The leadership at Saint Louis Public Schools and Dunbar Elementary School have joined a community movement to keep open the school, which had been considered for closure.
Dunbar Principal Anthony Virdure was one of the leaders of a community-organized parade through the school’s surrounding neighborhood on the afternoon of Friday, April 12.
“Dunbar must retain at least 180 children,” Carla Alexander, one of the community organizers, explained the purpose of the parade, which was meant to alert the community that it’s in danger of losing its neighborhood school.
Though the Jeff-Vander-Lou Neighborhood surrounding Dunbar is a relic of its heyday, when composer Scott Joplin and Negro League ballplayer James “Cool Papa” Bell lived there, the residents alerted by the parade were unanimous in their support of the school.
Kimberly Barton, who lives in an upstairs apartment on the street memorably named for Bell, stuck her head out the window at the sound of the Vashon High School drumline leading the parade with the high school’s JROTC color guard.
“Dunbar!” Barton shouted in solidarity, after reading the hand-lettered signs held by the students marching in the parade that read “Dunbar Forever” and “Dunbar Matters.” Three of her 19 grandchildren attend Dunbar, Barton said.
Trashay Rucker walked her 1-year-old daughter Chloe to the corner to see the parade, summoned by the drums. They live on Thomas Street, one block south of the school – where Rucker intends to send Chloe when she is old enough for kindergarten.
“We need to keep the school in the community,” Rucker said. “It brings a lot of people into our neighborhood.”
The neighborhood is sparsely populated. The parade passed as many vacant lots and derelict buildings as it did inhabited dwellings.
Gregory Farmer, who attended Dunbar from pre-school to fifth grade and graduated from high school in 2001, watched the parade pass and said he hopes for his old school to stay open.
“It’s in the neighborhood for all the kids in the neighborhood,” Farmer said.
Stephanie Harvey, whose son helped to summon the neighborhood to the parade as a marching member of the Vashon drumline, said a neighborhood school is especially needed in JeffVanderLou because many area parents lack transportation.
“If they shut down the school, the effect on the neighborhood would be really big,” Harvey said. “It needs to stay open.”
Once word got around the neighborhood that there was a parade advertising the danger of losing Dunbar, residents got motivated. Barton, who watched the parade from her upstairs apartment on “Cool” Papa Bell, came running down Webster Street looking for The St. Louis American reporter who interviewed her from the ground.
She said her neighbor Evelyn Stabler, 76, attended Dunbar, graduating from it at age 13. (The school was built in 1912, when William Howard Taft was U.S. president.) Stabler was in pajamas, her neighbor said, and preferred not to be interviewed but wanted her support to be known. Barton called another neighbor, Gloria Winder, 69, who also attended the school and now lives in apartments across the street. Winder, too, is rooting for her old school.
Jill Toney, an instructional coach at Dunbar, understands that the district must make tough choices, given its struggles. But she hopes the community rallies around its school and that shuttering it is one tough choice the district can avoid making.
“I know the community is small, I know Dunbar is small,” Toney said. “But it’s because the school is small that it has that close-knit feel. I don’t want our kids to lose that.”
Patricia Dora’s granddaughter is one of those kids in first grade in Dunbar. The district may not project population growth in the neighborhood needed to support keeping the huge, old school in operation, but Dora knows the children who are here now and growing up in the neighborhood.
“We have too many babies coming up to close this school,” Dora said. “We’ve got a nice neighborhood, and we’re trying to keep it together. We want our kids to be able to come outside and play and be safe. We are trying to keep our community together.”
