Public Service Academy

A public service West Point is in the works, and KC could be its home
By MARÁ ROSE WILLIAMS The Kansas City Star

Imagine a prestigious national academy, modeled after the highly selective U.S. military academies, but with the mission of building future public leaders. Now imagine 5,000 of the nation’s top liberal-arts students roaming a West Point-like campus — in Kansas City.

Some Kansas and Missouri leaders, along with one of the founders of the proposed U.S. Public Service Academy, will meet for the first time this afternoon at Union Station.

“We are going to build a case for Kansas City,” said Bobby Patton, a former president of the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, who is leading the local effort.

“The central part of the country, in the heart of America, would be the best location for the academy,” Patton said.

For now, the proposed academy has an office in Washington. It also has a Web site — USPublicServiceAcademy.org — a 105-page blueprint that includes a curriculum, and a broad base of bipartisan backers. If Congress approves, it would get more than $205 million a year in federal funding.

“It’s a big idea with a lot of support,” said Melissa Stuart, a spokeswoman for the academy. “We hope to get a bill through Congress this year.”

If that happens, the academy would open its doors to its first class of congressionally commissioned freshmen in 2011 or 2012, Stuart said. Then each year a new class of select students would be added.

According to the blueprint, the academy would be the country’s sixth federal service academy but the only one with a nonmilitary mission. It would offer rigorous coursework and require study abroad and fluency in a foreign language.

In junior or senior year, after declaring the area of public service he or she would focus on, the academy student would spend one quarter serving as an intern with a local, state or federal agency in that field. Students also would have the opportunity to spend a quarter interning in a military service.