Both citizens and public education leaders spoke some good sense at a forum held Tuesday night at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Though intended as a discussion of the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s proposed multi-tier system for supporting school districts that face loss of accreditation, the main topic of conversation was one currently unaccredited school district: the Normandy School District. DESE recently took over financial administration of the district, which faces bankruptcy if the state does not provide $5 million in emergency operation funds. The district has been drained of resources in the wake of a new state law that obligates unaccredited districts to pay tuition and (in select cases) transportation costs for students who choose to transfer to an accredited district.
“We should be on buses heading to Jefferson City,” Charles Coburn said, according to a St. Louis Public Radio report. “We should be mobilizing ourselves.” We agree that we need a more mobilized community engaged with the issue of public education, but we need to spend our energies wisely. When we get off the bus in the state capital, what should we do? The answer is not protesting the state school board for empowering DESE to step in on Normandy’s finances. Simply put, there was no chance of the state passing emergency funding to keep this failing district alive until the end of the term if those funds were to be administered locally.
“Those children who left, they didn’t have to leave,” said Melda Collins, who transferred her child out of Normandy. “They made their choice.”
That, too, is a fact. Some version of a school transfer law is here to stay, as long as there are public school districts that are consistently failing by state standards. The demands of parents like Collins are now an essential part of this conversation. So, if we wish to preserve a functional public education system in Missouri – and not everyone active on this issue wishes to preserve the public system – then we must pressure our legislators to fix the school transfer law. The Legislature currently is debating one such bill. We need a transfer law that caps tuition paid by the sending district and mandates the receiving district to spend the transfer funds on educating transfer students.
“We are meeting the needs of the whole child, not just the academic ones,” said Pam Sloan, superintendent of the Francis Howell School District, a district receiving transfer students. “The work is very complex.”
Whether or not Francis Howell is doing as well as Sloan claims, she is exactly right about what is required of a district receiving transfer students – in the vast majority of cases, African-American youth (which explains the strong racial overtones of the public discussion of this issue). This crisis presents an opportunity for area school districts to embrace diversity and devise programs for nurturing newcomers who face unique challenges.
“We have to come together,” Collins said. That should be clear now more than ever. The crisis in Normandy is likely to spread, if the Legislature does not act more swiftly and much more strategically than it has in recent years. If St. Louis Public Schools were to go down the same path as Normandy, then St. Louis and St. Charles county school districts would have a transfer student problem on a much larger scale. The western side of the state faces the same situation.
This is truly a statewide crisis in the making. There is a desperate and immediate need for firm leadership on this complex issue. Which makes us wonder: Where is Gov. Jay Nixon? The governor has appeared in the national media this week, claiming education is his priority as a way to dodge questions about raising the minimum wage. If education is Nixon’s priority, then where is he right now on this acute school transfer crisis? And if not now, governor, then when?
