Event Calendar

Start Date: 11/8/2025 12:30 PM CST
End Date: 11/8/2025 5:30 PM CST

Venue Name: Marriott Country Club Plaza

Location:

Organization Name: Education Law Association

Contact:

At the conference’s conclusion at 12:30 on Saturday, November 8th, ELA will offer a special post-conference event. After picking up box lunches, we will travel by coach to the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. We will do the ranger-guided tour of the site to hear the story of Oliver Brown and the other history makers at the Monroe Elementary School, one of the four segregated schools in the Topeka School District.

Update:  The Brown v. Board National Historic Site is a national park, and because of the Government Shutdown, it has been closed.  

As an alternative, we are arranging a Kansas City Museums afternoon tour from 1-5:30pm.  Kansas City is home to the National World War I Museum, which houses the largest collection of WWI artifacts in the world and the Liberty Memorial, which is the big torch you'll see when you pass downtown on the way from the airport to the conference hotel.  
 
The WWI Museum is a *private* museum that's also supported by the City of Kansas City, so it is OPEN!  It's been ranked as one of the best museum grounds in the country:  Set *in the hill* that overlooks downtown, almost like it's set inside a trench.  Inside, it tells the story of World War I not just from multiple theaters of war, but how the war "Over There" changed America over here.  When you walk in, you walk over a field of poppies, each flower representing a thousand casualties of the war.
 
From the World War I Museum, we'll go to the 18th and Vine District in Kansas City to the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which was *already* on the schedule. 

These two museums are side-by-side in the 18th and Vine African-American Historical District.  This was the home of Kansas City's version of Black Wall Street in the pre-Brown era, and these museums are, really, civil rights museums dedicated to preserving the history of this influential Black neighborhood.  This is where Charlie Parker created bebop jazz, where the Count Basie Orchestra got its start.   

Negro Leagues Baseball Museum:

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is a treasure---the Negro Leagues were formed in the YMCA building in this district, and through the work of Buck O'Neil and others (you will remember Buck from the Ken Burns PBS series on baseball), it tells the story of these thriving *communities* through the story of Negro Leagues Baseball.  

 
This program is designed to tell the real human stories from the history that defines much of work in education law today–and to share fellowship with our fellow ELA members after the conference! The program will run from 12:30-5:30, and is limited to 50 seats. The total cost is $90, which covers the cost of the coach, tickets, and the box lunch.