On March 30, a group of North County community leaders held a press conference outside district headquarters demanding the resignation of Normandy Schools Collaborative Superintendent Marcus Robinson.
They also called for the resignations of Sara Foster and Tony Neal, chairperson and vice-chairperson of the Joint Governing Executive Board, which appointed Robinson, and stated their opposition to two bond measures on the April 6th ballot in Normandy which would allocate increased funding to school building maintenance.
Earlier this month, reporter Blythe Bernhard with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed that Robinson, appointed to his position by the district’s Joint Executive Governing Board last May, did not hold the necessary qualifications for his position. Robinson, who is licensed to be a substitute teacher in the state of Missouri, is one of the three individuals who local leaders demanded to resign at the March 30th press conference.
Normandy, which has been provisionally accredited since 2017, cannot receive full accreditation as a district without a certified superintendent. It lost its state accreditation in 2012, triggering a wave of student transfers and a loss of funding, which continued somewhat when the district was provisionally re-accredited in 2017. Though academics have improved recently, Normandy still struggles — last academic year, its high school graduation rate was 69%.
Robinson, Foster, and Neal are not resigning, according to a statement released by the Normandy Schools Collaborative.
The press conference was organized by the Fannie Lou Hamer coalition, a group of local Black progressive politicians, along with the 24:1 Partnership of North County Mayors. County Councilwoman Hazel Erby, representing the Fannie Lou Hamer coalition, said that the group was involving themselves in this matter because “our responsibility is to create an appropriate and effective response to years of disparate treatment of African Americans in St. Louis county, especially our children.”
According to a statement from the district, Normandy leaders “were well aware that Mr. Robinson would need to acquire his superintendent certification, which he will acquire in the coming months. We understand that in order to achieve full accreditation that certification is needed.”
“There seems to have been, at best, a dereliction of duty,” Erby said. “How else could we understand the hiring of a superintendent who lacks the credentials to do the job?”
County Councilwoman Rita Heard Days connected the issue of Robinson’s hiring with the recent ballot initiative’s prioritization of building funding.
“The buildings are fine,” Days asserted. “But this bond issue is for buildings. It’s not for resources for our children, it’s not for greater compensation for our teachers. It’s not…anything that will improve test scores.” Proposition V and Proposition T, which are both on the April 6th ballot, are primarily focused on school building improvements. Proposition V would be funded through a $26.5 million no-tax-rate-increase general obligations bond, meaning that property taxes for individuals in the area would not be increased.
Proposition T would be funded by increasing the operating tax levy ceiling in the district by 58 cents.
Days stated that she opposes Propositions V and T, though she generally votes in favor of taxation to benefit the school system. “I have lived in this school district since 1974,” she said. “I have never voted against a tax increase for anything that involves our children. I cannot continue to say that. With the lack of leadership that we have had in this school district…it does not warrant my support of any kind of tax increase.”
Days and Erby both suggested that the end goal of Robinson’s hiring may have been to facilitate the conversion of more of the district to charter schools. The Leadership School, the first charter to open in the metro area outside the city of St. Louis, was approved to open in Normandy in late December 2020.
Robinson’s background is in charter schooling — prior to his position with Normandy, he co-founded The Opportunity Trust, the education innovation nonprofit that funded The Leadership School. The Opportunity Trust awarded $500,000 to the Normandy Schools Collaborative to support the district’s strategic plan in September. Robinson, however, states that he is no longer involved with the organization.
Mayor Brian Jackson of the City of Beverly Hills called for Robinson, Foster, and Neal’s removal, stating that “leadership has not been accountable to the community. The longer we wait, the longer it will take to get things repaired after the damage caused by this present administration.”
None of those individuals, however, have indicated any interest in ceding to the coalition’s demands that they step down. In a joint statement to the American, Foster and Neal stated their intent to continue to serve on the Joint Executive Governing Board. “Both Tony Neal and Sara Foster intend to continue to serve on the Normandy Joint Executive Governing Board. We will continue to focus our efforts on providing a high quality education for the children in Normandy.”
