MediterraneanGrocery Wholesalers in Kansas City, MO

It’s a new era for lovers of the defending Super Bowl champions in their home city. No, they won’t calm down.

Prayer candles adorned with the faces of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift gaze out from shop windows. Chiefs flags flutter on car windows zipping down highways. Red clothing appears to be mandatory.

Kansas City, Mo., has lost its mind, and happily so.

Its beloved Chiefs are headed to the Super Bowl on Sunday, the team’s fourth trip in five years. This time, what has propelled a usually down-to-earth city into a heightened state of euphoria is the glittery presence of Ms. Swift, who since last summer has been dating Mr. Kelce, the Chiefs’ star tight end, and occupying a regular place at football games, restaurants in Kansas City and Mr. Kelce’s $6 million mansion in the suburbs.

Most important in the minds of Kansas City residents is a Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers. But they are tantalized by possibilities beyond the game.

Could Kansas City, a place that is often left out of the national conversation, see its fortunes and economy buoyed because of Ms. Swift? Is the couple considering an engagement, as many residents are hoping?

Might the most famous woman in the world actually move to the Midwest, a region that people on the coasts frequently (and unfairly) portray as a vast, amorphous blob of blandness?

“Kansas City has needed this oomph for a while,” said a beaming Deanna Martin, 75, of Olathe, Kan., as she strolled through Kansas City with her husband, Don, this week. “It will bring young people in.”

“They seem like such a wonderful couple,” said Mr. Martin, 76, who was dressed in Chiefs gear. “It’s just added something extra special to the whole Super Bowl thing.”

In a matter of months, the city’s identity — most commonly linked to its abundance of excellent barbecue restaurants — has become giddily intertwined with Ms. Swift, who grew up in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and owns properties including a penthouse apartment in New York City.

At schools across the Kansas City metropolitan area this week, festivities for the Super Bowl included “Travis and Taylor Tuesday,” when thousands of students arrived at elementary and middle schools in costume, wearing “87” jerseys, pink-sequined skirts and friendship bracelets on their wrists.

Suburban parents talk about which schools the hypothetical Swift-Kelce offspring might attend. Carla Bryan, a season-ticket holder who has a room in her home in Blue Springs, Mo., that is devoted to Chiefs gear, spoke of Mr. Kelce with a certain protectiveness, as if he were a favorite nephew.

“I’ve never seen him so happy,” she said. “I just want him to put the ring on it, and get it done, and have those little Taylorettes and Travisettes.”

Small businesses in Kansas City have been reveling in the frenzy, selling custom merchandise playing on the relationship between Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce.

“We can’t keep Travis and Taylor stuff in stock,” said Kari Lindner, the general manager of Made in KC, as she stood amid displays of trinkets, clothing and baseball caps. (One example: a pink-and-cream T-shirt that read “It’s a KC love story: Tay & Trav.”)

Hotels in the Kansas City area are filling up for this weekend, even though the Super Bowl is being played in Las Vegas. Angie Brock, sales and marketing coordinator for the Hotel Phillips, said that she expected the downtown area to be packed with both football fans and Swifties — including plenty of women who were only mildly interested in the game before Ms. Swift became part of the fun.

“We’re all wondering if Taylor will be at the Super Bowl parade,” said Ms. Brock, who shares the widespread presumption in the city that it will be the Chiefs who will lead the victory parade.

All of it adds up to a sense that Kansas City, home to just over half a million people, is growing more visible nationally, a thrill to residents and city officials.

Maybe now that Ms. Swift is connected to the city, they say, more people will discover its museums, low cost of living and easy commutes. (She has also provided a distraction from some of the city’s entrenched problems, including a high homicide rate that has defied the national downward trend.)

“Kansas City is growing,” Ms. Brock said. “We’re not New York or Chicago, but we’re getting there. We’re showing people that we have cool stuff going on here.”

At a Rotary Club event in Kansas City on Monday, members could not stop talking about the Super Bowl. They marveled at the high level of community spirit, the sense of possibility and their pride in Kansas City, said Vivien Jennings, a longtime resident of the area who owned a bookstore in the suburb of Fairway, Kan., for nearly a half-century, until last year.

Also discussed at the meeting: the secondhand joy gleaned from glimpses of Ms. Swift jumping up and down in a luxury box at Chiefs games, Ms. Jennings added, and the “victory kissing” by the couple after a victory.

“It’s been so fun to be out with people and talk about it, because normally I’m talking about books,” Ms. Jennings said.

At the very least, the spotlight on Kansas City might eventually clear up a commonly confused matter.

Bethann Roten, a Kansas City native who now lives in San Antonio, flew into the city on Sunday and was irked to hear a flight attendant mix up the two Kansas Cities — one in Missouri and the smaller one just across the state line in Kansas.

“As we landed, he said, ‘Welcome to Kansas,’ even though we were in Missouri,” Ms. Roten said. “And I was looking around, thinking, nobody’s correcting him!”

“Maybe Taylor will put Kansas City on the map,” she said.

Even the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., Quinton Lucas, has noticed something different lately in his interactions with people outside of the Midwest.

On a recent trip to France to meet with other officials, Mr. Lucas said, a woman who worked for the French government approached him.

“She said, ‘I have to say, my daughters were really interested that the mayor of Kansas City is here in Paris, because they’re huge Taylor Swift fans,’” Mr. Lucas said in an interview in his wood-paneled office.

“This is the first year when I’ve been at different conference meetings where people are like, ‘Kansas City is kind of the ‘it’ city,’” he said.

Mr. Lucas, a lifelong Chiefs fan, visited an elementary school this week to talk to students about what a mayor’s duties entail.

“Nothing I do is interesting until I say, ‘I meet the Chiefs,’” he said, telling the children that he knew both the team’s quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and Mr. Kelce.

“They were like, ‘Cool!’” he recalled. “Then I said, ‘But I have not met Taylor Swift.’”

The children groaned in unison.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Black poets and other writers read their work Thursday night at ‘A Nation in Exile’ event at 21c Museum at the Kansas City Hotel.

“I just think it’s important for every single person who feels like they have a story to tell to actually write and share their work,” said Natasha Ria El-Scari, poet and writer.

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A poet recently honored as Kansas City's first poet laureate says the art can help others find themselves.

“Poetry is a tool for building community, poetry as a tool for finding agency, accountability and responsibility, self-expression and care,” said Melissa Ferrer Civil. “This idea of we were exiled from each other, the land, the culture from ourselves. What does it take to return home? What does it look like and feel like, taste like?”

The event was designed to share work from local writers, but to also celebrate writers who are publishing to learn more about the writing culture and industry.

“This is a very big deal for Kansas City,” said El-Scari. “It’s the Grammy's of writing in a way. We all get to come and celebrate work. I will be sharing original poetry around the idea of exile and also home. I actually have poems that speak to both of those things simultaneously."

Local poets make sure to pass on the history of their art in KCMO.

“Kansas City has a rich history of African American poetry," El-Scari said. "You have people who have created work for decades and we recognize they are a part of a continuum, and we teach the generations that come behind us. This is a really sweet spot to be in because KC has amazing musicians so we get to combine poetry and music a lot."

The work continues to get their art out into the community.

“We want to inspire what is normally a passive audience, who would come see art, feel feeling walk away and not knowing what to do with their feeling, we hope to inspire them into action,” said Ferrer Civil.

The proceeds raised benefited Uzazi Village, a local black maternal healthcare organization.

“All of the voices matter it’s never too many of a voice," El-Scari said. "So whatever you have in your heart that’s telling you to write, go ahead and get started."

For more poetry events:

https://anationinexile.com/

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[Editors’ note: This story was reported by a “completely unbiased” Kansas City fan. But it was edited by a ‘49ers fan, and by a second editor, who thinks the Super Bowl is mainly a good excuse for eating too many potato chips.]

If the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday, plenty of students there will be free to catch the red confetti when a victory parade winds through the city’s downtown neighborhoods a few days later.

The Kansas City, Mo., district and several neighboring school systems have already announced plans to close schools if there is a victory celebration Wednesday—just as many did when the team won the big game in 2020 and 2023. Across the state line, in Kansas City, Kan., schools have not yet made an announcement about whether they would cancel for a parade, as they did last year.

Perhaps not wanting to risk bad luck, San Francisco schools have not said either way how they would handle a possible 49ers win. The school system has already planned a day off Friday for Lunar New Year celebrations.

The Super Bowl decision is a super-sized example of a tension district administrators face: Amid surging rates of chronic absenteeism

, is it appropriate to call off classes for significant community events? If schools insist on being in session, will most students skip out anyway?

Canceling school “once for a very rare occasion of civic celebration, I don’t think that’s a big deal,” said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, a research center that studies school attendance and student engagement. “I don’t think we can scold our way to better attendance.”

Balfanz is among the researchers who have sounded the alarm about climbing rates of chronic absenteeism, which is generally defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days, following the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocacy groups have encouraged educators to “rebuild a culture of attendance” by tracking data and sending consistent messaging to parents and students about the importance of coming to class.

Planning around rare, significant community events could be a part of those efforts if most students—and many teachers—are expected to be no-shows, educators said in interviews and responses to a social media query.

“Our district canceled the last two times this has happened (as well as the Royals’ [2015 World Series victory] parade),” suburban Kansas City teacher Susan H., who is clearly not tired of winning, wrote in a post on X

, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Not enough staff available (and so many students gone anyway). Better to cancel and make up.”

Excited students and tough calls

“We want to give our families and staff ample time to prepare in case of a victory,” the Kansas City, Mo., district wrote in a notice to families about possible closures next week, shockingly unconcerned that they could negatively affect the game’s outcome by making the call early.

Traffic from the parade would also make it difficult to conduct normal bus routes, the district noted.

In San Francisco, an area with more college and professional sports teams than Kansas City, a football victory might be less of a cause for universal celebration among students, leading to fewer absences on parade day. In another large city with plenty of sports teams—and winning records, when the Los Angeles Rams prepared to play in the 2022 Super Bowl, local outlet LAist asked: “Why Would LA Cancel School After A Sports Championship? We Win Them All The Time

.”

Kansas City-area districts, though, take game week seriously. Students throughout the region celebrated “Mahomes Monday” Feb. 5, wearing No. 15 jerseys like Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The next day, they celebrated “Travis and Taylor Tuesday,” in honor of Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University

Administrators all over the United States have made similar game-time cancellation decisions after big local sporting wins or other locally significant events.

Districts in Green Bay, Wis., received a state waiver to start the 2024-25 school year early, allowing them to cancel school when the city hosts the NFL draft in April 2025, the Green Bay Post Gazette reported

. Green Bay is the smallest metropolitan area with an NFL team, and the effects of traffic and a swell of visitors are expected to complicate school operations more than they would in larger urban areas, the paper reported.

Some Philadelphia parents protested when schools in the region closed for a day in 2018 after the Eagles won their first Superbowl victory, WHYY reported.

“Very selfish in my opinion. Some of us don’t have the flexibility to call out of work ‘because the Eagles won,’” the mother of a student at a Newark, Del., charter school said at the time.

Still others in Philadelphia—known for greasing telephone poles to keep overly enthusiastic fans from climbing them in celebration—praised the move.

“I’m taking my kids whether there’s school or not. And I’m a teacher,” Eric P., an Eagles fan, replied on X

when asked about a hypothetical Super Bowl win.

Planning around low-attendance days

Balfanz said he’s heard anecdotes from district leaders that parents have gotten more lax about attendance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, even taking students out for vacation midweek, but there is no data to explore the extent of such claims.

Districts have responded to concerns about shifting family attitudes through messaging campaigns about the importance of “school every day” and targeted efforts, like text updates to parents about their children’s absence rates.

Some leaders have attempted to work with parents on mid-term vacations instead of fighting against them. The Pasco County, Fla

., school board voted in December to add three “mini-break” four-day weekends to the district’s 2024-25 calendar, encouraging families to take trips then instead of missing instructional time.

In a similar way, school systems might make a call to cancel classes after the Kentucky Derby or a Stanley Cup win, Balfanz said.

“It’s about offsetting costs and benefits,” Balfanz said.

Missing “one day out of 180, one time in your school career, is not going to change things,” he said, while acknowledging that some parents and educators might disagree.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The theme for Black History Month this year is African Americans in the arts.

The art scene in Kansas City, Missouri, is growing for Black artists.

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“There is a lot of great art and it’s a standard of not only putting out great art, but describing yourself and that takes openness, takes vulnerability, takes you putting your soul within a painting,” said Deaunte Thomas.

Thomas and Deante Howard say every brush stroke tells a story.

“We have individually and collectively throughout the nation gone through like there is a whole different lens of how we see life and and that lens is portrayed in how we do our art,” said Howard.

While their paintings are different, the two men can share their experiences as they worked to make their marks in the city's arts scene.

“It’s like, hey, there is somebody that is here, that is from this, that can say this what I’ve been through," Howard said. "This is what you’ll have to go through, this is how you navigate that."

That's needed during tough times when many Black artists struggle to find their worth or find venues to showcase their work.

“So like knowing how to price your art, knowing how to finish your art, knowing how to set up a collection of art and base that off of the entirety and not just one,” said Thomas.

Howard says Black artists in Kansas City are getting more exposure.

“ I thank them because I could have went another two months and I could have had my artist's block” said Thomas.

Howard said the Chiefs run of success has helped.

“It’s always been this I love art type of thing in the city, but it was very low key," Howard said. "But because of the exposure that the Chiefs is getting and bringing to the city, it's like all these artists happen to have been here and now we are seeing them."

Howard and Thomas say as Black artists in KCMO they will help create a picture of what it means to be Black in the arts.

“We are here, see us, support us,” Howard said.

—

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - Kansas Citians can now get a a municipal ID card for free in Kansas City when they don’t have the documents traditionally needed to get another form of ID.

The Kansas City Health Department began issuing Fountain Cards starting Wednesday morning.

While the ID cards are available to anyone who lives in Kansas City, the new cards are meant to help people who do not have a state-issued ID such as a driver’s license.

The cards will help people open savings and checking accounts, rent apartments, and access a number of services provided by the city.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in August that the Fountain Cards are something the city has worked on for years. The program will be managed through the Kansas City Health Department.

“Certainly, there are a lot of folks who I would say, ‘Today, make sure you get one.’ So you can open that bank account, so you can get that job,” Lucas said on Wednesday. “There are benefits for each and every one of us who exists in KC.”

Similar to a US Passport, the Adult Fountain Cards will remain valid for ten years from the issuance date, while the Minor Fountain Cards will remain valid for five years from the issuance date, according to a release.

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To get a Fountain Card, applicants must complete an application through the health department and present proof of residency. One form of photo ID is also required. If the applicant does not have a photo ID, the person is allowed to submit at least two of the following alternate forms of ID:

“Hopeful that having this opportunity here at the health department that is on a bus line, that is easily accessible will make it easier and relieve the stress there at the one location that they have to get a state ID,” Mayor Pro Tem Ryana Parks-Shaw said.

The city budgeted about $250,000 to cover the costs of the Fountain Cards.

Each card is good for 10 years for adults. Minors who apply for a card will be required to renew it after five years.

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