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Once the district had enough desegregation money to build such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But the effort to use upscale facilities and programs to lure in students from the suburbs never worked quite as planned. Covington has stressed that the district's buildings are only half-full as its population has plummeted amid political squabbling and chronically abysmal test scores. The district's enrollment of fewer than 18,000 students is about half of what the schools had a decade ago and just a quarter of its peak in the late 1960s. Many students have left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs. The school district also isn't the only one serving students in Kansas City; several smaller ones operate in the city's boundaries. Covington has blamed previous administrations for failing to close schools as the enrollment
-- and the money that comes with it -- shrank. Past school closure plans were either scaled back or scrapped entirely. Administrators warned that without the cuts, the district would have been in the red by 2011. "None of us liked voting for this," board member and former desegregation attorney Arthur Benson said, "but it was necessary."
[Associated
Press;
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