Forty-one years ago, Kinloch School District was merged into Ferguson-Florissant School District. Principally, this state action was touted to further desegregation efforts in the metropolitan St. Louis region.
In 2010, Wellston School District was merged into the Normandy School District. Financial insolvency was trumpeted to be the cause of this school reform measure.
And in 2014, with the advent of a new plan over “lapsed” districts, Normandy is poised to become the third majority-black district in the area since the early 1970s to be closed. Normandy schools – along with their students and, presumably, their educators – will be parceled off to an adjoining district or to an “outside organization.”
What might be called a plantation model of metropolitan school reform has ensnared yet another majority-black school district in a net designed to punish rather than nurture. And the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education seems to relish its role as the Big House on the new plantation.
Closure in the guise of merger neither softens the blow nor salves the wound. These changes carries significant trauma that must be realized and acknowledged.
The forced loss of kinship within enslaved families has been analyzed as social death. School closures on the new plantation amount to the same thing. District or school membership is – or should be – a family affair. Even more so in the black community when its structures, schools and others, are under perpetual harsh scrutiny.
So, tearing schools, students, or educators from one another in the black community severs kinship – and people suffer tremendously.
To be sure, these districts were judged as deficient, inefficient or failing – or some combination of all three. But the adjudicating structure served the age-old tradition of white supremacy, not the cause of social or human justice.
St. Louis residents may remember another school closure masquerading as a merger. This one was not a district but a single institution – Stowe Teachers College. Stowe started out in the late nineteenth century as a normal (or teacher preparation) department of Sumner High School. By 1954, Stowe was a thriving success, one of a small number of segregated municipal colleges in the United States filling local black schools with qualified, credentialed teachers.
However, in one of the St. Louis Board of Education’s first actions after the Brown U.S. Supreme Court case, Stowe was reportedly merged into white Harris Teachers College. Merged in name only, you see. Its building was repurposed and its students sent to Harris. And the Stowe faculty, with similar – and, in many cases, better – credentials than their Harris colleagues were out of a job. A small few were asked to move to Harris, too – a face-saving exercise, at best, for the SLPS Board of Education.
The myth of merger has enveloped the memories of Stowe Teachers College for far too long. Stowe was closed.
And the school closings on the new plantation continue. Normandy is but the latest in a shameful show of social death perpetrated onto black bodies. Which majority-black district will be next?
Matthew D. Davis is an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Missouri-St Louis.
