The child murders occurring throughout the region are simply symptomatic of the larger issue that the City of St. Louis is failing its black children, their neighborhoods and their families.
Over $1 billion spent by the Saint Louis Public School District over the last three years and a district literacy rate of under 25 percent. Intergenerational poverty plaguing North St. Louis, from playground to church pew. Decades of systematic divestment north of Delmar.
A Public Safety director who refers to dead children (SLPS students!) as “sophisticated criminals” and complicit in their own demise. A mayor who seems (feigns?) oblivious to the fact that a city’s public school system is the bedrock of its relevancy and its success. Politicians who wear apathy like it’s the new black.
A school board, tasked with ensuring equitable education to all students, who are uncharacteristically eager to shutter schools in the areas where educational empowerment is needed most.
City leaders who excitedly support investing in a soccer stadium in downtown St. Louis, yet lament to SLPS students that it is not cost-effective to keep their neighborhood schools/historic buildings open, despite the impending end of the deseg program.
All complicit in the deaths of SLPS students, in mind, body and soul.
Arthurine Harris
St. Louis
