Rather than deal with pending lawsuits or address concerns about excessive travel expenses, the embattled Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools Board of Education is planning to hire a consultant to help board members get along.
At the Sept. 22, 2026 board meeting, Board President Randy Lopez said he, along with other board members, met with two of the consultants who had bid for the job, “and really it was around providing, helping to provide the board some facilitation around working as a team and not necessarily team building, but working…as a…team around how to… address tensions. Honestly, how to address tensions, how to address opportunities that the district needs to move forward on, how to address our strategic plan and strategic direction, and it really is just development around working as a team.”
Lopez said it would be an opportunity to “get in a room with us and be able to do a retreat and talk through team building, professionalism, direction on how to work together towards common goals, even if our how may be a little different, but our end.”
Tensions spike among USD 500 members over travel expenses, accusations of staff ‘conspiring’ against district
In the same meeting, USD 500 board member Pamela Penn-Hicks accused “certain entities” of “hate speech.”
“What is happening now has gone beyond acceptable public discourse. And what we heard tonight surely qualifies for that,” Penn-Hicks said in a prepared statement. “Certain entities and individuals are going out of their way to make the budget process an opportunity to attack board members politically, and community members personally, and have ventured into the realm of hate speech and harassment. I want the community to know that the courts recognized this by authorizing protection orders, acknowledging that hateful verbal abuse, property damage, and lying exceeded First Amendment protections. However, outside organizations have continued their attacks on board members to influence voters, so vehemently that they have now violated federal laws. Their actions do not represent true concerns for our students, nor the well-being of this district.
“These actions have, unfortunately, been supported internally by employees of this district and other board members violating state statutes, codes of conduct, and failing to follow board policies. Which begs the question: why? I will not speculate on motives, but I will ask the community to consider that opposition to increasing taxes, and exceeding revenue neutral, and asking for information about our expenditures precipitated these attacks. I leave it to the community to decide for themselves what motivated those actions.”
The “information about expenses” Penn-Hicks references likely stems from board member Dr. Valdenia Winn raising red flags over travel expenses by the board.
As The Sentinel previously reported, Winn has been gathering spending records and spoke to ABC Affiliate KMBC about what she found.
“Some hotel rooms have been exorbitant,” she told the station. “There are some $700 hotel rooms, $900 hotel rooms. Nice for one night.”
She is trying in particular to get answers about “professional development conferences.”
“We’re talking Vegas,” she told the outlet. “We’re talking San Antonio. We’re talking in Wichita. And I can’t even imagine a $700 room in Wichita.”
She also told the station she had trouble getting records from the district — something KMBC said they have also struggled with.
“After submitting a Kansas Open Records Act or KORA request for school district travel records, a district representative responded that it would cost more than $6,700 to fulfill it,” KMBC wrote.
KMBC said community activist Louise Lynch said she had 10 KORA requests that were either unlawfully delayed or denied, and in one request, a district representative quoted more than $50,000 to fulfill it.
KCKPS also faces multiple lawsuits
The district is also facing a pair of lawsuits, one by the parents of an 11-year-old boy who was allegedly sexually assaulted in a middle school bathroom, and is also being sued in federal court by the United States Department of Justice over secret gender transitions in violation of state and federal law.
As The Sentinel and KMBC both reported, the $5 million lawsuit is on behalf of a sixth-grade boy who was allegedly dragged into a restroom by a group of eighth-grade boys where he was “physically restrained while they sexually assaulted him,” according to David Smith, an attorney representing the boy and his parents.
According to KMBC, the notice claims an adult monitor was supposed to be outside the restroom, but the district failed to provide one.
“That’s a gross mistake by the school district’s part, because there have been enough things that have happened in the bathrooms at that school that this was foreseeable,” Smith said to KMBC. “And if it’s foreseeable, it’s predictable. And if it’s predictable, it’s preventable. All they needed was to step up and follow their own policies, and they failed.”
Moreover, KCKPS board members say they weren’t informed of the issue.
“KCKPS School Board members Valdenia Winn and Vice-chair Wanda Brownlee Paige said administrators didn’t tell them what happened at Eisenhower Middle School after the incident as they should have,” KMBC wrote.
The Sentinel reported in early September that the DOJ filed a ” first-of-its-kind lawsuit against KCKPS to stop the district from facilitating secret “gender transitions” for children at school without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
As The Sentinel reported earlier this year, a whistleblower video confirmed USD 500 Kansas City appeared to be continuing to flout state and federal law concerning “social transitioning” of students by having the conversations “be like underground railroad conversations … so not stopping the work, just not making it so public.”
The Sentinel filed a request under the Kansas Open Records Act for the document in question, which was provided. The document entitled “USD 500 TRANSGENDER AND GENDER NON-CONFORMING STUDENTS INTERNAL GUIDANCE DOCUMENT” clearly states that decisions to notify parents will be made on a case-by-case basis.
The USD 500 guidelines state: “A student or a student’s parent or legal guardian should contact the school principal if a student is transgender or gender non-conforming and the student or the student’s parent or legal guardian are seeking any related accommodations. If any staff member learns a student is transgender or gender non-conforming, that information should be relayed to the school principal without delay. The school principal should discuss available accommodations and resources with the student or the student’s parent or legal guardian (emphasis added), including the availability of a planning meeting.”
DOJ and the United States Department of Education believed this violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or “FERPA.”
