Vashon High School, the second-oldest black high school in St. Louis, was built at 3026 Laclede Ave. in 1927. But in 1963, due to declining enrollment, the old Vashon was forced to move to the factory-looking building on Bell Avenue that formerly housed Hadley Technical High School. Building conditions at the school were so terrible that taxpayers decided to build a new Vashon, which opened in 2002.
The story of Vashon could serve as a blueprint for St. Louis Public Schools’ plan to restructure the district for the future.
On Saturday the three-member administrative board held the third in a series of community summits on the district’s long-range plan. The final summit was used to report progress on 30 goals for student achievement, parent engagement and school buildings.
“Something we need to ask ourselves is, is it worth keeping this building here?” Deanna Anderson, assistant superintendent of Operations for St. Louis Public Schools, said of the district’s facilities.
The district has 88 buildings for educating 27,500 students; the average age of 40 percent of them is 88 to 130 years. Many of them show signs of aging with peeled paint, uninsulated windows, no central air conditioning and poor electrical wiring.
“We can’t turn on all of the computers for fear of a fire,” Richard Gaines, chair of the long-range planning committee, said one teacher told him. “We can’t expect to compete in this world” with these kinds of problems, Gaines said.
Parents like Melissa Gillespie, who has a son with cerebral palsy, called for every building to have accommodations for disabled children. Teachers expressed concern that closings will lead to overcrowding classrooms.
“I wouldn’t want my child in a building with 500 children because that means bigger class sizes,” said parent and teacher Sabrina Bonnett, adding that there are classrooms already over teacher-student ratio standards. “Studies have shown that children work better in smaller class sizes.”
The district has seen its enrollment drop by nearly 75,000 students in a little under 40 years. The decline has come largely because of an eroding tax base in the city and the transfer of city families to more prestigious county schools.
Parents fear that with the building changes many families might opt for parochial, charter or county schools.
Peggy Brown ascertained that she would move her 6-year-old gifted son out of Stix Early Childhood Center to a private school if the magnet school becomes overcrowded.
“If you close another elementary school and send students to Stix, then you’ll overcrowd Stix and parents, like myself, will have to go to another school,” Brown said. “Parents may feel like their child has become insignificant from a school where they were significant.”
In the forum following break-out sessions, Gaines said closing a school is never easy, but the district has more schools than it needs.
Dwindling enrollment has left the average capacity of the district’s buildings to just under 70 percent.
The district has closed 25 buildings since 2003. Gaines emphasized that the board will not in any way follow the footsteps of Alvarez & Marsal, the out-of-town consultant firm that closed 16 schools and laid off 1,400 people without warning in 2003.
“It’s not that simple,” Gaines said.
Gaines remembered the anger and sadness that ensued when he heard the district was closing Vashon High School during the summer of his sophomore year.
He silenced rumors that school closings will happen in December, but promised that the district would weigh multiple factors first.
“There is no way we will disrupt this school year,” Gaines said.
The administrative board hired MGIT of America Inc. to research the building needs of the district. St. Louis Public Schools is paying the firm $625,000.
MGIT will propose school closings based on 11 criteria, including demographics, facilities, assessment, technological readiness, historical significance and building capacity. Nine public forums, which will run from Dec. 3 to Dec. 17, will give the community an opportunity to weigh in about the district’s future.
Bill Carnes, a former school superintendent and project director with MGIT, cautioned that they will not try to restructure the district until they have all the pieces of the puzzle.
School district CEO Rick Sullivan said, “We want to do this only once and we want to do it right.”