:: Was Dennis Carpenter out of his depth as Lee’s Summit School District superintendent? Or are a majority of school district parents wearing blinders and simply dead set against district employees being trained to do a better job of helping to even the academic scales?
And while we’re on that subject…Why hasn’t The Star’s longtime education reporter Mara Rose Williams written a news analysis about Carpenter’s departure? It’s not enough to recount months of roiling over the issue of “equity training” (as Williams did Wednesday). And it’s not enough to quote opposing “tweets” various people posted (as Williams did Thursday)…What this situation calls for is enlightenment from one of the the leading education reporters in town. So far, we haven’t gotten it.
:: Why would an ICE agent break out the car window of illegal immigrant Florencio Millan while his two children were sitting in the car? He was not a felon or someone posing a threat to anyone; he was just guilty of re-entering the United States illegally. Aren’t ICE agents on salaries? If so, what’s the problem with waiting a while, until Millan realized he had no option?
:: Why would a member of the Manhattan (Kansas) City Commission — Usha Reddi — think that revealing her father had raped her boost her chances of winning a U.S. Senate seat?
:: Why would a 31-year-old Independence man — Larry R. McQueen — not be wearing a seat belt while driving on I-44 near Springfield, MO? He died after his Dodge Ram pickup went off the road, struck a rock and overturned.
:: Why would a man be recklessly driving a Dodge Challenger on Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard at 11:30 in the morning while carrying five passengers, including four children in the back seat and a woman up front, with no one in the car wearing a seat belt or in a child booster seat? After the driver ran off the roadway and struck a tree in the median, the woman died; the man was seriously injured, and the children were being treated for broken bones and other injuries.
:: Why would The Star run a ridiculous “Google Street View” photo of a Lee’s Summit middle school on the front page? Don’t they have enough photographers to send one on a 90-minute round trip to a Kansas City suburb to snap a decent photo?
These things I would like to know. If I had some answers that made sense, I’d never have to go to my pencil bag and reporter’s notebook again.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
As a laid-off photographer from the Star, I can tell you the Star does not have enough photographers. Since my departure, other photographers have been laid off or took the buyout. When I started at The Star there were 22 photographers. Now there are four, and one of those is dedicated to video.
I didn’t realize we had more than 20 photographers at one time, Allison. The reduction to three reflects the complete de-emphasis of the print edition. And the lack of good photographs certainly doesn’t make the website more appealing. When you look at a website like The New York Times, which has an excellent combination of text, photos and graphics, you see just how good a newspaper website can be. It’s very dispiriting to see the demise of The Star’s visual presentation; it used to be so good.
I was most impressed by their attribution of a “Google Maps satellite image taken in March 2019” that captured a ground level view of this semi truck accident on July 13, 2019.
As seen in the July 14 print edition: https://imgur.com/ZOcrtVo
From what I’ve heard, it isn’t an either/or situation with Carpenter. He’s abrasive and doesn’t take a nuanced view of situations. I believe his wife is principal of a charter school — don’t know which one — and still has a racism lawsuit pending against a school district in Georgia. I write this not to excuse the Lee’s Summit School Board, the parents in the district or anyone else involved in this fiasco, but it does seem that more in-depth reporting would shed necessary light on the situation. I’m also not being critical of Mara Rose in any way — she has her hands more than full!!
Ms. Williams might do us the service of looking into the cost of termination agreements for both Carpenter and his predecessor, and elaborate on the circumstances that led to their demise. Couldn’t the Board see this coming, in both cases? After all, there are track records that should have raised concerns prior to hiring.
Seatbelts save lives, and the statistics closely tying the unbelted and the seriously injured and dead are convincing to only those open to weighing facts.
And as for photographers, how many have you ever seen rise to senior management positions in journalism? Its not that the talent is lacking, but most of those senior editors and publishers have never valued graphic skills at the same level as the written word and neither encourage nor support elevating “shooters.”
Mayhap Williams, much like Robertson before her, has decided that in-house leave is preferable to actual journalism.
I know I’m naive. Because of my links to Leavenworth, I subscribe to the e-version of the Leavenworth Times. I’ve been thinking the staff does a pretty good job of covering both Leavenworth and Kansas, along with national/international news. (Despite the fact that they just summarily — first thing on a Monday morning, what a way to start the week — let go one of the most dedicated persons on their staff and told her that her work in the future would now be done by two editors in Texas.) For entirely unrelated reasons I went looking at the Mexico MO Ledger, whose former publisher I think was Robert White. When the website first came up, I thought I had pushed the wrong key and had gotten the Leavenworth Times by mistake. No mistake. Same format for the website, and it slowly dawned on me that likely every Gatehouse paper would look the same — only a different nameplate.
Yes, it Robert White at the Mexico Ledger one of the top small town dailies when he was editor and publisher.
Here’s what I’d like to know: does The Star have a personal vendetta against Tyreek Hill or do they have a legitimate reason to question his moral turpitude?
Mr Millan had been sitting in that car for a couple of hours doing that routine, not just the half-hour that got recorded. The guy had several misdemeanors the first time he came in illegally, in court he agreed to leave voluntarily, five days later he was caught trying to come in again, and was involuntarily deported. There is *no* way he’s gong to even get a green card, much less citizenship, with even that kind of record. And ICE and the cops knew that, he’s not the type to voluntarily cooperate. So they have this business go on for a while, watch the guy call up all of his friends on his phone, and shortly thereafter, break the window, drag him out, take him into custody, transfer him to an ICE facility, and then a couple of days after, back to Mexico. So the cops really didn’t have much choice, they could wait until some of his friends showed up, in which case they’d have a lot of trouble on their hands, or go ahead and take him.