city government, one commissioner was knocked from his seat by another during a disagreement at a regular Tuesday night commission meeting, a perfect example of what was termed in those days as the “Tuesday night fights.” The situation appeared rooted in both partisan and personal dislike, according to news reports at the time.

Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple, who won a nonpartisan election in 2019 after seven years as a Democratic state representative in the Legislature, has a more partisan background than other city leaders accustomed to nonpartisan elections, although he favors sticking with nonpartisan city elections.

“I have a different viewpoint, I think, than my colleagues do here because I worked in a partisan environment” he says. To him, partisanship is “less scary and dirty.”

Even so, it was during his nonpartisan mayoral campaign when a partisan attack on him led to a scandal that rocked the city and resulted in the ouster of a City Council member and electoral defeats of a county commissioner and a state representative, all active in the local Republican Party.

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“Simply put – I agree that local elections should stay nonpartisan in nature and focused on local issues.

Local government affects our day to day lives more than any other level of government. People deserve local elected officials who are focused on serving them and not a personal or political agenda.”

MAGGIE BALLARD

“While parties don’t have a statutory role in local elections, party influence is still here,” Whipple says.

When the City Council voted this year to replace that ousted council member, the vote appeared divided along partisan and ideological lines.

The conservative faction prevailed, choosing the candidate backed by the local GOP, Cerullo, over Joseph Shepard, a candidate who was a party official in the local Democratic Party.

“It was so blatantly partisan, even though everyone who voted to fill that seat will tell you it was not,” Billingham says.

These days, partisanship seems inescapable, in part because levels of partisan antipathy have skyrocketed to quarter-century highs, bleeding over into disagreements at what seems like nearly every level of government. Nearly 60% of Republicans and Democrats had a very unfavorable opinion of the opposing party in 2016, up from around 20% in 1994, according to the Pew Research Center.

The dislike is so profound that negative partisanship, in which partisans shape their views in opposition to the party they dislike, is a defining feature of the era in the eyes of some political observers.

So if people want to choose their candidates on the basis of party, why not go ahead and let them?

Back in 2015, the Legislature discussed going in this direction. In moving local elections from the spring to the fall of odd-numbered years, it stopped short of making local votes officially partisan. But it did vote to add the option for partisan elections for some local entities.

City governments in Kansas, but not school boards, now have the option to hold partisan elections, although according to the Kansas Secretary of State’s office, none currently do.

It’s not a status quo that several incumbents currently serving on the Wichita City Council appear eager to change, although several academics argue there would be benefits from doing so.

POLITICAL POTHOLES

Wichita Council member Cindy Claycomb, who is seeking reelection to represent west-central Wichita in District 6 in the November election, supports keeping nonpartisan elections, using an oft-quoted concept about local politics and potholes.

“In general, I am opposed to partisan races at the municipal level. Partisan politics have nothing to do with fixing potholes, or the hundreds of other

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neighborhood projects and initiatives on which City Council members work,” she says.

Claycomb’s opponent in November’s general election, Maggie Ballard, feels similarly.

“Simply put – I agree that local elections should stay nonpartisan in nature and focused on local issues,” Ballard said in a written response to questions. “Local government affects our day to day lives more than any other level of government.

People deserve local elected officials who are focused on serving them and not a personal or political agenda.”

Council member Brandon Johnson, who represents east-central Wichita in District 1 and is also seeking reelection this fall, is on board as well.

“By keeping the election and candidate focused on the issues, it is harder to simply paint candidates with broad partisan brushes. In my experience, I have had to hit the doors and phones and earn each vote no matter of their party affiliation,” he says.

Johnson’s opponent, Myron Ackerman, also favors nonpartisan elections, saying he’s not a fan of either national party, has a mix of liberal and conservative views, and doesn’t want to be “tainted” by a party label.

“In a nonpartisan election, I am able to talk about my policy, not the party,” he says. “In partisan elections with party labels, they put you in a box and I don’t fit in a box.”

This reporter also reached out to Cerullo and Council members Becky Tuttle, Jeff Blubaugh and Bryan Frye, but did not receive a response.

Claycomb and Johnson echo the main theme in favor of nonpartisan elections cited by the National Council of Cities on its webpage devoted to the issue of nonpartisan versus partisan local elections.

Political parties, according to the organization, are irrelevant to providing services, and cooperation between elected officials belonging to different parties is more likely.

But there are downsides to having candidates run absent a party label, says Neal Allen, associate professor of political science at Wichita State University.

“The best argument for partisan elections is increased information for voters. It’s a lot to ask a voter to keep up with what the mayor is for, what the members of the city council are for,” he says. Voters, he says, use party labels as cues in deciding who to vote for and without those cues, they tend to apply other factors like name, race or gender – cues that have little bearing on suitability for the position.

“I think we’d be better off to bite the bullet and make them partisan elections,” Allen says. Fox, the Friends University professor, also thinks Wichita’s size makes it too large to be served with nonpartisan politics.

“We’re not some small little village where we all get together in the high school gymnasium and achieve some kind of consensus,” he says.

Adding to the mix is the vastly altered media landscape of the 21st century that makes it harder for voters to get unbiased information on candidate views on issues. Traditional news sources are no longer the sole-source gatekeepers they were in the past.

Social media is now the way information gets out and it is seldom nonpartisan. It does, however, make a big impact.

The scandal in the 2019 nonpartisan mayoral race that centered on a video that falsely accused Whipple of sexual misconduct with women at the state Capitol first raged online before consuming local election coverage. It was eventually exposed as a highly partisan attack on Whipple by a city councilman, county commissioner and state representative, all Republicans.

In summarizing the pros and cons of the approach, the National League of Cities notes the complaint that nonpartisan elections tend to favor the more affluent parts of the electorate.

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“BY KEEPING THE ELECTION AND CANDIDATE FOCUSED ON THE ISSUES, IT IS HARDER TO SIMPLY PAINT CANDIDATES WITH BROAD PARTISAN BRUSHES.” BRANDON JOHNSON, WICHITA CITY COUNCIL MEMBER

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“One of the reasons for Wichita to move to nonpartisan elections was to exclude people without means or networks. Political parties, on the other hand, always have an incentive to add more people to their rosters,” Allen says.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE?

Yet neither Allen nor Fox thinks a change to explicitly partisan elections would be a major shift to the Wichita landscape.

The people and organizations who want to be involved are already involved. Parties already spend money on preferred candidates, use their communication networks to push candidates they back, and motivated contributors already fund campaigns.

“You might see a few more elephants on yard signs,” Fox says of changes one might see.

One important aspect that might change, Allen said, would be in the run-up to the election

in the primaries, in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election.

But not too many people are paying attention.

Voter turnout for Sedgwick County in the August primary was 6.6%. With decreased nonpartisan media coverage and little civic engagement or excitement, explicitly partisan media – social media and talk radio – play an outsized role in providing information about candidates.

Shifting to partisan elections could force more robust debates within those partisan ecosystems, Allen says.

“One of the things parties do is give their core supporters the chance to weigh in before the general election in a primary where candidates would have to defend their positions,” he says.

He says political beliefs are on a spectrum even within parties and you find hard-core fringes along with middle-of-the-road members in both major parties. Voters would be better served, he said, if candidates in party primaries had to outline their beliefs for how local government should run.

Wichita is by far the largest municipality in Kansas. It has operated under the nonpartisan council-manager form of government since 1917.

In this form of governance, the council delegates all administrative duties to the city manager except those that state statutes require the council to perform.

DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. What do you think has changed over the years to make local elections more partisan?

2. In what ways might this be a good change? In what ways might it be a bad one?

3. What kind of leadership might be required to respond to changing political dynamics

in your community?

Put Wichita City Council member Cindy Claycomb, who faces Maggie Ballard in November’s general election, down in the opposition category when it comes to changing municipal elections to partisan. “Partisan politics have nothing to do with fixing potholes, or the hundreds of other neighborhood projects and initiatives on which City Council members work,” she says.

For example, he says the debate over the common but contentious use of financial incentives for new businesses by local government is a discussion that needs to be had but is lacking.

“I don’t think we have a robust discussion on that, and primaries would give us that,” Allen says.

But critics of partisan primaries say they have plenty of downsides of their own, including incentivizing politicians to “keep in lockstep with a narrow and extreme slice of the electorate, rather than govern in the public interest,” in the words of Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, a group that favors limiting the influence of partisanship in politics.

Almost everyone agrees voter turnout – hovering around 10% in recent years for local elections – would increase, but only slightly.

“I think that parties are organizations that can disseminate information to their voters and can mobilize voters to get out and vote. In the absence of that, you’re going to see only those voters who are already self-motivated or have

a vested interest in the outcome of elections being more likely to cast votes,” Billingham says.

Even with greater party involvement, however, no one expects more than a small bump in voter turnout unless an issue comes up to excite voters.

“The party money and the party label would activate more members but it’s not like, all of a sudden, you’re going to see 50% turnout or even 40% turnout. You probably get a couple of percentage points at best,” Fox says.

Where the debate goes from here is unclear.

As long as enough candidates committed to the nonpartisan approach keep winning, the wave toward nonpartisanship that started in the early 20th century is unlikely to break anytime soon.

But if more candidates who see partisanship as a benefit to their candidacies and agendas – rather than a hindrance to good government – get the nod from voters, Wichita and other cities in Kansas could be headed to an era where partisanship in local government begins to move out of the shadows.

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Making a Home for

FAT H E R K A PA U N

THE JOURNAL 27

T H E R E M A I N S O F T H E R E V. E M I L K A PAU N, A REV E RE D CH A PLA IN A N D A C A N D I DAT E F O R CATHOLIC SAINTHOOD, HAVE RETURNED HOME TO KA N SA S, BU T N OT TO H I S H O M E TOW N O F PILSEN. AT A TIME WHEN KAPAUN’S PROMINENCE IS G ROWIN G, TH AT’ S A B I T T E R PI L L F O R SO M E RESID E N TS OF TH E M A R I O N C O UN T Y H A M L E T OF FE WE R TH A N 1 0 0 PE O PL E . BUT KA PAUN ’ S D ESCE N DA N TS SAY TH E TOW N I SN ’ T R E A DY FOR AN INFLUX OF VISITORS RETRACING THE C O U R AG E O U S P R I E S T ’ S S H O RT L I F E . W H AT K IND OF LE A D E RSH IP W I L L I T TA KE I N T H E Y E A R S A N D D E C A D E S TO C O M E TO R E A DY P I L S E N A N D T H E S U R RO U N D I N G R E G I O N SHOULD K A PAU N BE CA N O N I Z E D ?

The pilgrimage from Wichita to Pilsen covers about 20 miles a day for three days. Organizers point out that after Capt. Emil Kapaun and his fellow soldiers were taken prisoner in Korea, they were forced to march for three weeks to reach a prison camp.

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BY: STAN FINGER

St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church has anchored the sleepy farming village of Pilsen for more than a century now, its steeple towering over the rolling Kansas prairie. Pilsen is a time capsule reflecting a far simpler time: Its church parking lot still nothing more than hard-packed gravel, a tiny gift shop on the corner about the only commercial business left on the town square, dusty round-topped gas pumps that haven’t worked in decades in front of a long-closed service station at the edge of town, a patch of prairie grassland nudging the south end of the church property.

The few dozen residents of this Marion County hamlet want to preserve it this way, even as untold thousands of tourists are expected to begin flocking to the region to pay homage to Pilsen’s most famous son.

The Rev. Emil Kapaun, who died at the age of 35 in a North Korean prisoner of war camp in 1951 and was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2013 for his bravery on the battlefield, is under consideration for sainthood by the Catholic Church for his selfless devotion to fellow soldiers in that primitive, desolate camp. In July, South Korea bestowed upon the chaplain its highest military honor, the Taegeuk Order of Military Merit.

Long thought to be interred in a mass grave near the Chinese border, Kapaun’s body was actually buried in Hawaii along with those of hundreds of other soldiers whose remains were brought home to the U.S. after the armistice that ended the Korean War. His remains were identified last spring and returned to Kansas in September. His funeral, broadcast by EWTN, was the largest that Wichita had ever seen, “certainly in our lifetime,” says Scott Carter, director of the Father Kapaun Guild for the Catholic Diocese of Wichita.

His remains, which were 95% intact when retrieved from Korea, have been placed in a

specially designed crypt in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Wichita – for the time being, at least.

Kapaun was born and raised on a farm outside Pilsen, was ordained at St. John Nepomucene and spent his first few years as an assistant pastor at the imposing red brick church before serving as a World War II chaplain. Pilsen residents want his hometown to be his resting place, but his descendants decided against that – for now, at least.

“They’re not ready,” says Ray Kapaun, Emil’s nephew, who lives on Whidbey Island in the state of Washington. “They’re not even going to be ready for what’s going to hit them to start with, even with his remains not being out there.”

The decision to place the potential saint’s remains in Wichita, an hour away, rankles residents of Pilsen.

“They said security wasn’t so good out here,” says Kathy Svitak, whose farmstead carries traffic for those who depart Pilsen’s little cemetery via the

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rear exit. “Well, I guarantee there’s a lot more crime around the Wichita church than there is out here. And we can put the same safe codes they could do. We just have not been given the choice of the chance.”

caused by the COVID-19 pandemic took effect the day before Kapaun’s cause was to be reviewed by the committee. A new date has not been set.

Pilsen residents even volunteered to provide armed guards for a tomb at their church, Ray Kapaun says, but that was dismissed out of hand.

The congregation will use those documents to determine whether Kapaun lived a life of heroic virtue, after which he could be awarded the title Venerable. The Congregation for Saints must then approve a miracle attributed to Kapaun’s intercession for him to be beatified, or declared “Blessed,” one step short of canonization.

An ongoing tension that residents and officials of the Diocese of Wichita must wrestle with is that as Kapaun becomes more revered, the more challenging it might become for Pilsen to deal with the roles and responsibilities that come with being his hometown. But too much change in Pilsen is unwelcome, too, because it could undercut the powerful story the town is able to tell about the chaplain’s life.

A GROWING INTEREST

Reflections of the growing interest in Kapaun are already evident. Within just a few months of the priest’s remains being announced as identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in March, visitors had come from 17 different states to the makeshift museum at Pilsen. May, for example, was one of the busiest months ever for museum tours.

Kapaun’s body was exhumed from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in 2019.

The exhumation was part of a seven-phase plan begun in 2018 to identify all unidentified Korean War remains in the Hawaii cemetery.

Inspired in part by the stories of Kapaun’s selfless acts of caring for prisoners regardless of rank or background, the Catholic Church declared Kapaun a Servant of God in 1993. That step formally launched the cause for his possible canonization.

Following an exhaustive investigation of Kapaun’s life, the Wichita diocese presented 16,000 pages of documents and evidence to the Congregation for Saints in Rome, where his cause awaits review. Government-imposed lockdowns

Among the thousands of pages of documents sent to Rome are three alleged miracles attributed to Kapaun: Chase Kear, who survived a horrific pole-vaulting mishap in 2008; Avery Gerleman, who recovered from a catastrophic illness in 2006 that doctors say should have killed her; and Nick Dellasega, who survived a cardiac arrest in Pittsburg in 2014.

If Kapaun is declared Blessed, another miraculous healing that has no medical explanation must then occur and be approved by the Congregation for Saints before Kapaun is eligible to be declared a saint by the pope. The process could take years, decades or even longer.

Should the day come when Kapaun is beatified, diocesan officials say, a formal campaign will most likely be launched to raise money for a shrine. A decision on where the shrine would be built has not been made, Carter says.

Speculative architectural drawings for a visitors center in Pilsen were commissioned many years ago, but they did not include a tomb because no one anticipated that his remains would be recovered.

New plans would be needed, Carter says.

“We have been hollering for years, ‘We need to get ready!’” says Harriet Bina, who conducts Kapaun tours in Pilsen. “I have never doubted for a minute that he was going to be declared a saint.”

The pilgrimage to Pilsen is a test of body and spirit. A change of shoes, which Joe Spexarth of Colwich chose to do at the end of the first day, can help sustain both; One of the most welcome faces for many of this year’s pilgrims was that of Allison Roggenkamp of Topeka, here tending to the sore feet of Sandy Miller of Broomfield, Colorado. The day finished, Jennifer Cain of Peabody sought restoration in her tent.

(Photos by Jeff Tuttle) OPPOSITE PAGE: On the morning of the second day of this year’s trek, the Rev. Eric Weldon celebrated Mass for the pilgrims. In 2009, Weldon provided the impetus for what has become an annual event. According to the Hillsboro Star-Journal, four walkers began that first pilgrimage and 11 finished.

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A CHANGED EQUATION

Ray Kapaun says he expected to hear his uncle had been declared a saint before he would be told the chaplain’s remains had been found and identified.

Now that those remains are back in Kansas, “that changes the equation,” says Randy Collett, the economic development director for the city of Marion, about nine miles south of Pilsen.

“How many thousands of visitors might we have to Marion County if and when the day comes where his remains are actually located here – and what needs to transpire in the period of time in between?” Collett asks.

Ray Kapaun and others expect pilgrims to flock to Pilsen and Marion County even while the chaplain’s remains are entombed in Wichita.

Kapaun says he has heard Pilsen residents voice their fears that, because his remains aren’t in his hometown, “nobody’s going to come to Pilsen.”

“They don’t realize how many people are going to come to Pilsen,” Ray Kapaun says. “They’re still going to want to come out there and see where he was born and see where he worked and lived as a priest.”

They’ll want to see the church he grew up in and later celebrated Mass, the town he called home, and the farmhouse where he was born and raised a few miles away. That house has since been moved into Pilsen, though it has lost much of its white paint and is used as a storage site by its current owner.

It won’t just be Catholics drawn to Pilsen and the Sunflower State, either. His story can’t help but inspire those in uniform, says Todd Livick Sr., a communications specialist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

“I’m just moved by what he brought to the table and what he went through,” Livick says

of Kapaun’s bravery on the battlefield and selfless suffering in the POW camp while tending to and lifting the spirits of his fellow prisoners.

“It’s incredibly humbling. I mean, it’s amazing: Somebody who can come from truly nothing, parents are immigrants, and he comes and all of a sudden becomes something.

“You have somebody who was willing to – duty, honor, country – give so much to what I’ll term as so many to make sure that they continue to live,” Livick says.

TRAFFIC BY FOOT AND CAR

One sign of the growing interest in Kapaun was the number of people who signed up for this year’s annual pilgrimage honoring the chaplain.

Organizers had to cut off registration at 400 for the four-day, 62-mile walk from Wichita to Pilsen.

That number was the most in the 13 years of the pilgrimage, which pays tribute to the more than 80 miles Kapaun and other prisoners had to march from where they were captured to their POW camp along the Yalu River.

The final morning of the walk occurs on Father Kapaun Day, the first Sunday in June, along Pilsen Road stretching north from U.S. 56. The heavily patched ribbon of asphalt ripples through verdant farmland, its edges frequently eaten away by erosion as if the soil were a gnawing agrarian tide.

St. John Nepumocene is routinely packed with more than 600 people for Kapaun Day, with portable toilets set up to handle the crowds and homemade Czech foods available in the church basement.

Such crowds are going to become more frequent, many say, particularly if and when Kapaun’s cause for sainthood gains momentum in Rome. A small group of local officials has begun meeting and brainstorming about how to best prepare for the expected crowds.

The Life and Legacy

of

R E V. E M I L

K A PAU N “The Pilsen roads are never going to handle that much traffic,” Collett says of the 23 miles of asphalt that lead into the tiny town. “So, then what do you do?”

The Marion County Commission has hired a consultant to explore how to best prepare for the increase in tourists. That includes working with state officials and recruiting hotel developers, commissioner David Mueller says.

Because Pilsen Road is a county road, it is not the responsibility of the Kansas Department of Transportation, says agency spokesman Tom Hein. Mueller and others wonder if surging traffic volumes may prompt a change to state maintenance.

State officials say they’re monitoring the situation in Marion County, but Mueller acknowledges local authorities are frustrated by what feels like a lack of support.

APRIL 20, 1916 Born in Marion County

SEPTEMBER 1932 Entered Conception High School and Seminary College, Conception Abbey, Missouri

SEPTEMBER 1936 Entered Kenrick Seminary, St. Louis

JUNE 9, 1940 Ordained a priest by Bishop Christian Winkelmann at Sacred Heart Junior College Chapel (now Newman University) in Wichita

“I wouldn’t say we’re in over our head” in Marion County, he says. “We’re doing everything we can to prepare. It’s just hard to know how much to do, and what route is best.”

County officials hope the consultant will be able to clarify answers to those questions.

To save wear and tear on that road and preserve Pilsen, local residents and county officials alike favor a shuttle system that would provide parking in large lots next to U.S. 56 at or near Marion, where visitors could catch a shuttle bus. But officials know there will still be those who ignore the shuttles and drive directly to Pilsen.

What passes for a museum honoring Kapaun is actually the two-story brick rectory, built in 1924 to provide a place for the parish priest to live. It’s the house Kapaun lived in as assistant pastor for a few years following his ordination in 1940.

Though volunteers have done what they could – recently converting a back room into additional

JUNE 20, 1940 First Mass, St. John Nepomucene, Pilsen

JUNE 30, 1940 Appointed assistant pastor at his home parish

JANUARY 5, 1943 Appointed auxiliary chaplain to Herington Army Airfield, beginning his association with the military

“WE HAVE BE E N H OLLE RIN G F O R Y E A R S, ‘WE NEED TO G E T RE A DY ! ’ I H AV E N E V E R DOUBTED F OR A MIN U TE T H AT H E WA S GOING TO BE D E CLA RE D A SA I N T. ” HARRIET BINA, who conducts Kapaun tours in Pilsen.

The Life and Legacy

of

R E V. E M I L

K A PAU N OCTOBER 4, 1944 Graduates from Chaplain School at Fort Devens, Massachusetts

MARCH 4, 1945 Leaves for service in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II.

JUNE 4, 1946 Separated from service and returns home

FEBRUARY 1948 Earns Master of Arts in Education from Catholic University APRIL 9, 1948 Bishop Mark Carroll appoints Kapaun pastor of Holy Trinity Parish in Timken, now in the Diocese of Dodge City.

NOVEMBER 1948 Kapaun is assigned to the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Corps at Fort Bliss, Texas.

FEBRUARY 1950 Kapaun is reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division in Japan, much to the surprise of Carroll, who expected him to remain stateside.

36 THE JOURNAL

display space – only a few people are allowed in at a time because the house simply can’t accommodate more.

Pilsen residents would welcome a new Kapaun museum, most likely built on land just south of the church that the Wichita diocese bought years ago in anticipation of such a need. Bina and others would like to emulate the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in rural Wisconsin, which has maintained its roots and rural flavor despite drawing 200,000 visitors a year.

The Wisconsin site was only drawing a few thousand people a year – or about what Pilsen does now – as recently as a decade ago. That began to change when, after reviewing detailed research and investigation, the bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay declared in 2010 it was “worthy of belief” that Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared to a Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise in 1859 at what is now the location of the shrine and instructed her to teach the children in the surrounding woods the tenets of the Catholic faith. Brise would traverse those woods on foot in a 50-mile radius teaching the children of the hard-working local families.

Interest in the Wisconsin site grew dramatically after the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared Our Lady of Good Help a national shrine, distinguishing it as the first and only Catholic shrine in the U.S. where the church believes the Virgin Mary appeared to someone.

The nearest city of any size is Green Bay, about 30 miles away. Pilgrims commonly stay at bed-and-breakfasts and eat at locally owned restaurants in the region, says Corrie Campbell, until recently the events coordinator for the shrine.

Lessons from how the Wisconsin shrine handled its growth could serve Pilsen and Marion County well, Campbell says.

“I think what we’ve learned is that it has to be a companion effort, in tandem with your surrounding community,” Campbell says.

“Everyone has to have a very good respect for one another” and work together.

One example of that is helping pilgrims find places to stay or recommending places to eat.

There’s a collegial spirit focusing on helping visitors have the best possible experience. About 200 volunteers help staff the shrine, with tour coordinators regulating how many people are on site at any particular time to preserve the tranquil environment.

Two basic themes drive decisions fueled by the demands created by the crowds, says Don Warden, the shrine’s chief operating officer.

“The first is recognizing that the peace and tranquility that so many pilgrims experience primarily comes from the presence of Our Lady and Our Lord in a special way, at this site chosen by heaven for whatever reason, and the encounter that happens between them and the pilgrims who visit,” Warden says. “We understand that as staff at the shrine there’s not a lot we can do to add to that encounter, so we focus on minimizing things that can distract from that encounter.” Secondly, they encourage a peaceful and contemplative disposition, especially near the more sacred spaces such as the Apparition Chapel and Apparition Oratory.

“Over time, we’ve addressed capacity constraints, as they appear, to ensure space for pilgrims while on the grounds,” Warden says.

They’ve also taken an active role in preventing commercial development near the shrine, “which is always a challenge in a place where large numbers of people gather,” he says.

Protecting that rural tranquility has been key, Campbell says.

“That’s the charm and beauty of coming” to the shrine, she says. “Because people are looking for solace in their lives. They’re looking for a beautiful rural atmosphere to come and practice their faith and consider the miracles of their faith … and really just escape in some ways the wildness of

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K A PAU N the world. We find that that’s probably one of our best assets is that we’re charming.

We’re country.”

JUNE 25, 1950 North Korea invades South Korea, sparking the Korean War.

ACCOMMODATIONS FOR PILGRIMS

While hampered by the pandemic, religious tourism moves as many as 300 million people to travel to the world’s key religious sites worldwide every year, according to Faizan Ali and Cihan Cobanoglu of the University of South Florida.

Devotion prompts some 600 million national and international religious trips, generating $18 billion in global revenues. As Pilsen and the surrounding area become a small example of one of those draws, it means thinking about providing accommodations to those making the pilgrimage.

Wichita’s hospitality industry is well-positioned to handle the influx of people drawn to the area, says Susie Santo, president and CEO of Visit Wichita.

JULY 12, 1950 Kapaun and the men of the 8th Regiment, 1st Cavalry arrive in Korea.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1950 Kapaun is awarded the Bronze Star for bravery, rescuing an injured man under heavy machine gun and small arms fire.

NOVEMBER 2, 1950 Kapaun is captured at the Battle of Unsan after refusing to leave his men.

“We have both established relationships and hospitality programs in place to assist them with welcoming these new visitors to Wichita as the need arises,” Santos says.

However, any travelers that want to stay in Marion County to be near Pilsen will find the pickings slim at the moment. There are eight food outlets in Marion, and most are family owned and so small that “they have to pick and choose their hours to be open so they can actually survive,” says Tammy Ensey, who owns the Historic Elgin Hotel, one of two small inns in town.

“Tourists don’t understand that, especially tourists that are coming from larger cities, where things are open all the time,” Ensey says. “It is an honorable characteristic of a small town, but it’s not conducive to tourism.”

MAY 23, 1951 Kapaun dies in Prison Camp No. 5, Pyoktong, North Korea, near the Chinese border.

Ensey and her husband bought the Elgin five years ago with one eye on serving the people who would come to Pilsen to learn more about Kapaun.

AUGUST 18, 1951 Kapaun is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award for bravery in combat.

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One of the most welcome faces for many of this year’s pilgrims was that of Allison Roggenkamp of Topeka, here tending to the sore feet of Sandy Miller of Broomfield, Colorado. For Joe Spexarth of Colwich, the end of the first day was a good time to change shoes. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle)

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Harriet Bina, who leads tours at the Father Kapaun Museum in Pilsen, kissed Kapaun’s casket when the priest’s remains made a stop at St. John Nepomucene in late September. Harriet and her husband, Laverne, were among many of the faithful who wore blue T-shirts bearing the words: Home at Last; A military honor guard carried the Rev. Emil Kapaun’s casket into St. John Nepomucene, where he had been baptized more than a century earlier. After the casket took its place near the front of the church, anyone could pay their respects without ritual.

A Mass was celebrated later; A statue of the Rev. Emil Kapaun aiding a fellow soldier, along with an area for meditation, is located near St. John Nepomucene in Pilsen.

The bronze plaque says in part: “Nurtured by the soil of Kansas, He consecrated the soul of Korea.”; About 3,500 people have been awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor. Capt. Emil Kapaun is one of only nine military chaplains to receive the medal; This year’s pilgrimage from Wichita to Pilsen honoring the Rev. Emil Kapaun involved about 400 believers, who after three days of walking crowded into St. John Nepomucene for Mass.

Bina of Pilsen told KMUW-FM that reasons for making the trek vary. For some, she said, it’s an act of devotion; for veterans, it’s a story of courage; for others, it’s self-exploration.

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“We had that in our business plan,” Ensey says.

“We weren’t counting on that to succeed, but certainly it takes our occupancy to a new level.”

Ensey opened a restaurant, Parlour 1886, inside the Elgin, a 12-room hotel built of limestone that is on the National Register of Historic Places, to provide visitors another meal option, though it’s currently open only Thursday through Saturday nights because of staffing shortages.

Efforts to attract a new hotel to Marion County have gained little traction, Collett says, because developers aren’t seeing sufficient traffic volumes on U.S. 56.

Marion officials are courting a restaurant “that would be considerably larger than anything we have right now,” Collett says, but if it comes to Marion it won’t open until sometime in 2022.

Back in Wichita, the diocese will rely on volunteers and a new part-time employee to lead tours at the downtown cathedral, Carter says. The tours will be scheduled to avoid interfering with Mass.

“Our hope is that we can have a place where people can pray, can learn about him, learn about his time in the Korean War, what it meant and learn about the Medal of Honor,” he says. “And, obviously, most importantly, his sacrifice … offering of his life as a priest, as a chaplain, and his message of hope and faith.”

Pilsen will remain the caretaker of most of the information and artifacts about Kapaun, Carter says, but the hope is to have something available for those who come to the cathedral.

A REGIONAL IMPACT

The impact of Kapaun’s prominence could reverberate well beyond south-central Kansas.

The Dodge City diocese is looking into creating a kiosk about Kapaun in Timken, where he served as parish priest for several months in 1948 before rejoining the military.

Holy Trinity was the only parish Kapaun served as pastor. In many ways, Timken is much like Pilsen: a Czech community small in numbers but great in faith, located about 130 miles straight west of Pilsen or about 140 miles west-northwest of Wichita.

Like Pilsen, Timken needed a priest who could speak Bohemian because English was the second language in both communities at the time. Unlike Pilsen, whose church inspires awe with its timeless beauty, Kapaun had to celebrate Mass and other sacraments in the basement of Timken’s church because fire had destroyed the upper part of the structure in early 1945.

On a rainy day in May of 1948, Kapaun was the celebrant for the only double wedding of his priesthood. One of those couples would one day become the parents of the author of this article, and their wedding photo graces a prominent place in the Kapaun museum in Pilsen.

The new Holy Trinity Catholic Church was completed in 1956 atop the old foundation, but other than updated appliances in its kitchen, the basement is essentially the same as it was when Kapaun was the parish priest.

Acknowledging the return of Kapaun’s remains, the Diocese of Dodge City released a statement to The Journal saying, “Only God knows the spiritual import it will have for our area and the pilgrims who travel to trace the life of Father Kapaun. If and when that brings them to Holy Trinity, Timken, or any other place in our diocese, we welcome them and ask for their prayers.”

No one involved in the efforts to spread word of Kapaun’s holiness expects Wichita or Pilsen to attract the hundreds of thousands of people that flock to the shrine in Wisconsin. Not right away, anyway.

Still, Campbell says, carefully managed expansion is the key to success. And even as the Pilsen numbers begin to grow, local officials say, the focus has to stay the same.

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“Of paramount concern is protecting the people of Pilsen, respecting their relationship with their native son,” says Mueller, the Marion County commissioner. “We need to make sure that we are very, very sensitive to the local people and their parish.

“One of the things that brings pilgrims is they want to walk in his steps,” he says. “That’s the theme of the (annual) pilgrimage. They want to see Pilsen as it was. They don’t want to see it as a commercial tourist trap.

K A PAU N OCTOBER 17, 1952 Carroll and Kapaun’s parents receive his military medals “in absentia” in a ceremony at St. John Nepomucene.

“We’re working really hard and trying to come up with ways to bring people in and out and still maintain the character of Pilsen, so that when people come and want to walk in his footsteps, it’s similar to what it was (when Kapaun lived there) and not a bunch of concrete.

“You know, it’s still Pilsen.”

In truth, Carter says, Kapaun’s story has already grown beyond Pilsen.

“There’s a lot of me that wants to see his remains up there,” Carter admits. “I think it shares a lot about who he was and is very fitting, but I also understand why the family chose it to be here (in Wichita).

“But I think for all of us involved, this is way bigger than any of us. This is the Holy Spirit spreading his story for a reason and impacting people. I think we just all have to be willing to do whatever is best for his story for the work of the Lord.”

JULY 29, 1953 Carroll celebrates a Memorial Mass for Kapaun at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita. He is unable to celebrate a funeral as Kapaun’s body has not been returned.

1954 Kapaun’s remains are among 4,000 returned to U.S. custody in Operation Glory after the war, but were among 848 that could not be identified and were buried in the National Memorial of the Pacific in Hawaii for 70 years.

1956 Carroll dedicates Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School with the help of the priest’s fellow POWs.

1993 Kapaun is named a Servant of God, after which the Archdiocese of Military Services, USA is allowed to open work on his cause for sainthood.

A 60-mile trek across parts of Kansas in the summertime involves casual dress and deportment. At a point distant from a confessional, the Rev. Eric Weldon met with penitent Gabe Jirak of Wichita.

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K A PAU N JUNE 29, 2008 The Diocese of Wichita takes over the efforts for Kapaun’s canonization, and Bishop Michael Jackels officially opens the Diocesan phase of investigation, which is completed in 2011.

APRIL 11, 2013 Kapaun is awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military award for bravery in combat, by President Barack Obama.

NOVEMBER 2015 Bishop Carl Kemme presents the positio on Kapaun’s life and virtue to the Congregation for Saints in Rome, in hopes that he will be named Venerable and his cause for canonization may continue.

MARCH 2, 2021 The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announces that it has positively identified the remains of Kapaun.

JULY 27, 2021 Kapaun is awarded the Taegeuk Order of Military Merit, the highest military honor from South Korea, by President Moon Jae-in.

SEPTEMBER 2021 Kapaun’s remains return to Kansas. The faithful celebrate a Vigil (Sept. 28), a Mass of Christian Burial, and host a procession to his interment at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita (Sept. 29).

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As Father Kapaun’s name grows in renown, the pronunciation lacks consensus BY: STAN FINGER

Ray Kapaun, a nephew of the Rev. Emil Kapaun, turned out to meet pilgrims this year and share his uncle’s Medal of Honor.

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Callers who reach Scott Carter’s voicemail at work may be tempted to listen to his recording more than once.

In a matter of seconds, the coordinator of the cause for sainthood of the Rev. Emil Kapaun pronounces the priest’s name two different ways.

Ka-PAWN and CAPE-un.

What’s going on there? The answer is simple – and complicated.

The priest, his parents and his brother all pronounced their family name Ka-PAWN, like the chess piece, says Ray Kapaun, the priest’s nephew.

One of Eugene Kapaun’s favorite stories about his brother was that, when Emil served as a auxiliary chaplain in World War II, the airmen at Herington Army Airfield liked to tease him that he wasn’t really a priest but a gangster in hiding because Ka-PAWN sounded so much like Capone, the infamous mob boss’s last name. The chaplain loved it, because the ribbing meant he had been embraced by those for whom he sought to provide encouragement and spiritual nourishment.

So where did the second pronunciation come from? The “unofficial official story,” as Carter puts it, is that when Cardinal Francis Spellman came to Wichita to dedicate a new Catholic high school in Kapaun’s name in 1956, he blurted out “CAPE-un.” No one dared correct the cardinal, so the name stuck.

Another version says Wichita Bishop Mark K. Carroll – whose name now graces the Catholic high school on Wichita’s west side – committed the blunder. Eugene Kapaun, who was a janitor at the school named for his brother, asked the diocese to change the pronunciation for years.

Those pleas went unheeded.

Eventually, to avoid conflict, the Kapaun family adopted the same pronunciation as the school

– which is why folks in his native town of Pilsen often insist that’s the right way to say it.

Kapaun died in a North Korean POW camp in 1951 at the age of 35, and stories brought home by those who were with him in the prison camp eventually led to the chaplain being awarded the Medal of Honor and the ongoing consideration by the Catholic Church for sainthood. When those same veterans visited Wichita to pay homage to a man they revered, they were baffled by the pronunciation of the school named after him.

Following careful research by White House staff, President Barack Obama pronounced the chaplain’s name Ka-PAWN at the Medal of Honor ceremony, and that is the version routinely heard outside the Wichita area. The correct pronunciation has begun to gain traction even in Wichita, though diocesan officials acknowledge it will be difficult to shake the other version because of the high school and its alumni base.

Old habits are hard to break.

Ray Kapaun grew up using the school version because by then his family had given up the fight.

But after his uncle was awarded the Medal of Honor, he changed his pronunciation to match that of his father, uncle and grandparents. He realizes, he says, that it’s important to say the family name the same way his uncle did as he shares his remarkable life.

“I wouldn’t be walking my walk if I didn’t,” Kapaun said in discussing the name in a 2014 story in The Wichita Eagle.

Addressing the pronunciation issue in the same story, the Rev. John Hotze, episcopal delegate for the office for Father Kapaun’s beatification and canonization, says the Wichita diocese figures to make the correct way of saying the chaplain’s name more of a priority should the Catholic Church one day declare Kapaun “Blessed” – or one step short of sainthood.

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On the evening of the first day’s pilgrimage this year from Wichita to Pilsen, Nick Dellasega of Pittsburg recited the rosary with his wife, who participated by phone. Dellasega’s connection to the Rev. Emil Kapaun is a noteworthy one. In 2011, he had a heart attack that was nearly fatal.

As medical personnel struggled to save his life, his cousin Jonah Dellasega asked Jesus, Mary and Kapaun to intervene. The incident was reported to the Wichita diocese as a miracle.

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“ I T ’ S I N C R E D I B LY H U M B L I N G. I M E A N, I T ’ S A M A Z I N G : S O M E B O DY W H O C A N C O M E F RO M T RU LY N OT H I N G, PA R E N T S A R E I M M I G R A N T S, A N D H E C O M E S A N D A L L O F A S U D D E N B E C O M E S S O M E T H I N G. ” TODD LIVICK SR., Communications specialist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

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The Juniper Gardens Training Farm in Kansas City, Kansas, helps refugee farmers navigate their first year of growing and selling produce at local farmers markets, a CSA program and a wholesaling operation that caters to restaurants. Here Gasalla Musekura, formerly of Congo, works in the field.

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Thinking Outside the Big Box Food deserts present an increasingly complex puzzle affecting minority communities in places such as Kansas City and Wichita.

And the solution doesn’t appear to lie in wooing large retailers to fill voids. Instead, the path forward is heavily tied to listening to the needs of the underserved and trying multiple approaches to put healthy food in the hands of residents.

BY: JOEL MATHIS

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BY: JOEL MATHIS

It’s around noon on a recent Saturday, and the local grocery store is all but empty of customers.

The grocer in question is The Merc Co-op in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, a member-owned enterprise spun off in 2020 from a venerable Lawrence store well known for its organic produce, exotic brands and hippie vibe. (Full disclosure: This reporter’s wife works in the Lawrence store.)

The Kansas City outpost is different. The produce section is just a few feet inside the front entrance, yes, and it is smaller than a typical store’s, but the shelves are packed with familiar brand names and affordable foods: Heinz ketchup, Bush’s beans, a 10-pack of pork chops for $10, that sort of thing.

Before The Merc opened, listening sessions were held to learn what residents wanted and what they were willing to pay, to make the new store responsive to the needs of its potential customers. This is the result.

“We’re traditionally seen as a health food store and oftentimes that’s a higher-price perception,” says Valerie Taylor, marketing manager for The Merc. “We needed to learn what it meant to be a downtown KCK resident.”

Outside in the parking lot, there is a bit more activity going on – a farmers market has set up, with even more produce available from local vendors. One local woman taking it all in, Maria Jaraleño, says in Spanish that she is glad for the store’s arrival. “It’s better, because the food is fresh,” she says through an interpreter.

Another way The Merc is different from most grocery stores: It is here in KCK thanks to the efforts of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas. In 2019, local officials reported there were 18 designated “food

deserts” in the county – where roughly 27,000 residents had no easy access to fresh produce and affordable groceries. The Unified Government owns the property, paid for the building and signed The Merc to a three-year contract.

“Our mission is to provide access to healthy foods,” Taylor says.

By the time the store opened in August 2020, though, another significant challenge had presented itself: COVID-19. The nearby office and hospital workers who had been expected to drop in and help sustain the store’s finances were suddenly absent, mostly working from home. The Merc may be cooperatively owned and working with government support, but it’s not a nonprofit – at the end of the day, the store still has to make money.

“Just in general it’s been a challenge,” Taylor acknowledges.

But The Merc isn’t trying to irrigate KCK’s food deserts all by itself. A block down the street, Catholic Charities operates a food pantry most weekdays. A few minutes’ drive away, more food is distributed to local residents at New Seasons Christian Church. Nearby, the Juniper Gardens Training Farm and the Somali Bantu Community Garden offer space for refugees to grow fruits and vegetables for their families and neighbors.

Soon, Dotte Mobile Grocer is expected to start providing affordable food at 15 locations across the community.

Two-plus miles to the south in Armourdale is the Cross-Lines Community Market, an effort to transform the traditional hunger-fighting food pantry into a grocery store experience that people will find inviting, according to The Kansas City Beacon, which reported on the effort this past summer.

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Caroline Harries is associate director of the Healthy Food Access program at The Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that fights food deserts across the country. The kind of approach seen in KCK – listen to the community, try multiple methods to get healthy food to residents – is one she favors. Building one big grocery store is “just a piece of the puzzle,” she says.

Which leads to a big question being tackled right now, a few hours southwest of KC: How will Wichita solve the increasingly urgent puzzle posed by its own urban food deserts?

WHEN THE MODEL DOESN’T FIT The July closure of Wichita’s last Save A Lot grocery store shocked the Black community that it largely served – after all, the store itself had opened in 2006 as a response to the food desert problem, lured with tax incentives after the nearest Dillons closed in 1997. (The neighborhood was also once home to an IGA, as well as a local grocery store owned by the father of NFL running back Barry Sanders.) The newest closure gave fresh life to a long-running conversation about how to help residents of the city’s poorer neighborhoods survive and thrive.

“It (the Save A Lot) wasn’t the best-managed store,” says the Rev. Broderick Huggins, of the nearby St. James Missionary Baptist Church. But its closure, he says, exacerbated an existing problem of getting fresh veggies and other affordable food in Black neighborhoods, a problem that’s hardly limited to Wichita. Without the Save A Lot, he says, many of his parishioners “have to get their relatives, their grandchildren, their children, Uber and public transportation,” to get groceries. “There are a few agencies that take seniors to those places, but at the end of the day the closure of the store … is emblematic of the trend across the country.”

residents there,” Burks says. “Our concern really is for people of the lower-income spectrum – the elderly, and a lot of people who don’t have cars – and it’s a problem for them to go and get the kinds of things that are needed for their families.

We’ve been struggling with it for a long time.”

Indeed, a 2013 report by the city’s Health & Wellness Coalition estimated that a quarter of the city’s population lived in neighborhoods with limited access to groceries. (The federal government defines urban food deserts as low-income areas where a significant portion of the population lives more than a half-mile from the nearest supermarket, supercenter or large grocery store.) The issue has been persistent enough that by coincidence Wichita and Sedgwick County officials received a presentation from the coalition on a proposed “food system master plan” – which includes provisions to address the city’s underserved areas – on the same day the Save A Lot news broke.

“There are folks throughout Wichita who have been shaken up by this,” Mayor Brandon Whipple says of the store’s closure. “Our neighbors should be able to have access to fresh food and fresh produce without too high of a burden.”

In Wichita and elsewhere, the problem has been propelled by grocery industry trends. Fewer, bigger corporate-owned supermarkets and big box supercenters such as Walmart, Target and Kroger (which operates Dillons stores in Kansas) have become the norm. The smaller neighborhood stores of yore have all but disappeared, often leaving behind convenience stores, dollar stores and small shops that generally charge higher prices for a gallon of milk and often have little or no fresh produce on hand.

Larry Burks, president of the Wichita branch of the NAACP, agrees.

The result has been particularly hard on minority neighborhoods. In 2020, an analysis conducted for CNN found that in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, 17.7% of predominantly Black neighborhoods had limited access to supermarkets. For white neighborhoods, the number was 7.6%.

“Just from the very outset, the African American community – specifically in northeast Wichita – has always had a problem with not having the right kind of facilities to meet the needs of the

Nozella Brown, director of Community Vitality at K-State Research and Extension’s Wyandotte County office, has spent much of the last two decades working on food access issues in KCK.

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CLOCKWISE FROM BELOW: When the Save A Lot grocery store opened in northeast Wichita in 2006, it was hailed as a redevelopment success story. The project got a leg up with a $750,000 federal grant through the Community Development Block Grant program. It stayed open 15 years, closing this past July; The Merc Co-op in downtown KCK is an offshoot of the Community Mercantile, founded in Lawrence in 1974.

The satellite operation is located in a building owned by the city-county government, which had sought to add a grocery store to the area for more than a decade; The timing of the opening of The Merc had the misfortune to coincide with the pandemic that has swept the globe. Downtown workers, who had been expected to provide some of the store’s trade, began working from home. “Just in general it’s been a challenge,” acknowledges Valerie Taylor, the store’s marketing manager.

DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. What factors make dealing with the challenge of urban food deserts complex?

2. What seems to be working, based on this story? What’s not working?

3. What are the implications for people exercising leadership on this challenge if we

accept that communities like Wichita can’t rely on big grocery chains to serve all the city’s residents?

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She realized early on that the problem wouldn’t be solved by trying to lure conventional grocery stores back to poor and minority neighborhoods in her city.

“They (corporations) use this particular model to determine how viable a grocery store is going to be in a particular community. Based on that model, we would never be a good fit,” she says.

“That was a shocker for us – we have all these residents here, everybody needs food.” “‘Food apartheid’ is a term we use quite a bit,” adds Kolia Souza, a former researcher at K-State’s Center for Engagement and Community Development who now works at Michigan State’s Center for Regional Food Systems. “(Food apartheid) looks at some of the systemic structures that lend themselves to whether or not a community is vital.”

Wichita’s experience bears that out, and also illustrates the health consequences of these forces. In 2019, KAKE-TV’s Pilar Pedraza found that the city’s New Deal-era redlining maps – which enforced segregation by making it harder to get loans to buy and build homes in Black neighborhoods – corresponded closely to the racial makeup of those same neighborhoods today. And those neighborhoods, she found, had higher rates of arthritis, diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease – illnesses born, in part, of insufficient access to healthy food. That’s fairly typical: Studies have shown that residents of food deserts have higher rates of “adverse cardiological outcomes” and other diet-related diseases.

Which leaves Wichita officials in a bind. Attracting new grocery stores will be tough, given the industry’s trends, but residents of underserved neighborhoods still need to eat – and they deserve healthy food.

“I know it’s a very difficult task to have companies come into town to put these facilities there,” says Burks. But he adds: “We can’t continue to exist that way. We have the right to have those types of facilities there. It’s a quality of life issue.”

MULTIPLE POINTS OF ACCESS The Food Trust started in 1992 to address a chronic problem: Too many Philadelphia residents couldn’t easily buy healthy fruits and vegetables.

The nonprofit started addressing the issue with a farmers market at one of the city’s public housing projects. Backed by state funding, the agency’s efforts to expand food access include bringing supermarkets to neighborhoods that lack them, helping stock corner stores with veggies and whole-grain products, supporting other farmers markets across the city and even providing cooking classes at local community centers to help adults learn how to prepare and enjoy healthier foods.

“We believe that communities thrive with multiple points of access,” says Harries, the Food Trust executive. But the process, she says, is driven by the residents of the communities her agency serves. That requires a lot of listening, or it’s possible for well-intentioned projects to fall short of their desired impact. “We really lean in on community perspective,” she says. “It’s important to let communities lead on what they need and what they want.”

The Food Trust has also taken its expertise far beyond Philadelphia, to cities and states nationwide – including in Kansas, where it provides strategic guidance to the Kansas Healthy Foods Initiative, which addresses both urban and rural food deserts across the state. (The program has also partnered with the Kansas Health Foundation, which provides core funding for the Kansas Leadership Center, publisher of The Journal.) According to the initiative, as many as 800,000 Kansans don’t have access to healthy food within a reasonable distance of their home.

Food deserts are prevalent across the state, says Rial Carver, a program manager for the initiative.

The urban projects that the Healthy Foods Initiative has funded hint at the variety of methods that might be used to attack Wichita’s particular challenges: A “post-harvest facility” for Teck Farms, a six-acre urban farm in Hutchinson that provides produce to local grocery stores, a strategic development grant to help the KCK

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Farmers Market purchase equipment and develop marketing plans, and a grant to help Topeka’s Supermart El Torito, a Hispanic grocery store, open its doors in 2018. “We’re building the capacity for healthy food in those areas,” Carver says. “We’re really focused at doing that at the retail level.”

There is a great need in Wichita for improved access, she says – but also opportunity. “I think what you’re going to see are innovative models.

When a market doesn’t serve a community, that’s when you see creativity.”

She notes that Wichitans have been applying that creativity to the food deserts issue for years. In 2014, Donna Pearson McClish started Common Ground Producers and Growers Inc., a mobile market that now provides produce from local farmers to more than 30 senior centers and low-income housing units across Wichita and Sedgwick County. The closing of Save A Lot means there is more demand than ever for Common Ground’s services.

“The problem is huge,” McClish said in a July video conference held by NetWorked Partnership for Community Investment. “We’re looking now at a greater need than we ever could have imagined when we started this process.” She added: “We’ve got the system in place; now we’re looking for the funding to expand what we already do.”

‘LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE’ Talk to experts and observers, and they’ll point to similarly creative efforts in other cities as possible examples for Wichita. In Detroit, urban farms are an increasingly prominent part of the city landscape – and activists have pulled together more than 1,000 member-owners to help start a cooperative grocery store much like The Merc.

In Baltimore, Loyola University Maryland is backing the FreshCrate program to put fruits and vegetables in corner stores, and it distributes coupons so residents can buy the food cheaply.

In Louisville, Kentucky, the “Fresh Stop Markets” program bags up local produce biweekly during

the growing season – in the style of subscription “farm shares,” sometimes known as community supported agriculture or CSAs – and sells them at a sliding scale: $6 a bag for people receiving SNAP benefits, $12 for other low-income buyers and $25 for most other people, with everybody getting the same produce regardless of what they pay. In many cases, cities circumvent the grocery industry by connecting local farmers to local consumers.

Getting community input is critical to the success of any effort. Souza says that what works in those cities might or might not work in Wichita.

“It has to fit in the context,” she says of possible solutions. Despite the need, fixing a food desert is not a “build it and they will come” situation – people have particular food preferences as well as varying budgets. “That’s why it makes it all the more important you are informed about the context that you’re trying to do a food supply in,” she says.

Brown, the K-State Research and Extension official, credits the Unified Government and The Merc with doing the kind of outreach that Souza describes.

“The positive here, although it wasn’t perfect – there are people who aren’t satisfied – is that the Unified Government really tried to listen to people, The Merc tried to listen to people,” she says. “Things weren’t done behind closed doors.”

Getting to this point was a challenge, though.

When Wyandotte County went looking to bring a store to Kansas City, “they basically courted every single conventional store in the area, and they all said no,” says The Merc’s Taylor. “The sales were going to be too low, the cost was going to be too high, not a high return on investment for conventional stores.” Bringing The Merc to town was a Hail Mary,” she says. It cost the county an estimated $7 million to build the 14,000-squarefoot store – on land it already owned – and even at that, the effort might not work out. The store celebrated its first anniversary at the end of July; it has two more years on its original contract.

“We’re keeping our eye on it, so that when it’s time to discuss extending it beyond those three

Nozella Brown, director of Community Vitality at K-State Research and Extension’s Wyandotte County office, has devoted much of the past 20 years trying to unravel the tangle of issues involved in the dearth of healthful and affordable foods in Kansas City, Kansas.

FROM TOP: This past summer, four Wichita agencies teamed up with Partnership for a Healthier America to distribute fresh produce through the national Good Food For All program. Volunteers from McConnell Air Force Base, including Tech. Sgt. Jennifer Jordan, left, and Senior Airman Michael Dacayo, center, helped with the distribution, while Connie Frederking of Wichita directed some of the 1,000 family participants toward the loading areas. (Photos by Jeff Tuttle) The Dotte Mobile Grocer makes food available in KCK neighborhoods at set times and at specific locations based on community demand. The truck is stocked with fresh produce, meats and dairy, as well as meal kits and other staples and household items. (Courtesy photo)

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years, we’ll see if it’s feasible,” Taylor says, but adds: “We’re not a nonprofit, we are a business, and we owe it to our 8,600-plus member-owners to run a successful business.”

to bring the store to town, but that wasn’t enough to get it to stay. “Somebody who lives in (Florida) is making decisions that impact Wichita,” he says.

But The Merc isn’t the only answer to the challenge, Brown says. “For us, I can only say what we’ve found is it has to be multilayered – gardens, farmers markets, as many ways as we could to get food into those (underserved) areas,” she says. As for the future: “We still don’t know. This is still an experiment yet.”

So now he’s hoping the future will be more oriented to local stores, with local ownership – and he thinks that’s where city government should put its efforts. “There’s always limits to what government can accomplish,” he says.

“What this teaches us is we should be more conscious of where we can target incentives.

What if we used different tools in our eco devo toolbox to grow local grocery stores?”

LOOKING LOCAL Wichita’s Whipple is also ready to do some creative thinking. In the short term, he’s looking at copying from a Baltimore program that distributes fresh food to residents at neighborhood community centers.

“What if we bought some of the big industrialized refrigerators – then you have people pick up a phone to make an order, or use an app,” he says.

In the longer term, he has come to believe that Wichita can’t rely just on big corporate grocery chains to serve all the city’s residents. Save A Lot’s property, he says, is owned by an out-ofstate developer. The city used tax incentives

Meriatrice Niyonkuru, a refugee from Burundi, washes vegetables at Juniper Gardens Training Farm.

Whether that will work is unclear. “Any time you have change,” Whipple says, “you also have opportunity.”

The NAACP’s Burks understands the challenges involved in filling the hole Save A Lot left behind, but he is also impatient. “It should be on the front burner for everyone who cares about communities,” he says.

He adds: “This is a priority for all of us, for the community. It’s something that’s a valid need.

It’s not something we’re going to stop talking about and discussing until we get it.”

BY: JOEL MATHIS

Addressing the issue of food access begins with listening.

Experts agree that officials who want to address a food desert crisis should be asking questions of the community. Kolia Souza, an equity and advocacy specialist with Michigan State’s Center for Regional Food Systems, says these four questions are a good place to start.

WHAT ARE YOUR FOOD ACCESS PRIORITIES?

“In my food-systems work, affordability often trumps access to healthy foods, which is not to say that people don’t want healthy foods. This is a product of the way our food system is set up to make calorie-dense, unhealthy foods more affordable ... which has far-reaching repercussions.”

WHAT ARE YOUR BARRIERS TO HEALTHY EATING?

“Have to be careful about this question because ‘health’ can be defined differently among people. The term ‘healthy’ can be used to shame others, making them feel guilty about their choices.”

WHERE ARE YOU GETTING YOUR FOOD IN THIS COMMUNITY?

“Are you happy with the options, or is there something else you would like to see? This is pretty straightforward. Travel patterns for food access is pretty important data when coupled with an understanding of why people are making these decisions. Even I travel to multiple stores to get certain kinds or quality of food. Others may grab food on their way home from work. Still others may pursue the best discounts.”

HOW CAN WE – AS OFFICIALS – HELP MAKE FOOD ACCESS BETTER IN THIS COMMUNITY?

“Not everyone will know the answer to this question. People may not know what their officials can do for them or may not trust officials to do it. However, opening the floor to this kind of discussion can open doors to more collaborative problem-solving.”

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AFTER THE STUDY, COMES THE TEST A 319-page study on affordable-housing needs in Johnson County and tangible strategies for filling gaps now sits in the hands of policymakers. The ideas were developed with input from more than 5,000 county residents. But change could be tough in a county that has long cultivated a suburban feel centered around pricey single-family homes.

After seeing their Hillcrest Transitional Living apartment for the first time, Steven Bowes and Jade Stott shared a tender moment on their combined journey out of homelessness. For 90 days they’ll live rent-free while following a strict budgeting regimen. They’ll then have to find their own place.

(Photo by Jeff Tuttle)

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BY: DAWN BORMANN NOVASCONE

David and Veronica Stogsdill hardly need a housing study to tell them that Johnson County doesn’t offer enough affordable housing.

The Roeland Park couple scours the home market regularly. Home ownership is their dream but the sticker shock is numbing for Veronica, an educational aide in the Shawnee Mission School District.

“How can people afford this?” she wonders.

Steven Bowes and his fiancee, Jade Stott, feel the same when it comes to apartments. For a long time, they couldn’t find a landlord willing to give them a second chance. Bowes, who has a criminal record, and Stott both work full time.

They can afford rent. But Johnson County’s rental market is so competitive that it shuts them and other laborers out. Bowes started asking everyone he knew where the rest of the blue-collar workforce lives in Johnson County.

“We have tried not to leave any stone unturned.

We are leading as many horses to water as we can,” says Julie Brewer, executive director of United Community Services (UCS), which pushed for the housing inventory.

Yet while it marks the end of one chapter, it is most assuredly the beginning of the hard work.

The exhaustive reports are now largely in the hands of county and city policymakers who are charged with housing. How will those cities respond?

The answer is simple. Many cannot.

The need for affordable homes and rentals in Johnson County far exceeds the inventory, according to a 319-page housing study produced this year by the Johnson County Health Equity Network, a consortium of leaders from schools, businesses, contractors, health officials, planners and policymakers.

And how will they respond collectively? Affordable housing advocates say it will take every city sharing the risks financially and otherwise to prevail. It will take a bandwagon from Lenexa, Shawnee, Olathe, Merriam, Leawood, Westwood and others. Short of that, why would one city stick its neck out?

The next step in the process occurred this past summer when the Housing for All Toolkit was released offering tangible strategies to help cities proactively diversify their housing.

Some of that depends on more residents like the Stogsdills being willing to ask for change. Area social service agencies, who have been sounding the alarm for years, don’t believe that cities can ignore it any longer.

The release marks the end of a massive engagement process that brought together ideas and input from about 5,000 Johnson Countians from all walks of life.

The report landed after the pandemic further exposed the deficiencies of Johnson County’s affordable-housing market and ensuing labor shortages. Johnson Countians more than ever

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have come to appreciate the crucial roles that teachers, police, firefighters, nursing home caregivers, grocery store employees and garbage truck drivers play in a community’s vitality.

“We were putting hero signs out in the yards of businesses and services that really made a difference to us,” Brewer says. “But how many of those heroes are able to live in our community?”

The Johnson County home market has been hot for years. But consider that from August 2020 to August 2021 the median sale price for a declining supply of homes went from $322,500 to $366,256 – about a 14% increase. The average selling price in August 2021 was $428,333.

Don’t expect policymakers to promptly jump on board. Any plan could easily fall apart if one city is left to shoulder the financial costs and take all the risks. One Overland Park mayoral candidate has already questioned the “sprawl of apartments” encroaching on existing residential neighborhoods and causing traffic congestion and water runoff problems.

THE STUDY

Not everyone will agree with what the housing study says and the toolkit offers.

The study offers unvarnished explanations as to why affordable housing is out of reach for some – a NIMBY mindset and a lingering history of housing segregation, redlining and racist deed restrictions. It matters because home ownership is considered the fastest way to build household wealth. It has given white Johnson Countians an intergenerational leg up on capital.

The study shows the need for more housing, period. Across all income levels, the Johnson County housing inventory must grow to keep pace with demand. So those large, high-density apartment buildings that many Johnson Countians seem to loathe? There’s a reason they keep multiplying.

But it’s not an either/or. The large, single-family homes that are a staple of suburban life aren’t going away. But other needs must be met. Some key points from the study and toolkit: •

The market is expected to supply a steady pace of large, single-family homes priced near $350,000 for years to come. But that won’t help those among the 28% who make less than $15 per hour.

•

Just reaching a housing supply that could be deemed adequate would be a mammoth task requiring communities to be proactive. By 2030, Lenexa would need 1,443 owner-occupied units priced at less than $250,000 and 824 rentals that would cost less than $1,000 a month to meet its needs. And that wouldn’t include other housing that the city needs to meet expected growth.

•

Zoning requirements may need to change to allow for redevelopment and infill projects, such as duplexes, smaller-format apartments, co-housing, and carriage or cottage courts, usually groups of detached homes with a shared interior courtyard.

•

Programs that help preserve and rehabilitate existing housing stock are often worth the investment. That’s something every city can help with. Repairs often rank last on the priority list when homeowners’ budgets are bare, especially for seniors on fixed incomes and young families.

•

Incentives could help offer developers a way to make more money on affordable housing in Johnson County. Funding mechanisms such as benefit districts and a housing trust fund can help share the financial risk. Cities could offer tax credits, tax-exempt bonds and lessen expensive hookup fees to entice developers.

•

Advocacy is essential. It’s easier for homeowners to digest a duplex or cottage court development if they understand the need and design well ahead of public meetings. It takes open communication and residents being willing to tell policymakers they need housing.

FROM LEFT: Steven Bowes, Jade Stott and her children are being housed in one of Hillcrest Transitional Living’s five sites in Johnson and Wyandotte counties. On their first day they checked out the new digs, including the food pantry in the basement, and signed a written agreement to follow program guidelines and attend weekly volunteer-taught classes in life skills, employment, community living and budgeting.

The housing study, paid for by the county and 19 cities, was conducted after years of complaints about affordable housing in Johnson County.

The study group heard from 4,700 respondents and another 170 social service and policymakers who gathered for a summit to discuss housing.

There were about 125 stakeholders represented, including several competing factions: home builders, tenant advocacy groups, landlords and homeless shelter advocates.

Brewer feared the pandemic would all but squelch the public listening sessions. The opposite happened.

The sessions moved to Zoom and engagement was better, allowing more residents a chance to weigh in without leaving the house.

But even with input from 5,000 people, there’s still tremendous loyalty to the suburban feel long cultivated in Johnson County, among the state’s fastest growing areas, according to the 2020 census, and home to 609,863 residents.

Overland Park mayoral candidate Mike Czinege has already questioned the need. The Shawnee Mission Post asked Czinege and other candidates if they would support zoning changes to allow for denser and more affordable housing options to help low-income residents live closer to their jobs.

“The KC metro is easily accessible throughout, with often no more than a 30-minute trip to reach most parts of the city, whether by car or public transportation,” Czinege told the online news source. “The suggestion that people are not able to live within a reasonable commute to employment in Overland Park is simply not as dire as the premised question would imply.”

Ideally, he said the jobs within Overland Park allow for hard-working and “prudently saving” families to transition from an apartment to a single-family home.

“Building endless, dense developments squeezed in alongside established neighborhoods is driving many longtime residents from those neighborhoods to flee to southern Johnson County, Miami County and rural Missouri,” he told The Post.

The Journal asked Czinege for comment on the county’s housing plan, but was unable to reach him.

The Post asked every candidate about affordable housing, which was a question selected by a reader poll. Nearly all the other candidates throughout Johnson County agreed that it was a problem.

One of those, Curt Skoog, has supported several affordable housing projects and proposals including hotel conversion to apartments, higher-density

apartments along Metcalf Avenue in the heart of Johnson County and redevelopment on vacant land.

“In the last few years, we have seen new housing return to north Overland Park for the first time in over 30 years. Additional new housing projects are expected, and I will advocate for a significant portion to be attainable,” he told The Post.

CHANGING THE RULES?

The toolkit gives politicians some ideas to consider as they decide what, if anything, to do next. It offers five goals to consider for cities, though none will solve the problem in and of itself.

Among them: Help preserve and rehabilitate existing housing stock, offer incentives for public/ private partnerships and create advocacy groups to build support and build an understanding about the need for affordable housing measures.

Another goal is reducing overall household expenses, be it with utility assistance or locating buildings closer to transportation, given the scarcity of public transportation in Johnson County. Johnson County could also use more middle density “house-scale” buildings that blend better with neighborhoods or walkable communities. It would fill housing for the missing middle, the toolkit suggests.

That’s already started in small doses.

Several small projects have sprung up in Overland Park that have tested the city’s amenability to affordable housing.

The first test came when a developer proposed building affordable duplexes and triplexes on two acres of vacant land in an older section of Overland Park. Neighbors argued that the density wasn’t the right feel. But their complaints were actually more about design layout. The city relaxed what had been non-negotiable setback rules to reconfigure the design. It created more harmony among neighbors, says Overland Park Planning Director Jack Messer.

“I think that’s probably our biggest lesson,” Messer says. “If we want a different kind of housing, I think that we need to think about how our rules affect the housing that we’re getting.”

Several Overland Park hotels are also being converted into affordable one-bedroom and studio apartments. The plans were approved despite non-compliance with the city’s strict parking mandates for apartments.

Plentiful parking is a staple of suburban life, so it’s not an insignificant adjustment.

“It’s going to take time for us to experiment with new ideas – to put in place new rules and regulations on those new ideas and then see what the reaction is,” he says.

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The projects show how important housing advocacy could be in the years ahead. Without strong support, affordable housing could take decades as city leaders wait anxiously to see who wants to go first.

After all, not everyone will love a triplex turning up on the unused church lot down the street.

YES IN MY BACKYARD

There’s one ace in the hole for residents desperate for true starter homes or cheaper rent, says Sonja Trauss, president of YIMBY (Yes in my Backyard) Law, a legal nonprofit that originated in San Francisco that promotes fair, abundant housing.

Showing up to advocate for affordable housing at public meetings is a powerful tool.

Trauss grew so frustrated by the NIMBY complaints that had doomed residential housing in her neighborhood that she started writing letters to support nearly every housing project that popped up in her community. A developer thought it was a prank.

“People just hate developers for some reason. We treat them like they make cigarettes,” she says.

Residents were positive that their home values would plummet anytime an apartment was built.

Research across the country generally shows the opposite, but the discourse was so berserk, she says, that no one could hear reason over the NIMBY cries.

She’s heard residents compare new buildings to a violent assault “or every new building is urban renewal.” Some have argued that housing would destroy their morning coffee break and backyard plants.

“This is a huge public policy decision,” she says. “People are going to have housing for 70 years, and do you think anyone cares about your morning routines?”

Except elected officials do care.

And why wouldn’t they, she says, when not one person shows up to ask for more housing.

“All you have to do is show up and be seen with this point of view so the decision-makers know that this view exists,” Trauss says.

FROM LEFT: Veronica and David Stogsdill and their children would prefer to be living in their own home. But bad luck and lack of money, now made worse by the pandemic, have compelled them to live for years with her parents in a modest Roeland Park home. They have adapted, helping with chores, using a bedroom in the unfinished basement as quiet space where Veronica can read to 6-year-old Nessa, and winking at Nessa and her older sister, Karli, when a little silliness seems warranted.

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Policymakers know that you don’t attract sound commercial businesses by hauling in employees by bus, she says.

“If you want jobs in your community, you have to want housing in your community too,” Trauss says.

Her advice to residents like the Stogsdill family?

Show up.

The couple, who first spoke with The Journal in 2019, have a story worth telling. Seven years ago they moved in with Veronica’s parents when David temporarily lost his job. At the time it meant having 10 people living in a three-bedroom, one-bath Roeland Park home. It hasn’t been ideal but it allowed their youngest daughter to remain in her Johnson County school. It was one shred of stability as the family encountered many challenges.

Their story might be dismissed as an anomaly, but they offer this: Down the street from the Stogsdills, a teacher lives with her mother.

Another neighbor was doubling up in a home with a parent until they were able to buy an affordable home outside of Johnson County.

The couple made headway on medical bills and planned to buy a home around 2023. Then the pandemic hit. David was laid-off from his heating and air-conditioning job after becoming sick with

what doctors later said was likely COVID. Testing wasn’t widespread at the time.

David says he filed for unemployment benefits in the early days of the pandemic. He and his wife suffered more health battles, which is common in cost-burdened households. Veronica needed a hysterectomy. David battled depression as he struggled with COVID isolation and worried that his family would never get out of the hole. He knows that some Americans were angered that so many service sector employees collected unemployment. But it helped his family pay down a significant amount of debt while many companies weren’t hiring.

An unlikely event led David to a new job. The transmission went out on the family’s only car, a 2008 Nissan Maxima. A familiar face pulled up in the tow truck. The driver was an old pal looking to hire someone he could trust to drive. David started days later making significantly more than his last HVAC job.

After they purchase a used car, the Stogsdills will once again put money away to invest in a home.

They hope the prices don’t escalate so fast that it prices them completely out of the market.

As for the Stogsdill family speaking up to advocate for affordable housing, it’s unlikely.

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“David and I have social anxiety, so speaking in public is not our favorite thing to do,” she says.

The bottom line: Johnson County has a growing need for homeless shelters, which are in short supply.

Vince Munoz, a tenant organizer with Rent Zero Kansas, says many residents stay mum about their finances and housing.

The homeless population includes many unlikely people like Bowes and Stott. They were recently accepted into Hillcrest Transitional Living, which offers a 90-day rent-free housing program. The couple, who are expecting a baby, will live in an Overland Park house divided into apartments while they participate in the strict all-needs, nowants budgeting program. The proven program traditionally stabilizes a family before they must find their own place within a budget.

The group is trying to organize Kansans to collectively create change for renters.

The group had a seat at the table as the housing toolkit was created.

Still Munoz, who lives in Mission, wishes the finished product had more policy suggestions to help renters.

“Part of affordable housing is changing the power dynamic between renters and landlords,” he says.

Do they consider how a security deposit is a barrier to housing?

“Some people might think security deposits are reasonable, but for many people that can really set you back,” he says.

Munoz thinks a tipping point has been reached in Johnson County because residents absolutely know that housing is out of reach for many.

“I mean it’s so egregious now that people get it,” he says.

But residents may not care about changing the dynamics. The real question, he says, might be determining who wins and loses from less affordable housing.

COMPLEX NEEDS

One housing category that gets little attention is the needs of the homeless population. Many homeless people work but live in their cars, couch surf or find temporary shelter with social service groups.

Others suffer chronic conditions that require intense social service help.

Bowes and Stott feel lucky to have found Hillcrest. Although they both had jobs, they had no permanent home. The couple, who are both in recovery for drugs and alcohol, have been shut out of many apartments because Bowes has a violent felony on his record.

The couple understand why many landlords would turn them down. They are upfront about it. The changes they made persuaded Hillcrest, largely supported by religious agencies, to accept the couple.

Stott, a mother of two, wants to stay in Johnson County because her older son receives highquality special education services in the public school system. But even applying for apartments is expensive. She asks if they accept felons and they tell her to pay the application fee to find out.

“You ask people for resources, and no one really knows,” she says. “They just keep telling you to call places.”

Throughout the Kansas City metro area, many landlords won’t rent to someone whose rent exceeds 30% of their monthly income. It’s sound thinking to avoid a heavy rent burden. But it’s also unrealistic for many, given Johnson County prices, says Brookelyn Morris, a Hillcrest caseworker.

It puts an $800 one-bedroom apartment out of reach for many.

“They have to make $2,400 to be approved. And that’s for $800 (rent). That’s on the cheap side,”

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WHERE AFFORDABLE HOUSING WILL BE NEEDED IN JOHNSON COUNTY. Housing study projects thousands of affordable units will be needed in many communities over the next decade to meet the demands of residents who want to live there.

The market is expected to supply a steady pace of large, single-family homes priced near $350,000 for years to come. But that won’t help those among the 28% who make less than $15 per hour.

Nationwide, minimum-wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental, and one-bedroom rentals are unattainable in 95% of U.S. counties, according to a 2020 National Low Income Housing Coalition report.

homes up to code. Community helpers – teachers, firefighters and police officers – who stay afloat by choosing to live outside the communities they serve. College graduates weighed down with debt and unable to return to Johnson County.

Working poor who were unable to qualify for a rental application in a highly competitive market.

Young families who have been pushed to Gardner, Spring Hill and DeSoto for starter homes, choices that add to their transportation costs. UCS also heard from employers struggling to find service sector employees.

United Community Services compiled diverse accounts from people in nearly every demographic during its work: Seniors on a fixed income who couldn’t afford to downsize let alone keep their

All of this might be great news for existing homeowners with increasing values. Yet a surprise might set in when it’s time to move.

There aren’t a lot of local housing choices. The

she says. “That’s our No. 1 barrier, for sure. They may be able to afford the rent, and the utilities and their bills for the apartment but still not make three times the rent.”

Johnson County isn’t alone.

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one-dimensional nature of many of Johnson County’s housing developments means there are limited alternatives for those needing a larger home as well as people who want to downsize.

The city of Prairie Village and Johnson County have already formed separate committees to brainstorm affordable housing options. Their ideas won’t be unveiled until later this year.

That reality further gums up the market inventory, Brewer says. It also hits home when residents experience unexpected life events such as a divorce, illness, death or job loss.

If commissioner Shirley Allenbrand has her way, there will be a nonprofit foundation or trust created to bring together private and public donors. The trust could be used to set aside land or money for affordable housing or possibly beef up home repair grants. It needs to pull together business, religious and government officials in order to gain traction, she says.

WHAT’S CHANGING

It took decades to build Johnson County into the richest county in Kansas, admired for its homes, high-quality schools, vibrant parks and quality of life. It might take several more to change its approach to housing.

Brewer is optimistic given the changes she’s already seen in Overland Park and elsewhere.

Affordable housing has come up at nearly every candidate forum in Johnson County since 2019.

Several projects are underway. Gardner approved a $15 million townhome project for “workforce housing” near the 3,000-acre logistics park in Edgerton. The project won’t be completed for more than a year but the developer’s cell phone rings regularly with hopeful tenants who long for the high-quality homes and income-based rent it offers.

A funder request led to nine local nonprofit groups building a coalition to better coordinate home repair needs. Group members, among them Habitat for Humanity of Kansas City, will still operate separately but they’ve let down their competitive walls to share ideas and help more residents.

It could be a pivotal way for landlocked cities to participate and not leave other growing cities with the obligation to serve the need. Cities with open land – Shawnee, Lenexa, Overland Park and Olathe – didn’t create the problem and shouldn’t be the only ones solving it.

All of the work is a start, Brewer says. Ultimately no agency – not even hers – can force a solution.

Critics might want her to pound her fists and hammer public officials until policies change.

But it’s not her job.

“We’re not that heavy-handed advocacy agency,” Brewer says, noting that it’s time to give the work back. “We’ve always been steeped in doing the impactful research.”

Those efforts have laid out for officials across the county the scope of the affordable-housing problem and possible solutions. What happens next will depend on how much people who live and work in Johnson County, and the policymakers who serve, want to see change.

YOU ASK PEOPLE FOR RESOURCES, AND NO ONE REALLY KNOWS. THEY JUST KEEP TELLING YOU TO CALL PLACES. JADE STOTT

The past two years have brought both ups and downs for David Stogsdill and his family, including daughter Nessa.

He and his wife had been making progress on paying off medical bills and saving for a home. Laid off from his HVAC job when the pandemic hit, David eventually landed a better paying gig and the couple could begin saving for a house again after they purchase a used car. (Photo by Jeff Tuttle)

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RAISING TH

Kansas’ shortage of homes for working-class and low-income families mirrors national trends, and recent events have made things worse. Construction costs, which were rising before the pandemic, soared last year, which effectively forced builders to concentrate on the top end of the housing market, where it was easier to make a profit.

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HE ROOFS BY: STAN FINGER

An explosion in demand is creating opportunities for small towns and medium-sized cities across Kansas to expand their housing options. But with so few new houses having been built in recent decades in places with declining or stable populations, communities are having to try out creative approaches to deal with the challenges. However, being aggressive in tackling the problem could pay future dividends.

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If Doug Williams wasn’t seeing it with his own eyes, he would be hard-pressed to believe it. House after house in Hays that have gone on the market have drawn multiple bids and sold in just a few days at well over the listing prices. Williams has worked in Hays real estate for decades, just like his father before him. • “We’ve never had a market quite like this,” he says, bewilderment in his voice. • Aside from typical ebbs and flows, he says, the housing market in Hays has always been pretty steady. But what’s happening now, he acknowledges, is nothing short of a buying frenzy.

Hays is not alone.

In fact, after decades-long lulls, small towns and medium-sized cities across Kansas – indeed, throughout the nation’s heartland – are facing an unprecedented surge in housing demand. National experts say it’s being driven at least partly by millennials, now the nation’s largest generation, becoming home buyers on a massive scale.

“All of a sudden, it’s OK to live in rural America or small-town America again,” Colby city manager Tyson McGreer says. “For decades, it was a ‘You grew up here, but never came back here’ type of attitude. And now we’re really seeing a lot of younger people move back.”

It’s happening all over the state.

“We have people walking in here every day, asking for landlord lists and ‘Do you know of any houses for sale? Is there anywhere we can live?’”

Humboldt city administrator Cole Herder says.

“My heart goes out because these people are struggling to find a place to live.”

FLOCKING TO SMALL TOWNS

A variety of factors is fueling the surge in demand, officials say. The COVID pandemic forced companies

to close and employees to work remotely – a trend that looks to continue in the post-pandemic world.

That means lots of people can live wherever they want, and some are choosing to relocate where the cost of living is lower and the pace of life is closer to their liking.

Companies are looking for places where the cost of doing business is lower, bringing employees with them or adding them upon arrival in their new locations.

The deep partisan divide splitting the nation has some people looking for homes in places that more closely mirror their views.

And many are simply wanting to live where people get to deal with one another and not urban dilemmas.

That is a big reason Todd Baker and his wife are considering making Hays their new home. The natives of Colorado bought a house for their daughter to live in while she attended Fort Hays State University and were so impressed with what they’ve seen they’re buying another house and may eventually live there themselves.

“We want to go to a more small-town feel, where it feels like community,” says Baker, who lives in a Denver suburb.

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Baker, who works in insurance, calls himself “a relationship guy.”

“That’s how I built the insurance business,” he says. “That’s what we like to do.”

He liked how the university was so inviting when they went on a school visit, and they had the same feel when looking around town.

“We build relationships with neighbors, make friends and have relationships with people that maybe do work on our house or I want to have service my car,” Baker says. “It’s more first-name basis. And in all honesty, what’s appealing to us with Hays is that virtually every person that we’re working with, like the contractors on the house, it’s been a referral. I haven’t gone online and try to search out a bunch of people.”

The Bakers are Republicans who like to hunt and spend time outdoors, and feel out of place in Colorado despite its obvious outdoor grandeur.

As the state leans further left on the political spectrum, Baker says, they’re feeling more and more uncomfortable.

Many of the people moving to the Midwest have family roots to which they are returning – or they went to college in the nation’s heartland and loved the area so much they want to come back.

“I grew up in Nebraska, and they’re facing the same thing as everybody,” McGreer says. “All those small towns are just getting flooded with people moving out of the city for whatever reason. It definitely is interesting.”

AN ANSWER ON MAIN STREET?

The trend is bringing urgency to communities after a long, slow decline in population that has been happening in rural America for the past century. Eighty of the state’s 105 counties lost population in the 2020 census, and the bulk of Kansas’ population growth is concentrated in the Wichita and Kansas City regions.

The adaptive challenge for communities is that while new housing is needed in parts of the state that haven’t experienced significant growth, or have even suffered losses in population, it often requires collaboration between the public and private sectors to get it built. A lack of affordable housing may even be a factor in population declines. But convincing residents that their community needs new housing, and that their local governments should play a role in building it, can be a tough sell.

And to make such investments affordable, communities are having to get creative by looking at ways to get more housing out of existing infrastructure, such as the upper stories of downtown buildings.

“It’s the boomerang crowd,” says Dan Carmody of Michigan-based Carmody Consulting, who led a two-day workshop in Hutchinson in August to help Kansas communities map out strategies to increase their housing stock in cost-effective ways.

Having demand for housing significantly exceed supply comes with tremendous challenges. If those challenges aren’t addressed in the right way, officials say, this will go down as a rare opportunity lost.

The workshop drew representatives from 110 towns across the state.

The Great Recession of 2007-09 was triggered by a housing bubble that burst.

“With the country kind of coming apart at the seams, I think there’s politically a sentiment that somehow small towns are safer,” Carmody says.

Data over time doesn’t bear that out, he says, but there’s no denying the demand for housing outside of large metropolitan areas.

“The home builders had really leveraged their souls to build houses that they didn’t have a market for” then, says Bill Murphy, deputy secretary of business development for the Kansas Department of Commerce. “But this is a different type of challenge for us. Home builders are much more

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FROM LEFT: Morgan Baker, a student at Fort Hays State University who’s from Denver, spends much of her off-campus time in Hays at a house that was purchased by her parents.

Colorado native Todd Baker, here lending his daughter a hand with her furniture, has taken a liking to the western Kansas town and purchased another house in Hays, where he and his wife, Stacie, may resettle.

reluctant to take risks. They were burned back in 2008 and 2009.”

all. And I have some very distinct timelines in which I need them in order to meet this future demand.”

What has developed recently, he says, is a perfect storm to create a bullish housing market rarely seen in recent history: a quickly rebounding economy, a disruption of the supply chain for building materials and a tightening labor market.

After decades of almost flat population figures, Salina hopes to grow again thanks to expansions announced by two major employers.

Salina officials are willing to entertain spurring homebuilding through industrial revenue bonds and the newly expanded Rural Housing Incentive District tax credits to help finance their projects, Driscoll says. Because of a bill passed in the Kansas Legislature this year, the tax credits can now be used to renovate for residential use the upper floors of buildings more than 25 years old and in downtown districts of cities with populations of 60,000 or less.

As part of a plan that includes the acquisition of Great Plains Manufacturing, Kubota is moving production of compact track loaders from Japan to Salina, opening a new $53 million plant next year and adding 120 employees.

Schwan’s Co., which makes frozen foods, has announced plans to build a new 400,000-squarefoot expansion of its pizza production plant in Salina, adding an estimated 225 jobs by 2023.

More expansions and products produced by Schwan’s are anticipated.

“Very, very exciting,” says Lauren Driscoll, director of community and development services for the city of Salina.

Yet high materials costs, labor shortages and booming demand almost everywhere could potentially turn what sounds like a dream scenario into a nightmare for Salina.

“Holy cow, I need just shy of 1,000 housing units by 2025,” Driscoll says. “I don’t need just one developer or one product type. I really need them

The credits can also be used to pay infrastructure costs on new streets in developments.

The tax credits cover the incremental increase in real property taxes created by the housing development project for as long as 25 years. They could play a significant role in easing the housing crisis for small towns and cities across the country, Carmody says.

“They don’t have the resources to extend the sewer lines and build new subdivisions,” he says.

“We have an answer for that, and it’s right on Main Street.”

ALTERNATIVES TO THE THREE-BEDROOM HOUSE

Converting upper floors of downtown buildings into residential units is likely to appeal to college students who aren’t living on campus and to empty nesters looking to downsize, officials say.

The new tax credits make such projects more economically feasible.

Those upper floors are “a bit of an untapped resource that makes sense to develop,” says Dave Wilson, who is a partner in Sterling Services on the first floor of a building he bought in downtown Sterling in 2005.

The second floor is undeveloped and has great potential, he says.

“It’s also where the greatest expense lies, and the greatest courage of investment,” he says.

“It’s meaningful and helpful.”

In small towns, the appraised value of a property “many times falls short of construction costs, or even redevelopment cost,” Wilson says. “That’s a hard thing to overcome. That’s an irresponsible risk for any lending institution to take. So, either developers have to be philanthropic and really risk-tolerant, or else there has to be some other method of plugging that gap.”

That’s where tools such as the Rural Housing Incentive District tax credits come in, Wilson and Carmody say.

“That’s huge,” Carmody says of the new expansion of the tax credits, adding that they’re an effective way to overcome financial barriers. But making full use of the tool means winning over the people who play a make-or-break role in housing investment.

“You’ve got to educate appraisers and bankers along the way,” Carmody says.

In town after town in the Midwest, he says, developers or investors have had to take the financial risk of developing upper-floor residential

units and demonstrate there was a demand for such living spaces before lending institutions would begin to back such projects.

“It does have a snowball effect,” Carmody says.

Wilson says he’s still wrestling with whether to target short-term leases with college students or longer-term options with empty nesters or retirees when he develops the second floor.

Communities with an abundance of such development opportunities possess a golden opportunity and may not realize it, Carmody says.

The most common household type in America right now is a couple with no children at home, he says.

The second-most common household is a single person. Only 22% of households in America have school-age children, according to census data.

“A lot of people don’t want a three-bedroom house,” Carmody says. “There’s a lot of people, even in small towns, who want to be able to take advantage of two things. One is they will walk out their front door and do stuff, whether that’s get a cup of coffee at a shop across the street or go to the library. Even in a small town, it’s about amenities. And secondly, the (living) space is more interesting, usually, than a traditional mid-century ranch home.”

Beyond aesthetics, officials say, developing those spaces into living units makes economic sense.

“In many smaller cities – under 5,000-7,000, let’s say – the cost to build a home does not match how you’d need to price it for people in those cities to be able to afford them,” says Erik Sartorius, executive director of the League of Kansas Municipalities.

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‘WE JUST DON’T HAVE PLACES FOR THEM’

Like Salina and smaller towns such as Colby and Humboldt, Sterling needs housing options of all kinds.

Partnering with the Kansas Housing Resource Corp., the city broke ground on a 10-unit apartment complex this year. Barely two months after dirt moving began, the 10 units were already reserved.

“It’s the perfect testament to the housing demand here,” says Craig Crossette, Sterling’s city manager.

Another eight units are being built a few blocks from that complex, he says.

A couple of major local employers are growing dramatically, Crossette says, but many of their employees have to commute from neighboring communities because there’s no place for them to live in Sterling.

One local business has 70 employees, he says, but only 13 of them live in Sterling.

A multitude of factors can hamper the attractiveness of a city like Hays to businesses looking to move or expand. A limited workforce is high on the list, says Doug Williams, executive director of Grow Hays. A lack of affordable housing can be pivotal too. “Housing is kinda the baseline. If you don’t have housing, not much else matters,” Williams told KSNW-TV this past spring.

“We have a tremendous quality of life,” Crossette says. “It’s an affluent community with wonderful amenities, wonderful streets, parks, entertainment … so they want to live here. We just don’t have places for them.

“One of the highest priorities on my list of things to do has been attracting homebuilders and trying to work with employers to understand what types of housing we need, and then just aggressively pursuing residential development projects.”

There’s no single solution for the housing crisis in Kansas, Murphy and other officials say. What will work in one town won’t succeed in another.

Instead, a multifaceted approach is needed. The housing resource corporation is one pillar of the state’s response.

“They really understand what the challenges are, where the opportunities are and where we need additional resources,” Murphy says of the nonprofit public corporation that serves as the primary administrator of federal housing programs for the state of Kansas.

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The entity is working on a statewide housing study, the first in 30 years. One area of need already obvious is the lack of affordable new housing under construction.

One example of that occurred in Marion, where Tammy Ensey hired someone from Topeka to manage the Historic Elgin Hotel, which she owns with her husband.

The corporation provided a grant to help St. John build several new houses over the next few years, dubbed net-zero residences because the solar panels on them generate more electricity than the homes use. The first house, which has three bedrooms, two bathrooms and 1,100 square feet of space, was completed this summer.

“He could never find an appropriate place for him to live,” so he ultimately didn’t take the job, Ensey says. “Housing is a huge issue out here – or lack thereof. We can recruit someone, but then we can’t house them. So that’s a challenge.”

As part of the grant terms, Stafford County Economic Development must own the houses for at least 20 years and rent them for $500 to $550 a month. If the homes were to be sold, they would be worth between $135,000 and $150,000.

“We’re still struggling with finding contractors that can replicate it at the price point we want, but we’re getting there,” says Carolyn Dunn, executive director of Stafford County Economic Development.

The goal, Dunn says, is to have these houses replicated in small towns all over the state, because the need for them is everywhere.

“We’ve got to find ways that we can create more housing that is affordable,” she says.

This first net-zero house has little curb appeal – “It looks like a shed,” Dunn says, because the focus was on keeping the home affordable. The money was spent on the living space rather than the outside, she says. That meant trade-offs such as a detached garage and a slab foundation instead of a basement.

But the house has a living room large enough to comfortably accommodate 20 people, she says, so occupants could host a holiday dinner.

The average age of a house in Stafford County is 90 years old, Dunn says, and 80% of the housing inventory was built 60 years ago or longer. Almost no new houses were built in the 1990s or 2000s.

“It’s kind of this paradox that people think that,‘Well, we don’t need housing because the population is declining.’ But I think that the housing is a part of the population decline,” Dunn says.

The Department of Commerce is creating a position for a housing specialist who would identify developers for projects, look at best practices and new techniques for home building, and “navigate those resources and really put our best foot forward,” Murphy says.

Rural Housing Incentive Districts figure to be a significant catalyst in easing the housing crunch, he says.

Hays used the Rural Housing Incentive District tax credits to offset infrastructure costs on a 75-unit housing development on the east edge of town. Another developer is converting an old schoolhouse in Hays into 12 apartment units.

“The Emporias, the Hayses, the Great Bends are those perfectly sized cities that can make these investments in their upper-story downtowns and really do a good job of helping retain the talent that is going to be critical to their longterm abilities to compete for future economic development projects,” Murphy says.

Colby used Rural Housing Incentive District tax credits to help offset infrastructure costs on two different housing developments, McGreer said.

One local developer is preparing to build twoand three-bedroom duplexes primarily catering to young couples or retirees, and another has built a number of senior-living residences that allowed retirees to move out of their larger homes and free up existing housing stock. The city just approved a new 30-lot development for single-family homes, using Rural Housing Incentive District credits, which “is probably the single largest tool we’re using to add housing stock,” McGreer says.

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Hays is also making concerted efforts to build living spaces for empty nesters, Williams says, so they can move out of their existing homes and free up more housing stock.

“We know there are a lot of retirees trapped in their existing homes because they don’t have an appropriate choice” to relocate, Williams says.

Hays and Colby officials would like to attract more retirees because their hospitals make them a regional medical hub.

“Housing is where it all starts,” Williams says.

“That’s simply unacceptable,” he says.

The study recommends the creation of a statelevel grassroots support division that would make navigating government agencies less challenging.

Paid training for “local champions” and support for a paid grant-writing position focusing on rural communities are more solutions suggested in the report.

For a surge in housing demand to be more than a flash in the pan, local and state officials say, communities need to offer amenities that will keep newcomers around.

“If you don’t have that, you can’t even play the game.”

It doesn’t matter how many people or businesses may want to relocate or expand in your community, he says, if you don’t have a place for workers to live.

Allen County is looking at ways to bring an Iowa project to Kansas. Rural Housing 360 is a publicprivate partnership that brings cities, lenders, contractors and home buyers together to build affordable housing on empty lots. Rapidly growing businesses may be willing to help collaborate in hatching housing solutions so more employees can move closer to their work, says Herder, the Humboldt administrator.

TIME TO BE AGGRESSIVE

Yet housing access alone isn’t enough for rural communities to take advantage of the urban exodus, local and state officials say. Child care has to be readily available too.

In fact, Murphy says, it’s one of the driving factors in the decision on whether to expand or locate in a given state.

A recently released study conducted by the Kansas Sampler Foundation and the state’s Office of Rural Prosperity found that the lack of quality child care is keeping young people in rural Kansas from taking jobs or even having children – and may be pushing them away from rural Kansas.

Residents of Hays are known to drive 30 miles one way to access child care, Williams says.

Humboldt, for example, has a couple of new clothing boutiques and a confectionary shop “that should be in Crown Center (in Kansas City) or in Branson,” Herder says.

Colby has built a new community center, added walking paths, improved its baseball diamonds and swimming pool, and updated its Villa High Park.

“Colby, just in general, is busy,” says contractor Mike Woofter, a lifelong resident of northwest Kansas. “There’s just a lot going on for a small town. We’ve got a pretty progressive hometown in a good area.”

It’s important, Herder and Crossette say, for communities to involve their residents in shaping the vision of what they want their towns to look like and offer in the years to come. If the residents feel like they have a voice in what’s happening, they’ll be more likely to support the costs necessary to achieve that goal.

“If you don’t have community involvement and not everyone is involved, I don’t think you stand a chance” of successfully addressing the housing challenge, says Jonathon Goering, director of economic development for Thrive Allen County.

That kind of local buy-in is vital if Kansas communities are to make the most of what’s happening right now, Woofter says.

“I don’t think that rural Americans can sit on their hands, because if you don’t get with it, you get bypassed again.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. What makes providing high quality affordable

housing in rural areas different from providing it in urban and suburban parts of the state?

2. What information, if any, do you think local

leaders need in order for them to help solve the housing needs of rural and mid-sized cities in Kansas?

3. What attitudes or perceptions represent a

barrier to progress on this issue that could be addressed through leadership?

The city of Sterling needs housing of all kinds, says City Manager Craig Crossette.

A limited number of apartments are under construction. Repurposing downtown buildings to living space, such as a project involving the historic Shay Building, is another option.

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BLURRED LINES BY: CONNER MITCHELL

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The last two rounds of redrawing legislative and congressional boundaries in Kansas proved especially contentious. In 2012, the job fell to federal judges when lawmakers couldn’t agree. Is there a less contentious way to do redistricting than letting legislators choose their own constituencies?

Or is the process simply partisan by nature?

It sounds straightforward: Every 10 years, after the federal census, Kansas lawmakers redraw the state’s political boundaries to balance out changes in population In practice, however, it’s been a fraught process.

Members of the Legislature are responsible for redrawing the boundaries for U.S. representatives, the State Board of Education and the borders for their own House and Senate districts. The governor gets a say with a signature or veto, as with any other bill, and the Kansas Supreme Court is asked to review state legislative district maps too.

For the last two rounds, the process has gotten ugly. Redistricting after the 2000 Census was so bitter that state lawmakers narrowly avoided having a panel of three federal judges draw the state’s maps – a fate they couldn’t escape 10 years later.

Increased political divisiveness, a population that’s becoming more urban and less rural, and technological advances that make it easier to gerrymander districts have greatly raised the stakes.

With a history of tying the Sunflower State in knots, the 2021-22 redistricting process began in earnest with a series of 14 town hall meetings in five days this August. A few days after the tour, the U.S. Census Bureau released new population data showing 80 of the state’s 105 counties had lost population.

Among the implications of the data: Johnson County and Wichita will gain political clout in the Legislature at the expense of rural Kansas, and the 3rd Congressional District will have to be redrawn to account for Johnson and Wyandotte counties being too big to be wholly contained in one district.

Republican leaders in the House say they’ll continue to seek public input in the map drawing process, but partisan dividing lines had taken shape prior to the town halls. Democrats saw the compressed timeframe as evidence of an untrustworthy process aimed at producing maps that will cost Rep. Sharice Davids her seat in Congress and bolster the Republican super-majority in the Kansas Legislature in 2022. Republicans see a Democratic Party that is politicizing the redistricting process with the public to pressure lawmakers into passing maps friendly to the left.

Meanwhile, groups representing the state’s African American and Latino communities worry that the process could “disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Kansans and undermine their faith in those who will be elected to represent them,” the Kansas Hispanic and Latino American Affairs Commission and the Kansas African American Affairs Commission said in a rare joint statement.

The stage is set for a messy and increasingly partisan redistricting battle over the next few months. But does reapportionment have to be this way?

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Kansas’ method to draw maps isn’t unusual. It’s highly politicized almost everywhere. But a handful of states think they have found less contentious ways, including the establishment of independent and nonpartisan commissions that draw district lines.

Such commissions have been floated as an answer for stabilizing democracy. Gov. Laura Kelly expressed her support last year, and Kansas Democrats filed legislation to establish a commission, but the effort was largely symbolic.

The proposal was a non-starter in the Legislature, where Republicans would be sacrificing their own power to hand it over to an unelected commission.

Furthermore, Republican operatives in the state have long translated “nonpartisan” as a code word for letting Democrats muscle in on the process.

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE AS A ‘GUIDING LIGHT’ Of the nine states that use commissions made up of independent and nonpartisan members to draw legislative districts, six of them went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. But it’s hard to discern a political pattern on a list that features Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado (which has separate commissions for its House and Senate), Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Montana and Washington.

A few other states have what are called politician redistricting committees that draw electoral maps.

These commissions aren’t especially independent because politicians can be appointed to serve, but there is a degree of separation from lawmakers being able to effectively choose their own constituencies.

Iowa has gone its own way. There, nonpartisan legislative staff develop maps without political or election data and work with a five-person advisory commission. Legislators still get to weigh in with an up-or-down vote.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Iowa lawmakers have approved at

least some version of nonpartisan staff-drawn maps every decade since 1980.

Still, that’s only 15 of the 50 states with nontraditional mechanisms in place. With so few states using them, are nonpartisan commissions really all they’re cracked up to be?

Yurij Rudensky, an expert on redistricting with the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank generally seen as left-leaning, says the answer is unequivocally yes.

“The thing about something like redistricting is, ultimately, the way that people should think about it is not … Democrats versus Republicans or moderates versus more hardline conservatives or hardline liberals, but more between political interests versus public interests,” he says.

Where independent commissions can succeed is by taking away the ability of lawmakers and parties to chart their own futures.

The prime example of success with independent redistricting, Rudensky says, has been California.

The 14-member commission there makes sure the varying interests of Californians are adequately addressed by taking its show on the road.

“The commissioners sort of decided that they would listen to the people, and that their primary instructions would come from regular Californians. … They held extensive hearings across the state in conservative areas and in liberal areas, and they let that guide the process,” he says. “What people informed the commission about was why their community should not be split up in ways that would prevent that community from having a voice in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C.” The will of the people is the guiding light for redistricting in California and in the other states that use an independent commission model, Rudensky says. And that’s the way it should be if the public truly wants the process to be fair.

“They weren’t protecting incumbents, they weren’t trying to ensure that X number of Democrats and Y number of Republicans were in the Legislature

DISCUSSION GUIDE 1. To what extent do you think redistricting

is a trustworthy process in Kansas? What factors do you think build or reduce trust in the process?

2. What do political parties risk when they

give up control to a nonpartisan redistricting committee? How might interpretations of what’s being given up differ among various factions?

3. In your view, what should “fair”

redistricting look like?

The construction of the Kansas Statehouse was long and difficult, perhaps a metaphor for the political wrangling that continues under its refurbished dome. By the time legislators exit the Statehouse next year, new geographic boundaries for congressional representatives, the state Senate and House, and the Board of Education are supposed to be set. (2013 file photo by Jeff Tuttle)

or in the congressional delegation, they just went out there,” he says. “They wanted to give people representation and to make sure that the people could vote out leadership that they didn’t feel like was reflecting their views.”

It’s also easy to see that California’s model worked as intended, Rudensky says. In 2018, the state saw more of a blue wave, in line with national voter trends, while in 2020, it saw the election of more Republicans to Congress – especially in the House, which was a trend seen nationwide.

A 2012 analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the states with independent commissions drew more compact and contiguous districts at the local and state levels than those where legislators control the process – a telltale sign of gerrymandering avoidance.

Yet that analysis also revealed one of the more prominent arguments against independent commissions: They don’t succeed in tamping partisan rancor. In Colorado, for example, a commission member who was appointed as an independent member triggered an uproar after

being seen at a 2012 fundraiser for President Barack Obama.

Bob Loevy, a professor emeritus of political science at Colorado College, served as a Republican member of the state’s reapportionment commission in 2011-12. He later published a 104-page analysis of the group’s processes, and concluded that even though the commission was purported to be independent, its product was riddled with gerrymandering because Democrats had a one-member edge in commission voting.

(The group’s chairman, Loevy says, functioned as a Democrat.)

Loevy says it’s to be expected that Democrats would take advantage of the situation. If one party doesn’t gerrymander districts for itself, the other will, he says.

Colorado overwhelmingly approved changes in 2018 that could address some of the issues raised by Loevy. Half of the members of the state’s two commissions are to be chosen randomly and half by judges, not politicians.

Previously, the Legislature and the governor appointed a majority of the members.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, says he’s expecting court intervention no matter how the Legislature draws its redistricting maps.

Furthermore, eight of the 12 members on each commission, including at least two unaffiliated members, will need to vote in favor of a new map for it to be approved. Under the old commission system, it took a simple majority.

Colorado’s reforms will be closely watched to see if it’s actually possible to make redistricting less politically partisan. But the proceedings are off to a contentious start that included a complaint about improper partisan lobbying.

Advocates of the commissions say eliminating partisanship isn’t the primary objective. It’s taking control away from legislators, who have a personal stake in the outcome of those new electoral boundaries.

NO WAY TO BE ‘UNBIASED’

The idea of an independent, nonpartisan commission to draw Kansas’ maps isn’t a novel one.

It gained popularity in some Republican circles after the bitterness of the 2001-2002 redistricting cycle that nearly required court intervention and left elected

officials embarrassed, according to news reports.

Republican Derek Schmidt – then a senator, now Kansas’ attorney general – proposed the idea of a semi-independent commission to draw the state’s electoral districts in 2003. It would’ve comprised seven members appointed by the governor, chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, chief judge of the Kansas Court of Appeals, the state Senate president and minority leader, and the House speaker and minority leader.

News reports from the time show that Schmidt’s proposal gained traction but fell well short of the two-thirds majority required to put the issue to voters as an amendment to the state’s constitution.

Schmidt and a bipartisan group of legislative leaders tried again in 2009 to adjust the process.

Under that proposal, the Legislative Research Department would have used census data and other criteria to redraw districts, and then a fivemember commission would have been appointed to resolve questions raised by researchers. Two members would be Democrats and two would be Republicans, with the fifth commissioner chosen by the other four.

Confronted with criticism about holding 14 town hall meetings regarding redistricting over five days, House Speaker Ron Ryckman, an Olathe Republican, said a legislative committee would have additional, virtual meetings during the fall.

The 2009 iteration of a redistricting commission, which had bipartisan support in the Senate and the backing of the House minority leader, also failed to advance.

Mike O’Neal, a Republican who served in the House for nearly 30 years representing Hutchinson, was the chairman of his chamber’s redistricting efforts in both 2002 and 2012. He remains opposed to the concept of independent redistricting commissions.

“I just think redistricting is uniquely a process that needs to involve lawmakers, and I’ve never seen an ‘independent redistricting commission’ that was independent,” he says. “They are appointed with political appointments, and they all tend to have their own agendas.”

O’Neal dismissed one of the main arguments for independent commissions – that legislators shouldn’t have such a powerful role in something they have a personal stake in – by saying that no one can truly be unbiased.

“No commission … is going to be free of their own personal biases. I think the process has

worked very well and I think it’s poised to work well again, if you’ve got lawmakers who are committed to being fair and trying to get maps that have the greatest chance of passing,” O’Neal says. “No one knows their districts any better than those 165 lawmakers. They are far better able to know the communities of interest, and the nuances of their districts and natural boundaries … than a nonpartisan commission.”

Eighteen years after starting the conversation, Schmidt, who as attorney general bears the responsibility for petitioning the Kansas Supreme Court to determine the validity of new state-level maps, says through a spokesman that forming a nonpartisan redistricting commission isn’t feasible for the upcoming round of redistricting.

“Article 10 of the Kansas Constitution requires the Legislature, not a commission, to reapportion legislative districts,” spokesman John Milburn says. “It is too late in the current redistricting cycle to change that constitutional process.”

Milburn wouldn’t say whether Schmidt still supports the idea of a redistricting commission or other alternatives to reduce partisan gamesmanship.

Town hall meetings to solicit public input on redistricting have historically given Kansans their best chance to offer opinions on how they would like their congressional and state legislative districts drawn for the upcoming decade. But because legislative leaders, seen here meeting in Topeka, have not embraced alternative approaches to drawing boundaries, lawmakers don’t have to embrace that feedback.

Kansas’ last round of redistricting, like in 2002, was a bitter legislative battle that stretched over a year after the state received census data in March 2011, reaching a conclusion in June 2012.

The Legislature adjourned in May 2012 with no agreement on legislative and congressional districts, throwing the matter to the U.S. District Court for Kansas. A month later, a three-judge panel issued the new maps while criticizing what legislators a decade earlier had narrowly approved.

In its ruling, the panel said it “tried to restore compact, contiguous districts where possible” and said it was “pushing a reset button” on redistricting in Kansas. That approach carried some significant side effects. For instance, the court’s maps placed 46 Kansas House members – nearly 37% of that governing body – into districts that generated multi-incumbent races in the next election cycle.

The debate over redistricting in 2012 was driven less by partisanship and more by intraparty warfare between moderate Republicans in control of the Senate and conservatives who wanted to

unseat them. The effort proved largely successful, and conservative Republicans easily control both the House and Senate today.

All told, Schmidt’s office doesn’t see this round of redistricting looking anything like the last one.

“In 2012, the Legislature failed to perform its constitutional duty to redistrict, and a federal court had to step in, burdening Kansas taxpayers with almost $400,000 in legal costs,” Milburn says. “AG Schmidt is optimistic this time the Legislature will get the job done, and he is prepared to present the Legislature’s work to the Kansas Supreme Court for approval as the constitution provides.”

FEARS OF GERRYMANDERING

In years past, key Republican officials have been vocally opposed to implementing a redistricting commission. Mike Kuckelman, chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, said earlier this year that legislators should just follow the laws that are on the books.

“If there should be an independent commission,

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there should be legislation to that effect,” he adds. “But otherwise, follow the statute and get the redistricting done according to statute.”

Kansas isn’t known as a state with a history of pervasive gerrymandering. But one current Republican desire became clear last October when then-Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, told a group of Republican activists that having a Republican supermajority during redistricting could make it difficult for Davids, Kansas’ only Democrat at the federal level, to hold her seat.

“I guarantee you we can draw four Republican congressional maps,” Wagle said. “But we can’t do it unless we have a two-thirds majority in the Senate and House.”

Kelly immediately highlighted Wagle’s comments as proof of the need for Kansas to institute an independent commission to draw new maps for the Sunflower State every 10 years.

Republicans have wide latitude to do as they wish, though. The veto-proof GOP majority Wagle envisioned came to pass as Kansas Republicans gained several seats in the House and Senate, hemming in any leverage the state’s Democrats might have in the process.

The results of last year’s congressional elections, in which Democrats managed to hold on to their House majority by just five seats, have drawn enormous national attention to districts like Davids’. It’s possible that Republicans could pick up six seats next year and flip control solely through the use of the gerrymander. But concerns over gerrymandering aren’t limited to Republicans, as the situation in places such as New York shows.

Kelly, as governor, will get the chance to sign or veto any redistricting bill. She declined to answer specific questions about the redistricting process but has reiterated her support for a nonpartisan redistricting commission.

State Rep. Stephanie Clayton, an Overland Park Democrat who switched her party affiliation from Republican in 2018, says an independent

commission does still have support among members of the Legislature. But there has not been the required two-thirds support needed to pose the question to voters – the same issue that Schmidt, who is running for the GOP gubernatorial nomination to oppose Kelly in 2022, ran into when he tried to establish a commission during his Senate days.

Clayton, who has served in the Legislature since 2013, didn’t mince words about why even the best-intentioned legislators shouldn’t pick their own constituencies.

“There’s a lot of moral ambiguity with redistricting when legislators do it, because I can try to be … as fair and honest (as I can) and follow the standards, but at the end of the day, of course I’m going to have a bias. Of course I know how I want those maps to look,” she says.

“Because of that implicit legislator bias, it’s morally gray,” she adds. “No, it should not be in the hands of the people who benefit from it.

That’s pretty messed up.”

Republican leaders such as House Speaker Ron Ryckman of Olathe continue to stress that additional public input will be sought and will remain important to the process. But there’s a sense among other legislative leaders that it doesn’t really matter what Republicans do.

“They’re (Democrats are) gonna sue no matter what the map comes out,” Senate President Ty Masterson told The Topeka Capital-Journal.

Furthermore, as Washburn University political scientist Bob Beatty has pointed out, regardless of how much opportunity the public is given to weigh in, that input isn’t binding.

“Let’s keep in mind that in a partisan redistricting process, you can have all the input in the world, but at the end of the day, one party can simply do whatever they want,” Beatty told Topeka’s KSNT-TV. There’s still a possibility that lawmakers might find some compromise that lets the GOP exercise

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its power over the process without leaving Democrats hamstrung and headed to court.

But the current trajectory doesn’t make it look very likely.

In a Statehouse environment where both political power and democratic fairness are on the line with redistricting, it remains to be seen to what extent the two can ever be balanced, if at all.

“If we act like adults, and don’t act power hungry or weird and just get the work done – which is what the people want us to do – then yeah I think we could avoid it,” Clayton says. “But you know, it all kind of depends. It’s the Kansas Legislature, and in the Kansas Legislature, there are no fair fights.”

But what would Democrats say if they had more power over the process? For people like Loevy, the Colorado redistricting commissioner, concerns about gerrymandering are just as much about partisan gamesmanship as gerrymandering itself.

“In a redistricting struggle, both political parties continually argue they are being treated unfairly by the other side. It is a conscious and purposeful strategy,” he writes in his analysis. “Always contend your side is losing. Pretend your political party is losing badly, and maybe things will go better for your party in future negotiations or court cases.”

EXPLORE FURTHER: TRY YOUR HAND AT REDISTRICTING KANSAS

Want to see how challenging reapportionment can be? Think you can do better than state lawmakers at redrawing the state’s political boundaries?

According to Stateline, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts, at least a dozen states are giving residents access to the software and web tolls necessary to map out how they’d like to be represented. Some states are even legally obligated to consider maps submitted by the public.

Kansas isn’t one of those states on either score.

It’s one of 25 states where public input isn’t required during the redistricting process. (Lawmakers are still soliciting public input regardless.)

But there are several online tools out there that you could use to draw your own versions of what the congressional and state Legislature’s boundaries should look like after the 2020 Census. They include Dave’s Redistricting, found at davesredistricting.org, and DistrictR.org.

If you’re interested in the redistricting process, drawing a map might provide insights on the competing values lawmakers wrestle with as they go about their work. And there’s no reason you can’t share your work with state lawmakers.

But be forewarned. Drawing a map might be the easy part. It’s getting enough people to agree on the boundaries that makes redistricting a leadership challenge.

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Bridging the rural-urban divide LESS ON S ABOU T STAY IN G E N E RG I Z E D F RO M A FA R A W AY BU T S U R PR IS IN G LY S I M I L A R P L AC E BY: T R I S H A G OT T

Salif Kanoute (far left) focuses on youth leadership development in rural Senegal. (Courtesy photo)

EDITOR’S NOTE: T H I S C O M M E N TA R Y I S B E I N G P R O D U C E D A S A PA R T O F E L E VAT E 2 0 2 1 , W H I C H A I M S T O S H A R E T H E V O I C E S O F N E W W R I T E R S O N I M P O R TA N T C I V I C I S S U E S .

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Won’t you be my neighbor?

Mr. Rogers’ invitation is at the heart of an all too personal leadership challenge for Kansans.

As a state with a stark urban and rural divide, what is progress when our realities are so different?

All it takes is a trip from Leawood to Dorrance, along Interstate 70 in central Kansas, to notice that life looks, and in fact is, a lot different. On a recent trip to western Kansas, I passed through Dorrance and had the chance to drop in and visit a friend. There was no scheduled meeting, just a phone call from the driveway. As we pulled in, she welcomed us inside.

I grew up in a wildly different setting: suburbia.

Drop-in visits didn’t really happen. For one thing, it took a lot longer to hop off a highway and land in a neighborhood. We also understood community differently.

It strikes me that bridging this divide among neighbors – and really, neighborhoods (rural and urban) – may be the most critical leadership opportunity we face to organize and lead change in Kansas. What works in Dorrance won’t go as well in Leawood. Differences in how we want to be engaged and how we engage others reflect both regional and personal preferences.

These approaches to engagement are social contracts we build within our communities. We count on them for a shared understanding of how we engage our neighbors. These contracts provide insight into how we can organize and lead change in rural and urban settings. And they aren’t isolated to Kansas.

Across the Atlantic, Senegal sits on the western edge of the African continent. There, they too face a stark rural and urban divide that threatens social and economic prosperity. In Senegal, I gained perspective on Kansas – learning from two men who are leading change across that rural and urban divide.

Seydi and Salif are tall, multilingual and Senegalese, but that is about all they have in

common. They are opposites in affect (Seydi is shy, and Salif knows no stranger), in appearance (Seydi sports T-shirts and jeans; Salif, a polo and pressed pants) and in profession (Seydi works in tech; Salif, in aid). Seydi is a city dweller who is at home in Dakar, the regional business capital.

Salif calls the rural, southern region of Casamance home. The rural Casamance is a different world from metropolitan Dakar.

Seydi and Salif met in Kansas through the Kansas Leadership Center and work at Kansas State. They connected around their passion for engaging youth. Now they run distinct, and overlapping, youth leadership and civic engagement campaigns that bridge urban and rural divides by focusing on youth development around civic issues.

ENERGIZING OTHERS ONLINE

As an election watcher, Seydi has organized young people to demand accountability and transparency in federal elections. He built a following of thousands on Twitter, his reach stretching to a pan-African audience. In his urban context, this virtual engagement was the key to energizing a youth movement.

This ignited interest in in-person training, where Seydi for the first time brought together online activists who had been working as a group virtually in Dakar for years.

He understands the importance of timing and approach in this effort, saying about the urban movement, “We should take our African context, culture and history as our reference point to find our way of making progress through some innovative and disruptive experimentation based on the challenges that we have in Africa. It is important to spread our narrative and raise awareness about our identity as Africans in this global context.”

His call is for not just urban narratives, but rural narratives too. And in a sprawling metro like Dakar, engaging these youth narratives starts through social media.

Seydi Ndiaye (standing) has organized young people to demand transparency in federal elections. (Courtesy photo)

BUILDING TRUST THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS

Working with global nongovernmental organizations, Salif saw a major gap in progress being made in rural communities, compared with urban areas. He tried to understand why expenditures and efforts weren’t able to achieve similar levels of success regardless of geography.

“So I started to put more focus on understanding why – why people in these organizations (NGOs, nonprofits, the government) were unable to make progress. This brought me to speak with women, children and young people. I realized there was a gap between those organizations and young people that they were here for. So, how do we go about solving that gap? This is the leadership challenge.”

To close this gap, he started to focus on rural youth leadership development. His approach?

He went door to door and built one-to-one relationships with youth and their families. Salif’s belief is that by developing youth leadership capacity, rural regions will have people poised to solve problems that the government, aid organizations and others have failed to solve.

And in the Casamance, that happens through a drop-in visit to as many youths and their families as possible.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Seydi and Salif epitomize the rural and urban divide. In different spaces geographically, in their civic lives, in their lived experiences, in their aesthetic and in the groups they serve.

They represent the expanse – and the bridge that can be built.

Their paths converge around a drive to energize and engage youth in their communities to lead change. Today they have a partnership to educate, equip and engage young people in rural and urban settings. Seydi has traveled to regions of Senegal he didn’t know existed, and Salif finds himself connected to online activists across the continent.

Their partnership bridges their disparate paths and honors the way their respective communities connect. Their interventions energize others, and momentum builds from individual effort to a network of stakeholders.

A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD

In Kansas, we share their struggle to bridge the urban and rural divide; their struggle to make sense of how to do well for communities with diverse needs; their struggle to engage youth meaningfully.

We share their struggle to not just hear the ideas of youth, but to engage those ideas as key to strengthening our democracy, to advancing our communities, to bridging our divide.

How can we get energized to bridge this divide?

Or is the expanse that divides us just too big?

I don’t think so; I think we can learn from them.

Our divide will be bridged when we build a different kind of neighborhood. One that energizes and engages rural and urban youth to help us work across differences and build our own bridge.

Trisha Gott is an assistant professor and associate director at the Staley School of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University. She lives In Manhattan with her partner Ben, a middle school teacher, and three sons.

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96 THE JOURNAL

THE BACK PAGE

History everyone can embrace By: MARK MCCORMICK

One of the criticisms most often used by people opposed to critical race theory and other methods of investigating racism is the canard that they uniformly paint white Americans as oppressors.

Washington, D.C., and schools on military bases (even in the South), made an early appointment of a Black official at the White House, and helped pass an early Civil Rights bill.

My friend David Nichols’ work as perhaps the nation’s foremost biographer of President Dwight Eisenhower, however, reduces such arguments to what they are – bold untruths.

Nichols, who is white, shares this and more in his book – and this is just about Eisenhower.

When Abilene’s Eisenhower Presidential Library made a batch of Eisenhower’s papers available, Nichols dove in and surfaced with a compelling story of a covert war against American systemic racism.

I haven’t discussed agents of change such as John Brown, the myriad people who operated portions of the Underground Railroad running through northeast Kansas. I haven’t discussed William Allen White, the namesake of KU’s journalism school who ran for governor on an anti-Klan platform.

Nichols’ research shows that Eisenhower, as a matter of policy, refused to appoint segregationists to the federal bench. One of his judicial appointees, Frank Minis Johnson, would hand down the ruling that allowed the 1965 voting rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, to go on as planned.

I haven’t discussed another friend, Phil Blake, who spearheaded the establishment of a Double V Victorette memorial honoring Black women who supported the Double V campaign (victory over racism at home as well as over fascism abroad) that began in Wichita months after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Interestingly, a white Unitarian minister born in Wichita – the Rev. James Reeb – died in Selma.

Reeb, as did clergy nationwide, answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to journey there and to march for voting rights. Segregationists bashed in his head. He died days later. King gave Reeb’s eulogy.

Blake also birthed the idea for a Civil War reconciliation memorial in downtown Wichita, which was hijacked by people who ignored his wish that Black soldiers be honored but who instead chose to honor white Confederate soldiers.

Segregationists also killed white Michigan housewife Viola Liuzzo. Klansmen shot Liuzzo on one of her trips shuttling activists to and from the Montgomery airport.

Eisenhower sent federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision outlawing segregated schools. He tapped Earl Warren to be chief justice, knowing Warren favored integration.

Ike also carried out President Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the military, desegregated

David’s and Phil’s work doesn’t offer history that white Americans need fear. This is history everyone can all embrace.

Mark McCormick previously served as editor of The Journal.