The elected school board of St. Louis Public Schools released the following statement tonight following the effective firing of Superintendent Diana Bourisaw by the state-authorized Special Administrative Board and forum tonight on the closing of eight more city schools:

State Control of Local Schools – No Room for Children?

Recent actions by the state appointed board (SAB) running St. Louis Public Schools make one thing very clear: the well-being of students is not one of their top concerns.

The members of the SAB clearly are following the charge laid down for them by the Missouri Board of Education: squirrel money away in an account you will never touch instead of spending it to educate city children. The state board of education established the SAB on the recommendation of a report that called for closing many schools in St. Louis in order to transfer money from the school district’s operating budget into the desegregation capital budget, a budget that the state board says can only be used to build new schools in the unlikely event that the county school districts suddenly pull out of the interdistrict transfer program and send all the city residents in their schools packing back to the city. The state board of education and the Missouri Attorney General have it in their power to waive payments into the desegregation capital fund. We think it is wrong that they do not do so.

School Closings

We believe that the state board of education’s demands that St. Louis Public Schools forego spending money it has on education and instead place it into a fund that the state hopes to takeover in 40 years is outrageous and immoral. We unequivocally oppose closing schools to bank money for the state.

We also note that the assumption shared by the state board of education and the SAB that smaller schools are more expensive to operate than larger schools is an assumption that is not supported by research. Studies by researchers at Brown University and the University of Wisconsin, for example, have shown that small schools are not any more expensive to operate than large schools. The key is not how large a school is, but how it is managed.

Instead of closing neighborhood schools, the SAB could have looked at changing the way they are managed to save money. One suggestion to emerge from neighborhood meetings is to have the principal and literacy coach in small schools teach classes, in other words, make the administrative positions part time administrative and part time teaching positions. Yes, that would have required getting the teachers’ and administrators’ unions to agree to changes in their contracts. More significantly, perhaps, it would have required that district administrators – education officers, assistant superintendents, and the superintendent – give up their practice of routinely pulling principals out of schools for daylong meetings. They would have had to think more carefully about when they really needed to pull a principal out of school and plan better in order to use principals’ time out of school more efficiently.

The SAB’s failure to consider alternative management structures for small schools suggests that they are more concerned with preserving management the way it is than with serving children.

The financial talk surrounding this round of school closings masks a prejudiced belief that city school children do not deserve the same small class sizes enjoyed by children in the county. Elaborate arguments about school capacity and utilization are all about one thing: making sure that when city public school children attend school they are in the largest classes possible. We believe that is wrong and we urge the state board of education and the attorney general to do the right thing and forgive payments to the desegregation capital fund.

Forgiving payments the desegregation capital fund would not do away with all of the school district’s financial woes – the state’s charter school policy of having more and more schools fight for pieces of the same fixed financial pie ensures that the city school district will continue to face strong financial pressures – but it would give the school district breathing space to consider alternatives. A year ago, the St. Louis Board of Education asked staff to estimate the cost of reducing class sizes to the state’s “desirable” level. That estimate could have served as the basis for a discussion with legislators and the community about funding. Under the weight of the campaign by the state education commissioner, Kent King, to remove the school district’s accreditation and the remove the elected school board, district staff never prepared or presented that estimate. The SAB never requested it. Forgiving payments to the capital fund could give the SAB time to repair its negligence, if it so desired.

School Violence

The decision to return to the classroom students, who were suspended earlier this year for such felonious offenses as making death threats to staff or getting caught with weapons or drugs at school, is another example of the SAB sacrificing students in order to put a few more bucks in the bank. Such students should have been removed from the population they threatened and put in a program where they can get the concentrated services to change their behavior and progress academically. We emphasize that the issue is one of providing students the services they need, not one of punishment. The decision not to provide such services is really a decision about money that hurts everyone in the school. We strongly urge the SAB to reconsider its decision to deny alternative education services to violent students.

Superintendent

Less than one year ago, the state board of education declared that it had to replace the elected school board with an appointed board in order to stop “the revolving door” of superintendents in the school district. They said an appointed board was necessary to bring stability to the superintendent’s office. Now, one week after the state-appointed CEO is confirmed in his position, he is spinning that door again, and for no good reason. The statement from the SAB that everything was good with the superintendent, but they wanted a change, apparently simply for the sake of change, is insufficient reason for again creating uproar and instability in St. Louis Public Schools.

We believe the SAB owes the public an explanation for their precipitous decision to fire Diana Bourisaw.

In addition to approving the above statement tonight, the school board also voted to appeal the recent court decision which upheld the state takeover of the district.