St. Louis Public Schools will not close any schools during this academic year, according to district officials.
Interim Superintendent Millicent Borishade, school board President Toni Cousins and Vice President Matt Davis have said in interviews that district officials haven’t decided which schools will have to close their doors in coming years.
They did not provide a timeline for when the district would do so.
SLPS hired an architecture firm, Cordogan, Clark & Associates, to assess school buildings across the district. The firm concluded that it would cost $1.8 billion over 20 years to repair and maintain all school buildings — some of which are over 100 years old.
The architecture firm also is working with a demographer to determine exactly how many students live in St. Louis and where they live. The firm is wrapping up a feasibility study on how effectively each school building is being used, according to district officials.
Davis and Cousins said that once the studies are completed, the district will present the findings to the public through community events.
“We’re doing it in a way that we can have all the information and come up with something where we’re giving people, realistically, something better,” Davis said. “It may not be the best thing for your neighborhood, but it’s going to be the best thing for your student’s education.”
Dorothy Rohde-Collins, an education, policy and equity doctoral candidate at St. Louis University, said the district should decide soon which schools to close.
“It’s great that these studies have been commissioned, but I would say that the timeline has been drawn out so long that the need to decide whether or not to close schools will become even more pressing as we get into next school year and the years that follow,” said Rohde-Collins, who researches school closures.
Enrollment at St. Louis Public Schools has been declining for decades. The district’s peak enrollment was more than 115,000 students in 1967; this year, it’s around 16,500.
In December 2020, former Superintendent Kelvin Adams recommended that 11 schools should be closed for good.
Among the schools was Charles H. Sumner High School in the Ville neighborhood of north St. Louis. It was the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi River when it opened in 1875. Including Sumner, seven of the recommended closings were north of Delmar Boulevard.
They were Clay, Dunbar, Farragut, Ford and Hickey, all elementary schools; Sumner and Northwest Academy of Law High School.
“So, the district has a strong past — we’re not here necessarily to focus on the past but really to use the past as a benchmark for thinking about what we need to do in the future,” Adams said, as he began his presentation.
Adams noted that approximately 1,000 people participated in community vision workshops that sought to prioritize what the community sees as best when it comes to school consolidation.
The closing of the schools on the city’s north side was intentional. The way you destroy a community is you have to first have to destroy the educational system!! Over the years, resources have been taken away to make our Public Schools unattractive to parents. Elimination of Sports.. taken away bands all which were needed for some to get scholarships to go to college were taken out of middle and high school..giving parents no choice but to enroll their childrend elsewhere. The school board has destroyed the PHL and has erased the culture in the school pride once held by children on the city’s north side. Dunbar was a feeder School. Located right across the street from a Vashon high school and down the street from William Harris college they should have never been closed Dunbar!!!!It should be reopened Pre-K to 8th!! I met my gynecologist my lawyer the guy that cut my grass in elementary school. We all graduated from the same High School. That’s how you establish and maintain a neighborhood by children who attend community schools!! We failed the black children on our cities Northside! Instead of closing Dunbar, we should have made the changes needed to attract more parents to that community school.. instead of bussing those students out in the county and to other schools. We didn’t give our young parents A choice. If I was to grade the school board, they will get a “F”.
Agreed! Let’s reopen the city schools.
I agree ,parents has a choice and a say in this matter and I don’t think parents are stand up for their children. Send your child out in the county, I never understood that stop sending your kids in the county start fighting for the school’s in the city.I guarantee you when enough of you blacks fill them County schools and community up the white people get the city back.Thats something they always want and then they’ll be closing up your County schools.People need to get up and fight for your communities and demand for change and pay attention.
The closure of schools has led to overcrowded classrooms and forced students to enroll in sports and Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) schools merely to survive—even when they are not interested in these programs. Class sizes have swelled, and there are not enough experienced or qualified teachers to meet the demand. We also lack sufficient teaching assistants (TAs) and instructional classroom assistants (ICAs) to support the influx of students. As a result, the few seasoned educators are experiencing frequent burnout, and our health is deteriorating.
We are fighting to sustain our livelihoods and continue pursuing our passions. Yet, the district continually demands more from us—expecting additional time, talents, ideas, visions, and solutions—without providing the resources we need and want. The district keeps taking without giving in return. It is time for them to stop penny-pinching and start investing in teachers as we deserve. This change is long overdue. Pay us!
Hello, myself and another local organizer are working on an op-ed related to resources being taken from the northside by our city government, specifically from the schools.
I saw your comment and wanted to reach out with our contact info in case you’d be interested in giving us better insight into the conditions the teachers are facing under these current situations.
If you are, my email is rgphotography314@gmail.com.
Thanks, Gracynn.
Do what’s right !
True knowledge….no schools in the county ever close because that’s where the money goes to fund their school and children mean while the urban black neighborhoods schools shut down
I agree. Tha best way to destroy a neighborhood is to dismantle the education system and take away the choices for parents. It also becomes an undesirable district for good, dedicated teachers, academic resources are diminished, and property owners with school aged children choose private and Charter schools. Also, students in the district receive less than competitive education which also impacts post secondary opportunities for the students that desire to go further in the education.
That’s y the Charter schools receiving funding as if they are public schools..like as if they are traditional 🤔😢..if we as a community can make up the difference it’s time to bring our babies home ❤️
HARVARD EDUCATION PRESS, 10/4/24…With the passing of the federal K-12 education legislation No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001, districts nationwide began engaging more aggressively in punitive reformations to respond to ‘failing’ schools. Persistently low academic achievement began to be met with seismic changes: privatization, charter refashioning, administrative restructuring, or even closure. In the aftermath of NCLB’s implementation, the threat of closure gained traction as a scare-tactic for improving educational outcomes in struggling schools. Many empty buildings were left in NCLB’s wake, thereby signaling that the schools and, by extension, the people within them were incapable of repair as they previously stood. Further, beyond NCLB, budgetary constraints or low academic performance are typically cited as justification by districts for closures, but advocates have continued to argue that these decisions unfairly target communities of color, particularly schools with large shares of Black students…