The Road to Consolidation
Newcomers to Johnson County often cite the excellent national reputation of the Shawnee Mission School District as one of the primary reasons they move to the area. They are often unaware of the pain and challenge of the district’s consolidation in 1969. This state-mandated unification of existing elementary districts within the boundaries of the Shawnee Mission High School District overturned more than a century-old educational system in northeast Johnson County.
When Shawnee-Mission Rural High School opened its doors in 1922, it was a latecomer to the field of education in the county. The first school opened in the county soon after the Shawnee Indians began arriving in 1825. After ceding their lands in Ohio and Missouri to the United States government, the Shawnee were resettled on a reservation in northeast Kansas, which included all of present-day Johnson County. Reverend Thomas Johnson persuaded the Methodist Missionary Society in New York and the federal government to support a manual labor school to serve Native Americans throughout the region. Both parties agreed, provided the school was located on Native American land, rather than in Missouri as Johnson had proposed.
Reverend Johnson and his wife Sarah opened the school on a fork of the Santa Fe Trail in 1839. Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean DeSmet noted the following year that he say “nothing remarkable in the land of the Shawnee but the college of the Methodists.” Johnson also added a boarding school for young white students who wanted a higher education. By 1850, this Western Academy headed by Reverend Nathan Scaritt served students from the frontier area.
Free Common Schools
The area changed dramatically in 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the territories for settlement. Thousands of potential settlers or squatters staked land claims. They immediately voiced their preference for free “Common Schools” for all children, rather than the fee-based Western Academy or the “subscription” schools of Missouri. The territorial and later state legislatures passed laws for school districts and created the posts of Superintendent of Common Schools and County Superintendent of Schools. A three-person school district board, elected annually for rotating three-year terms, oversaw all aspects of their schools which served grades 1 through 8.
The earliest schools were located along existing roads such as the Santa Fe Trail and the Westport to Aubry Road (present-day Mission Road). Not every district constructed a school; some held classes in homes or other buildings. Johnson County schools were numbered in the order the districts organized, with Linwood becoming District No. l. Shawnee became District No. 27, for example; Corinth followed as 32, Hickory Grove 40, Prairie 44, and Valley View 49. By 1886, Johnson County had over one hundred school districts in operation.
The common school was the center of the community, and the powerful school board made all important decisions for the school and community. These included the location of the school; the hiring and pay of teachers; the building, upkeep, and use of the school; attendance policies; financial decisions; and, to some extent, curricula decisions. The state government listed required texts each year, but until the Kansas Departments of Education and Public Instruction were created in 1874, no one enforced these decisions.
By 1915, the Kansas Department of Public Instruction was exercising strict control over local schools. The State Printing Plant in Topeka published required textbooks as well as curriculum guidelines. To insure that students were learning what they should, state law mandated that each eight grader take a standardized exam. Records and scores for each student were meticulously kept by the County Register of Deeds.
Higher Education
Elementary education, as provided by the common school, was well-organized in Kansas. Education beyond the eighth grade, however, involved extensive travel for students in the Shawnee and Mission townships. Since the demise of the Western Academy in 1862, there had been no school of higher education. In the early part of the twentieth century, high school students in the northeast part of the county rode horseback to Rosedale High School in Kansas City, Kansas, or even farther to Olathe High School. The situation had improved by 1920. Shawnee and Mission townships had fourteen common school districts, and two of them—Merriam and Overland Park—had small two-year high schools.
In 1921, following a survey conducted by the University of Kansas, the citizens of the two townships voted 1,049 to 975 to establish a rural high school district. The three-member school board secured the state-issued charter. Voters then narrowly passed a $150,000 bond issue to build a new high school. In September 1922, Rural High School District No. 6 opened with eleven faculty members and 187 students. The new district was named Shawnee-Mission after the two townships which had created it, not after Reverend Johnson’s Shawnee Mission.
More Schools Needed
There was little change in the organization of the schools from the opening of the high school until after World War II. Then suburban building patterns began to strain the schools with a rapid increase in student enrollment. The elementary districts felt the pinch first as they struggled to build and provide physical space and qualified teachers for the post-war baby boom. It was evident by 1948 that Shawnee-Mission Rural High School would not be able to accommodate all of the elementary students when they reached ninth grade. A series of renovations continued through 1950. School leaders considered building a second high school, but tabled the idea when a study showed that 87% of the students lived within three miles of the existing high school.
The school board in 1951 hired the Institute of Field Studies of the Teachers College, Columbia University to survey building needs. The Columbia report stressed the rapid population explosion of the community noting that “more homes have been built locally in the last six years than were constructed in the previous 120 years.” It noted the political subdivisions of the area—two townships, twelve cities, thirteen elementary school districts, and one high school district—and pointed out the “existing lack of coordinated effort” among the various groups. The “only real cementing force within the area today,” the report concluded, “is the Shawnee-Mission High School. The fact that there is a genuine and warm regard for the school speaks volumes for the excellent manner in which it has met the educational needs of the youth of the community.”
The Columbia report recommended the redistribution of the student population by changing to a system of elementary schools serving grades K-6, junior high schools for grades 7-9, and senior high schools for grades 10-12. The educators also recommended the consolidation of the numerous elementary districts with the high school district. Targeting seven sites for future junior highs and two sites for future senior highs, the report addressed the need for additional money for education in the area. “After all is said and done,” the report reasoned, “the people who have moved to Shawnee-Mission have not done so because they sought the lowest cost housing and living conditions; they wanted something better. This desire for a higher standard of living should carry over to the school system, and from present evidence, the people want exactly that.”
Support for education was not a problem in northeast Johnson County in 1952. Although the school board rejected the Columbia report’s recommendation to consolidate, they did approve the construction of four new junior high schools to open in 1955 and a new senior high for 1958. The principal, Dr. Howard McEachen, became district superintendent and Murlin Welch was appointed principal of the new high school.
Before the new high school opened, the community debated its new name. Dr. McEachen was adamant that the school not lose the Shawnee-Mission name, as the district had by now acquired a national reputation. Shawnee Mission Rural thus became Shawnee Mission North, and the new school was named Shawnee Mission East.
National Recognition
Murlin Welch said that when he started with Shawnee-Mission in 1937 as a coach and social studies teacher, it was “a rural high school—a country school that was pretty ordinary.” McEachen recalled that when he became principal in 1944 “no student could qualify for admission to Eastern colleges without going to preparatory school first.” McEachen, Welch and their staff changed this. In the mid-1950s, a lawyer from New Rochelle, New York, conducted a comprehensive study of schools with graduates attending Harvard University. Measuring numbers of students, graduation rates, and achievement, he listed the ten best high schools in the country in a national news article. Shawnee-Mission was among the top ten.
McEachen wrote a pamphlet called “This is Shawnee Mission, the Heart of the Heart of America.” The publication featured demographic and economic information from Columbia University and emphasized the national “top ten” designation.
Unification Becomes State Law
The Kansas Legislature and Shawnee-Mission’s national reputation collided with the community’s allegiance to neighborhood schools in 1961. The Legislature’s original law mandating unification of Kansas school districts was declared unconstitutional, but a revised version passed in 1963 was upheld. House Bill No. 377 directed Kansans to “…establish a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state whereby all areas of the state are included in school districts which maintain grades 1 through 12…”
Parents and educators in Johnson County saw the law as a threat to the century-old system of autonomous districts. The law called for local planning boards to recommend district boundaries in the largely voluntary unification process. After much heated discussion, a plan was proposed to create one large district. Those who did not want to “equalize” mounted a heated debate. In June 1964, the unification plan for the Shawnee Mission District was soundly defeated by a nearly 2 to 1 majority.
While Johnson County refused to unify, it was reported by early 1965, that 1,563 former Kansas school districts were now consolidated into 284 new entities. Bill Sparks, a school board member of District No. 110 (and later the Shawnee Mission school board) recalled that there was a great deal of opposition in all districts to consolidation and that loss of local control was the overriding issue.
Despite its resistance, Johnson County could not escape. After months of intense debate, the Kansas Legislature passed Senate Bill No. 58, to establish “one unified school district to include all the territory of any rural high school district in which there are located at least two cities of the first class.” The bill specifically applied to the Shawnee Mission District. The Department of Education in Topeka issued an order “disorganizing” non-unified districts and establishing “unified School District No. 512, Johnson County, State of Kansas.” Effective July 1, 1969, Rural High School District No. 6 and now twelve common school districts—some in operation since territorial days—were consolidated.
--ALBUM vol. 9, no. 1 (winter 1996)