VIDEO: MAYOR SLAY INTERVIEW
Filed Monday, December 18, 2006 at 12:00 PM
PUB DEF EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Friday afternoon, the day the Special Advisory Committee on St. Louis Public Schools recommended that an appointed three-person board run the city schools for the next 6-10 years, Mayor Francis Slay sat down with PUB DEF to discuss what it all means for the children and parents of St. Louis City.
“The school district is in crisis. It’s been on a downward spiral for quite some time,” said Slay.
“It’s not something that happened last week, or several months ago, or even four years ago. It’s something that’s been going on for a number of years.”
But some would argue that the current state of the SLPS financial and academic spiral can be traced back to 2003, the year longtime superintendent Cleveland Hammonds retired and four new members, all backed by Mayor Slay, were elected to the school board. Since then the district went from a positive to a negative fund balance, slipped further away from full accreditation (after being only two points away), and has lost the confidence of the city’s parents, voters and corporate community.
But Slay maintains that the current woes have more to do with troubles which started much earlier.
“What happened back then is something that was created by the crisis this district presented,” said Slay.
He said the financial situation realized in 2003 forced the board to make some tough decisions causing some disruptions. But the mayor repeated his view that the school district’s problems go back many, many years.
“This started a long time ago,” he said.
Even if all of the Advisory Committee’s recommendations, which seem to attempt to take politics (and the voters) out of the process for a while, are eventually adopted, the central question of how to better educate urban children is barely addressed in their report and is by no means a riddle only we in St. Louis are scratching our heads about.
All across America, large school districts are trying to answer the same question: How do we prepare poor children for the world of the future while competing with the deadly challenges of their world today? None of these recommendations guarantee success. So we asked the mayor if at the end of two, four, even six years into this latest experiment, SLPS still isn’t succeeding — what then?
“I think everyone involved in this ought to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Slay.
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