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.
These two paragraphs were both taken from the article.
The "peak in the late 1960s" was about 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
The [Brown] suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. Separate elementary schools were operated by the Topeka Board of Education under an 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in twelve communities with populations over 15,000.
From Wikipedia.
Results were that with inner city kids, parents didn't participate in school activities which were far from home, slow learners and juvenile delinquents from ghettos were sitting in classes with high performing kids in upscale neighborhoods, good teachers left because of physical violence from affected students, shootings and knifings were occurring regularly, especially at athletics, shootings at school buses regular event. Well off parents refused to allow their children to be bused out of their own neighborhoods. Even black parents resisted busing their kids but didn't have the clout to refuse outright.
Nice schools in very nice neighborhoods began looking like ghetto schools. People not only left the public schools, many who didn't move, put their children in private schools.
The fact remains is that it was never Brown v. Board of Ed. that drove the stake in the heart of KCMO schools, it was liberal management, black and minority school board making awful decisions and always firing school head any time they disagreed with the "black experience" and for a number of decades, will only hire minority to head the district, whether or not barely qualified.