The Missouri State Board of Education stripped St. Louis Public Schools of its status as fully accredited onTuesday a move the only opposing board member called a “messaging device.”

The school district has been downgraded to provisionally accredited.

“Lowering accreditation is a broad signal and by itself does not fix audits, stabilize transportation or strengthen governance,” said Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, a board member from Pasadena Hills.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education planned only to raise accreditation during the state board meeting Tuesday, boosting the Osborn School District from provisional to full accreditation following its hiring of a superintendent in order to meet certification requirements.

The department has been looking at factors like superintendent certification and financial security to determine whether a school district is fully accredited since the launch of the Missouri School Improvement 6 in 2022. Any changes to accreditation based on MSIP6 scores are not supposed to be implemented until next year, which has who want low-performing schools penalized sooner rather than later.

State board member Kerry Casey, of Chesterfield, asked the board to lower St. Louis Public Schools to provisional accreditation based on factors outside of MSIP6. She cited leadership instability, transportation issues, a poor rating from the State Auditor and the district’s late submission of its annual financial report to the state.

“(My recommendation) is strictly based on the fact that they have experienced significant change in the scope of effectiveness of their programs and their financial integrity upon which their original designation was based, and they have failed to comply with the statutory requirement,” Casey said. “If we do not make this lower classification change, we are not doing our job.”

Commissioner of Education Karla Eslinger said she was “very dissatisfied” that the district turned in its financial report late and thought about recommending to lower its accreditation. But she didn’t think the move would solve any problems.

Charter schools can open in areas where a school district has been provisionally accredited for three or more consecutive years. But state law already allows charter schools in St. Louis.

“The provisional tag on the school district is not going to make that big of a difference,” Eslinger said. “Why I did not make that recommendation is I’d rather have them at the table with me and working with me.”

A spokesperson for St. Louis Public Schools could not be immediately reached for comment on the board’s decision.

State education officials have been working with the district, Eslinger said, and the department has convened a group of school leaders and local stakeholders to brainstorm solutions for St. Louis Public Schools and other underperforming districts.

“Putting those plans together, I see good things ahead for St Louis,” Eslinger told the board.

When she took office as commissioner in 2024, St. Louis Public Schools’ leadership did not return calls or emails, she said.

“We do now have a relationship, and we’re being very honest and upfront about the issues that they have,” Eslinger said.

Westbrooks-Hodge, whose district includes St. Louis, was the only board member to speak against Casey’s motion. She pointed out that the district had incremental growth in its annual performance reports, and she worried it was being singled out.

“Using reclassification primarily to send a message risks blurring the distinction MSIP6 intentionally draws between academic performance and governance or financial stress and risks, weakening the consistency and credibility of classification systems statewide,” she said.

Casey and the other five board members voted by voice in favor of the motion.

Last January, Casey but did not receive a second supporter to spur a vote. In reaction, the from the board. Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin , saying: “This has long been needing to happen but for some reason hasn’t.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, Casey also requested that the department provide a report on underperforming schools statewide by the board’s April meeting. This motion received unanimous support from board members.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

Addressing a crowd at City Hall just one week after , Spencer opted not to mention a district that was shaken last year by scandal and a wave of staff terminations. The omission reflects the political reality that, unlike their counterparts in cities like New York and Washington, St. Louis mayors are given no control over public education. With little official influence, Spencer will instead have to appeal to the seven-member school board, which itself on the day she was elected.

Former board member Dorothy Rohde-Collins said she believed the turnover on the school board, which included the defeat of its president, could yield huge benefits for students and families. Still, she called it “endlessly frustrating” that the city’s leaders haven’t devoted more time and care to the problems of the district in recent decades.

“The inability of mayors to engage with the education system is the number-one thing that’s holding the city back,” said Rohde-Collins, who served from 2017 to 2021 and . “They don’t have statutory authority — they can’t do the budget, they don’t appoint members to the board — but they should be able to pay attention and understand the issues.”

Those issues include not just the controversial hiring of former Superintendent Keisha Scarlett, who was terminated in October amid an investigation into . They also extend to in student enrollment at St. Louis Public Schools, now reduced by nearly 90 percent since its peak in the 1960s. With aging, under-utilized facilities sprinkled throughout the city, local authorities will have to make agonizing decisions about how to manage a decline in numbers while attempting to boost academic results.

John Wright, Sr., who attended public schools in St. Louis before embarking on a career in education that culminated in appointments as both a superintendent and board member, said the newly elected board members needed to quickly develop a plan of action. Simply following the example of less crisis-plagued districts, he added, would be an important first step.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you,” Wright observed. “There are models out there of functioning school systems, and it’s a matter of exploring those: What do they have that we don’t have? What are good board members doing across the country that we aren’t doing?”

Keisha Scarlett scandal

Some of the biggest governance challenges facing the new board arose during the tumultuous tenure of the previous superintendent.

Announced in 2023 after a nationwide search, Scarlett listed school improvement and academic achievement . But after just a year in the job, she was placed on as questions grew about her personnel choices and spending practices. 

Scarlett was accused of after giving jobs to a group of personal friends and former colleagues. Board members they had been deceived about the salaries of top staffers, which sometimes exceeded $200,000. Scarlett herself on perks like flowers and meals during her time in office, a later audit would reveal. Most of Scarlett’s aides, including her chief of staff and chief financial officer, were let go precipitously, leaving the district without a leadership team.

In a striking twist, however, Scarlett’s hand-picked deputy was after no search process. Most board members defended the decision as necessary for the sake of stability, but by that point, dissension had already exploded into public view; in the middle of a January board meeting, member Sadie Weiss , lamenting the body’s previous failures in oversight. 

Rohde-Collins said she was dismayed by the organizational chaos enshrouding local schools, with board members even as basic services like bus transportation , stranding thousands of students at the beginning of this school year. 

“It feels like we’re all trapped in this ridiculous movie here in St. Louis, and no one would believe that it’s real life,” Rohde-Collins said. “It doesn’t feel like anyone is sorry that these things happened and that we’re having so much turmoil.”

Three seats were contested in this month’s elections, including who declined to run for another term. Board President Antionette Cousins, the target of substantial criticism for the district’s dysfunction, sought reelection, but out of 12 candidates. 

Byron Clemens, a longtime organizer with the American Federation of Teachers’ local affiliate, said he was heartened by voters’ attention to the school board elections, which typically receive much less coverage than the mayor’s race. The top two vote getters in the field, he added, each tallied more votes than Mayor Jones received in her failed reelection bid.

“Despite the low turnout, the public is engaged with education,” Clemens said. “That’s important, that people believe in an elected board and support public schools.”

‘Everybody is in trouble’

But any post-inaugural honeymoon will likely be brief. 

The three new board members did not run as a unified slate; just one, Brian Marston, of Clemens’s union, which also backed Cousins’s unsuccessful bid. Another, veteran school administrator Karen Collins-Adams, is the wife of Dr. Kelvin Adams, the long-serving superintendent who preceded Scarlett. Reaching a consensus on the district’s leadership, including the future of Superintendent Millicent Borishade, will likely absorb much of their attention in the coming months. 

Beyond the day-to-day necessity of rebuilding trust with families and district staff, St. Louis must soon confront the structural problem of plummeting headcounts. State data indicate that the district since the pandemic, with enrollment falling to around 16,000 from a peak of roughly 115,000 a half-century ago. has seen the total number of public schools stay the same from beginning to end, with 85 opening and 104 closing since 1991. 

Further closures and consolidations are regarded by most observers as inevitable. Wright, who remembers school days spent in overflowing classrooms, said that abandoned and dilapidated facilities now blight neighborhoods, often causing residents to move. Many of the oldest schools in the city, including some that educated African American children in the era of segregation, are likely destined for demolition, he added.

“You can see the windows broken out from blocks away,” he said. “I went to four different elementary schools, and they’re all closed.”

Any plans to shrink St. Louis’s K–12 footprint will require tough political compromises with families and educators, who usually dread school consolidations. Mayor Spencer has not yet stated a position on the future of the district’s facilities or finances; reached for comment, her deputy communications director said that schools would be included on the agenda of one of her half-dozen advisory committees. But Rohde-Collins said that her input could be critical given both the disputatious nature of building closures and the recent acrimony on the school board. 

“That’s where a mayor could come in, by bringing people together, starting conversations, and making it a real priority for the next four years to say, ‘We have to figure this out because everybody is in trouble.’ A mayor could change the trajectory of the city by focusing on it.”

When 17-year-old Mackayla James sat down this month with three of the 11 candidates vying for open seats on the St. Louis School Board, she wanted to know one thing: How will they take student concerns more seriously and give them more input into the decisions made about their education? 

“This is about building a better educational system,” says James, a junior at KIPP High School in St. Louis. “I’m about to graduate next year, but my sister has yet to enter high school, and I don’t want her to be dealing with the same things that I’m dealing with. Adults always say they can make things better for the next generation. Yet the school system is getting worse. It’s not improving. It’s worsening.”

The contentious election, now just three weeks away, comes as the district faces teacher and bus driver shortages, dwindling student enrollment expected to result in school closures, an audit over alleged misuse of district funds by the prior superintendent and chronically low rates of academic achievement. 

In many ways, St. Louis is similar to other urban school districts attempting to claw their way back from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In other ways, it’s very different: Child poverty is high – higher, in fact, than 95% of communities nationwide – and crime, though on a downward trajectory, is still high enough that the state may strip the city’s control of its own police force.

James, meanwhile, is one of the St. Louis area high school students selected after a competitive application process to be part of a small cohort that gathers weekly to learn the nuts and bolts of advocacy and how to effectively inject their voices into the political process. The program, Youth Activators, encompasses a handful of semester-long cohorts and summer fellowships operated by Activate Missouri, all of which focus on boosting civic engagement among young people, with the goal of lifting up student voices in under-resourced communities across the state.

Among other things, the program educates students about the ways schools and districts are funded, the reasons funding can be so disparate, the state of education in their communities and how it got to be that way. With help from the organization’s own grassroots leaders, students identify the people in positions of power in their community and build their own advocacy campaigns to advance an issue that’s important to them. 

Vera Pantazis, a 17-year-old junior at Maplewood Richmond High School who is also part of the St. Louis cohort, had questions of her own for the school board candidates. Tutoring to improve math and reading scores is well and fine, she said, but show me the fine print. 

“So you say that you’re going to provide free tutoring for all kids. What’s that going to look like? How are we funding this? Who’s going to be doing the tutoring, you know? Is that going to be for all schools? All grades? I wanted more details on the biggest education proposals.”

The youth engagement effort marks a change in strategy for the education advocacy group, which had been focusing resources on trying to engage, educate and organize parents on the issues.

“We were asking the people most impacted by the systemic inequalities to fix the issue,” says Tiara Jordan-Sutton, founder and executive director of Activate STL, an offshoot of the statewide organization. “But they have so many things on their plate, and if they have to choose between working another job to put food on the table or attending a curriculum night at their kids school or coming to an organizing meeting, they’re gonna choose to put the food on the table. At the end of the day, there’s multiple competing factors that are keeping parents from being able to jump in this fight. So we needed to think about this from another lens.”

That lens is now trained on students, or as Jordan-Sutton likes to remind folks, “the very people who are closest to the issue.” The issue being, of course, the significant academic and fiscal challenges of the K-12 system. According to the most recent NAEP results, just 27% of fourth-grade students in Missouri and 26% of eighth graders are proficient in reading. In math, 36% of fourth graders and 23% of eighth graders are proficient. No grade-score combination reached pre-pandemic level, and the performance gap between white students and Black students hasn’t budged for more than two decades. 

Out of all the districts in Missouri, St. Louis Public Schools posted the third lowest scores on the state’s last year, with just 21% of students passing the English Language arts assessment and 17% passing the math assessment. The chronic disinvestment of the system has pushed families out of the city in droves, reducing total enrollment by roughly 20% over the past decade. 

“A lot of people in St. Louis think that what’s happening here is the norm,” Jordan-Sutton says. “We have an opportunity to get to them [students] earlier, so that by the time they become parents, they have a very different understanding of why education is the way that it is, who’s allowing it to stay this way, and what the factors or levers are that can be pulled for it to actually improve.”

Activate ATL and the youth advocacy programs she oversees are funded by The Opportunity Trust, a nonprofit organization working to strengthen public education for St. Louis students.

The youth advocacy programs include a paid summer fellowship for high school juniors, seniors and recent graduates, which operates weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., like a real job, and provides young people with a deep understanding about the myriad issues impacting St. Louis – especially education, but also housing and crime – and the tools needed to effectively organize. Among other things, they’re responsible for drafting get-out-the-vote campaigns focused on education equity. 

The semester-long cohorts for high school students run during the school year. Students meet twice a week to learn about how the K-12 system operates and is funded, who controls the purse strings, how the school board operates and who the biggest decision-makers are in the system. They canvas to register students old enough to vote, travel to Jefferson City to meet with legislators at the state capital and draft their own advocacy campaigns related to something they’d like to change at their school. The experience culminates with a pitch contest for a chance to have an advocacy campaign funded and brought to life.

Those pitches include everything from establishing a mental health buddy system among students to increasing the availability of tutoring to becoming more environmentally friendly. For James, who’s biggest concern is lack of communication and understanding of the issues that students face in school, she is considering proposing a plan that would allow a student representative from each high school to sit on the school board. 

“We want students to imagine what school could be like,” says Jordan-Sutton, who began her career as a special education teacher and then principal in Chicago. “What are the things that they love about their school, and what do they wish that they had that’s missing? We tell them, ‘You can do something about that. Let me show you how.’”&�Բ�����;

“We teach them how to organize for change in a very structured way,” she says. “It’s not about just staging a protest, or walking out of school, or going to the principal and saying, ‘I want this,’ and expecting the principal to do it. It’s how to fine tune an idea, research it, think through how it should be implemented and whether anyone has ever tried it before. It’s thinking through how to build coalitions of support for it because there’s strength in numbers and how to survey peers to better understand the nuances of it. And finally, it’s about figuring out who in the power dynamics has the ability to implement the change you’re asking for.”

The pivot to focus on youth advocacy is perhaps the next iteration of the national movement that’s taken shape in the wake of the pandemic, with groups like and the helping parents become smarter public education consumers and savvier advocates for change. Yet research shows that young people are eager to be involved in the process, but often feel overlooked by the political process and unprepared or unqualified to take action. 

According to the , young people (18-29) believe that their generation can and should engage in civic life and effect change: 74% said that there are things they can do to make the world a better place, 76% believe that their age group has the power to change things, and 83% recognize the potential of young people working with other generations to create change. However, many don’t feel informed or qualified enough to participate in politics. Only half of youth say they feel they’re “as well-informed as most people,” and even fewer (40%) say that they feel well-qualified to participate in politics. 

Moreover, young people from groups that have historically held less political power were even less likely to feel qualified, with 34% of youth of color saying they feel qualified to participate in politics, compared to 44% of white youth.

In addition, a growing body of shows that when students regard their school leadership as responsive to their expressed input and criticism, students themselves have better grades, attendance and reduced rates of chronic absenteeism. Students who believe they have a voice in school are seven times more likely to be academically motivated than students who do not believe they have a voice, and student voice is also linked to an increased likelihood that students will experience self-worth, engagement, and purpose in school.

“In this moment, with all of these different elections coming up, how do we ensure that the student voice is elevated?” asks Rachel Powers, a senior vice president at The Opportunity Trust. “How do we support students in the same way that we support parents to advocate for what they are looking for, what they need, what they see in their own spaces, in their schools, in their communities?

“We’re trying to get students in that ethos and to understand the power of their collective voice,” she adds. “We know that people who go to the polls don’t always look like people who are served in our schools. And that’s something we point out and ask them, who’s making the real decisions about what happens to you, and do you want to be involved in making decisions that impact you and your community?”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to The 74.

The year COVID-19 shuttered classroom doors, St. Louis’s Premier Charter School was acclimating not only to a new normal, but to a new way of teaching literacy.

The K-8 school and its 900 students shifted their curriculum in fall 2020 to include the science of reading — a  switch many U.S. districts have made because of its positive results on literacy scores. But last year, with results remaining stagnant and low, Premier’s administrators started to wonder what they were missing.

“We are not seeing the gains and the progress that our school should be making,” said Jessica Smyth, one of Premier’s elementary principals. “We just know that our kids are capable of so much more than what the outcomes are currently showing.”

So, in December, Smyth and educators from three other St. Louis schools traveled to Washington, D.C., to learn from Garrison Elementary. The school had across the nation and has seen improved literacy scores as a result. 

The trip was part of a two-year program called the Emerson Early Literacy Challenge that launched last fall to help educators from the four St. Louis-area schools brainstorm ways to improve reading in the early grades. Atlas Public School and Premier Charter School in St. Louis, Commons Lane Primary School in the Ferguson-Florissant School District and Barbara C. Jordan Elementary in the School District of University City share a $1 million grant for the work.

Efforts to improve St. Louis reading scores have been ramping up since last year, when the local NAACP chapter launched a literacy campaign and later filed a federal complaint against the city and county school districts because of disparities in reading proficiency for students of color. 

Leaders of the Emerson challenge say the biggest problem in improving St. Louis’s reading proficiency rates — which were at 20% for third graders in the city and 46% for third graders across the county in — is how the science of reading is implemented.

There are key elements besides using curriculum based on the science of reading that are needed to create substantial academic progress, said Ian Buchanan, a steering committee member for the Emerson challenge. For example, Garrison has more teachers in the classroom, efficient employee schedules and intensive tutoring sessions that allow its staff to increase their focus on literacy. 

“We can have all of the curriculum resources. We can have rock star teachers,” he said. “We can have all of that, but there are some foundational pieces that need to be in place.”

Smyth said that even before Premier was chosen for the Emerson program, administrators had eliminated outdated instruction strategies like , which encourages students to use context clues to guess what a word could be instead of sounding it out. 

The strategy is a major part of balanced literacy, an approach that has been by cognitive scientists. Its lack of emphasis on phonics can cause students to fall behind as they encounter harder text in later grades. 

While using a curriculum based on the science of reading was a step in the right direction, Premier’s administrators still weren’t happy with the school’s third grade reading scores: About 28% on the state MAP reading test last year, down from 33% in 2018.

“While we see some really strong instruction that aligns with the science of reading in some classrooms, it’s not necessarily consistent among all classrooms,” Smyth said.

Premier is still training teachers in how to teach lessons based on the science of reading, Smyth said. 

Garrison Elementary School began changing its reading instruction in 2018-19. Just a year before, only 13% of the school’s 250 students were meeting or exceeding expectations for reading on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education.

In 2023-24, that number rose to .

Teacher training and explicit phonics instruction are crucial to gaining results like that, but schools also have to focus on staffing, class schedules and literacy screening tests, said Katharine Noonan, an English language arts instructional coach who helped implement the science of reading at Garrison.

The school already used DIBELS, a screening tool that evaluated students’ literacy skills and identified learning disabilities like dyslexia. Noonan said teachers were coached to use the screener more effectively by catching gaps in reading proficiency early and ensuring struggling students received the most intervention. 

“(It’s) putting your best teachers in front of the kids that need the most help, and really prioritizing teacher-driven instruction,” Noonan said. 

Garrison administrators had to rethink staffing and traditional class schedules, Noonan said. Rather than giving students the same amount of time with their teachers and pulling children who needed extra help out of the classroom to work with a reading specialist, staffing and schedules were restructured for those who were the furthest behind. 

“That means, if I have 20 kids in my kindergarten class and I have three children who are behind — our screening data has showed us that they have gaps — then they see the (specialist) possibly every day, maybe even two adults a day, as a way to provide those interventions inside of the classroom,” Noonan said. “It does require a lot of creativity around staffing and schedules, because you have to sort of think, who are my available adults?”

Smyth said she and the other visiting St. Louis educators watched Garrison’s reading specialists conduct small-group lessons inside classrooms. The school “had some really great models in place, like classrooms that had two teachers in their rooms during all intervention blocks, which is wonderful. But then we got to ask questions like, ‘Who were those people? How do you have the staffing? How do you have the funding for the staffing to get these models to work?’ ” Smyth said. 

Noonan said Garrison uses federal Title I funding to provide enough staffing for interventions, but schools can also use instructional aides and parent volunteers.

Buchanan said Garrison Elementary was chosen because it has similar student demographics to the St. Louis schools in the Emerson challenge. Even if it has more resources, Buchanan said, he thinks that what Garrison has accomplished can be replicated in St. Louis.

Leaders of each selected school received $20,000 at the beginning of the academic year to brainstorm strategies and craft plans to improve early literacy. They can get up to $250,000 during the 2025-26 school year to implement those plans.

“It was an excellent visit, because we were able to see in real time what teaching and learning looks like and to understand why they have been making gains,” Buchanan said. “We have a better feel for what it takes, where we are and what we need to do.”

Clarification: Some 28% of Premier’s third graders scored as proficient or advanced on the MAP reading test last year.

The report, published Wednesday by the nonprofit watchdog group , finds that Missouri has some of the strictest school residential assignment policies in the nation. District attendance boundaries mirror historic racist housing redlining maps and are limiting student access to high-performing schools, said Tim DeRoche, the organization’s founder.

“Whenever the government assigns children to public schools, then the government also takes on the role of excluding those children from other public schools — that’s where the split starts to get problematic,” DeRoche said. “In Missouri, there’s just very strict assignment-based policies in districts. It’s very hard to cross district lines in Missouri as opposed to other states.”

Available to All’s report estimated that 94% to 96% of Missouri public school students attend their assigned school, based on their home address. State law has , such as if a student is homeless, parents pay property taxes at another location or a school loses accreditation. 

The lack of ability for students to easily transfer schools inside or outside their district encourages wealthy families to buy houses next to high-quality schools, DeRoche said. 

“It creates this very strict system where kids, especially low-income kids and low-income kids of color, get locked into struggling or failing schools, and the families have very few options to find another home for them,” he said.

DeRoche said the boundaries on redlining maps that were drawn a century ago to determine who got access to government-insured home mortgages largely correspond to the state’s school attendance lines. 

“Parts of towns that have high concentrations of people of color or immigrants or working-class folks are excluded” from receiving that sort of housing assistance, DeRoche said. “We found three examples where the school zone in Missouri overlaps or mirrors the pattern on redlining maps from 80 to 90 years ago.”

One school attendance boundary cited by the report runs north to south through St. Louis. Children living east of the line are assigned to the St. Louis City School District, where roughly 20% of students score proficient or better on state reading and math tests. Children located west of the line are assigned to Clayton School District, where nearly 75% of students are proficient or better on the same exams. The boundary, according to the report, “mirrors the pattern of the racist redlining map created by the federal government in 1937.”

In the St. Joseph School District, Field Elementary School — located near an area described as a “choice part of the city” in redlining maps — has significantly higher math and reading proficiency rates than Lindbergh Elementary School, located 2 miles away. The Lindbergh neighborhood was described in redlining maps as “a poor area and one which lenders avoid,” according to the report.

A 2024 analysis by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C., found this line is among the 100 most segregating district borders in the nation in terms of poverty rate disparity among school-aged children.

Because of the steep inequality across district boundaries, DeRoche said, it’s not uncommon for parents to lie about where they live to give their child an education at a higher-performing school. Schools in Missouri — and across the nation, he said — often investigate students’ residences to find families that aren’t living within district boundaries. 

These inspections are conducted by school officials, teachers or even private investigators hired by the district, according to the Available to All report.

A by St. Louis Public Radio and Midwest Newsroom found the Hazelwood School District, which enrolls roughly 16,000 students in suburban St. Louis, performed 2,051 residency investigations during the 2022-23 school year. In 2018-19, the district conducted just 148.

Parents can be charged with a misdemeanor for falsifying their children’s enrollment records, according to

State Rep. Brad Pollitt has been trying to expand school choice in Missouri with open enrollment bills for the last five years. He reintroduced his proposal again this year in hopes it will finally make it to the state Senate floor. 

, the Public School Open Enrollment Act, would allow any K-12 student to attend a school in a nonresident district, depending on factors including disciplinary and attendance records, the school’s student-to-teacher ratio, class sizes and building capacity. Only 3% of a district’s students would be allowed to leave each year.

According to , the bill doesn’t require school districts to accept students living outside the area, but districts that do would receive extra funding.

DeRoche said Available to All recommends that Missouri require districts to enroll children from outside their boundaries when schools have space available. 

“School finance policies should ensure that education dollars can flow across district lines, enabling Missouri families to access the public schools that they feel are the right fit for their children,” the report says.

It also recommends that schools reserve a specific percentage of seats for students who live outside the district.

“There’s an opportunity for reform,” DeRoche said. “We don’t take a stand on individual bills, but there is a chance [to create] best practices in protecting equal access to public schools.”

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts.

is the most concerning. The district’s current $300 million budget gap is set to triple next year, which isn’t surprising since enrollment dropped 10% over six years as the district added staff. Now, it won’t close schools, won’t reduce the workforce and is being told by the mayor to give in to union demands for big raises. How would the math work? The mayor wants the district to take out a short-term, high-interest loan. Oh, and the city and district still need to work out how to .

is a close second. Two years ago, leaders agreed to a costly labor agreement that they admitted would require major cuts. But then they didn’t make those cuts. Instead, leaders exhausted all reserves and are borrowing money they’ll have to pay back by 2026. What’s the plan for the $100 million budget deficit? None yet. 

Why are financial crises suddenly common among large urban districts? Federal relief funds are part of the issue. Despite warnings that the money was temporary, many city districts used those one-time funds for salary raises and new staff hires.  

Some never had a plan for what would happen next. For example, when the federal relief funds ended, leaders in seemed surprised by a glaring $143 million hole in their budget forecast.

Of course, it’s never easy to cut labor. But avoidance makes it worse over time. In a recent hostage-like negotiation, the superintendent demanded $10 million from the city within 24 hours or the district would start issuing pink slips.

Falling birth rates are another factor. Over the long term, fewer kids means fewer dollars and a need for fewer schools. Closing schools is tough work, and many city districts especially aren’t up for it. In , schools are down to capacity. After pressing pause on its school closures, now has until Dec. 15 to come up with an alternative or face a potential .

Sometimes it’s basic financial mismanagement. For months, , inadvertently overpaid its staff, which, not surprisingly, has created a drain on the budget.

got behind on filing its financial reports and ended up with a state-imposed “corrective action plan” that involved repayment of $43 million. After the state imposed an external financial audit, the district has since .

In , where Las Vegas is located, “miscalculations” keep shifting the budget gap by tens of millions. And because New Orleans dragged its feet on surfacing a $20 million miscalculation of local tax revenue, each of its schools must cut some six or more staff midyear.

In St. Louis, the issue appears to be an unwarranted spending spree by a newly hired — and now fired — superintendent.

All these financial messes are leaving kids in the lurch. The dysfunction destabilizes the district, often leaving little time to make consequential decisions like staffing cuts or school closures. Employees are demoralized. Trust in the system erodes. Families with means pursue other options. Most of all, the financial upheaval takes all eyes off the district’s primary responsibility: student learning.

What is it about city school systems that predisposes them to such financial dysfunction? One obvious factor is that leaders are underprepared to manage complex financial operations that can involve upward of a billion dollars — or more — in public funds. Coming off a that outpaced inflation, few of today’s leaders have any experience with making hard budget tradeoffs. As forecasts change, leaders ignore the signs, stall or, in the case of , pass off major budget-cutting to a task force of 40 volunteers.  

Another reality is the intense, unbalanced political dynamics common in today’s urban centers. Powerful labor groups make unaffordable demands. Vocal parents resist program reductions or school closures. Some elected board members reverse planned cuts, imagining they’re defending constituents from the heartless bean counters in the district’s finance office. The good finance leaders flee the turmoil. Eventually, the district runs out of beans.

Strong district leadership should be an antidote. Leaders need to be , sharing options and explaining financial tradeoffs. They need to make hard choices, laser-focused on what’s best for students. They need to safeguard their schools’ financial integrity, ensuring that today’s decisions don’t erode the education of tomorrow’s students.

Missing in action are states. Typically, legislatures throw up their hands and bemoan local control. Many are wary of state takeover policies in part because of their of impacts on students.

But there are . Requiring multi-year budget forecasts and minimum levels of fiscal reserves are a start. States can then adopt policies that get triggered when districts overspend and deplete those reserves, each with the goal of helping the district get back on track. With some 80% to 90% of expenses going to personnel, states could mandate that labor contracts be reopened for renegotiation. They could appoint a financial auditor to communicate honestly about district finances. Also triggered could be a requirement that the board and leaders undergo finance training and hold more frequent meetings until budget gaps are addressed.

Standing by while finances erode further in these urban districts is unfair to the many students who depend on their leaders to manage the billions being deployed for their education. Continuing to look the other way will make things worse. City kids need the adults to figure this out.

In September, St. Louis education nonprofit The Opportunity Trust launched the , a $1 million effort to help charter and district schools brainstorm ways to improve reading in the early grades. The four schools, selected from St. Louis City and County are Atlas Public School, Commons Lane Primary School in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, Premier Charter School and Barbara C. Jordan Elementary in the School District of University City.

The Emerson challenge is a direct response to work the St. Louis NAACP is doing to improve reading scores and close the literacy gap for Black students, said Jesse Dixon, an Opportunity Trust consultant and one of the project leaders for the challenge. The project is being funded by a $1 million donation from , an international automation technology and software company headquartered in St. Louis.

The NAACP branch recently filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against 34 St. Louis school districts because of disparities in reading proficiency for students of color. 

The branch also launched a campaign this year called Right to Read, which is working with superintendents, teachers, parents and nonprofits to get all third graders in the city and county of St. Louis reading well by 2030. Dixon said the Emerson challenge is building on the campaign’s principle that requiring instruction based on longstanding research about how children learn to read — the — is key to improving literacy.

“For years, teachers had been trained how to teach reading in ways that we’ve now since learned are counterproductive and actually hinder the progress of kids learning to read,” he said. “It … sent a strong message about how big a problem this was and how evident it’s become that we need to teach reading in this other way.”

Dixon said a big problem in improving St. Louis’s reading proficiency rates — which were at 18% for third graders in the city and 43% for third graders across the county — is how the science of reading is implemented.

“Many districts and charter schools have already adopted science of reading curriculum, and yet, we’re still not getting much better,” Dixon said. “These are well-intentioned, hardworking, smart educators and education leaders doing everything they can to try to catch these kids up and get them to be proficient, and something’s not working, and we need to learn what it is.”

Leaders of each selected school will receive $20,000 this year to brainstorm strategies and craft plans to improve early literacy. They can get up to $250,000 during the 2025-26 school year to implement those plans. The Opportunity Trust will also provide support from literacy experts.

Dixon said the school leaders will have to look outside St. Louis, to districts that have successfully implemented the science of reading and boosted literacy. 

“They can learn what’s working around the country and they can learn from each other,” he said. “At the end, [they will] write a plan for how to spend their quarter of a million dollars consistent with everything they’ve learned, and so that they can implement those practices next school year and get the kind of results we all know are possible.”

Dixon said St. Louis education officials and experts still don’t know what’s going wrong with schools that have adopted science of reading curriculum but seen no results.

“That’s part of the challenge — we don’t think any school in St. Louis has figured this out,” he said.

One of the selected schools, , incorporated curriculum materials based on the science of reading when it opened in 2021. The school serves more than 460 students from prekindergarten through fourth grade.

Colby Heckendorn, executive director and co-founder, said Atlas students scored slightly above average this spring, ranking in the 51st percentile for reading on the — a test that’s widely used in schools across the U.S.

“We feel good about that, but we still know and believe our students can do better,” Heckendorn said. “That’s why it’s important for us to continue to refine our practice and make sure that our teachers feel supported and have the training that they need.”

Heckendorn said he’s looking forward to collaborating with other schools to brainstorm strategies around reading instruction.

“I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be great about the literacy challenge — really reflecting on how we are best supporting our students who need more enrichment and to be pushed to the next level,” he said. “How are we supporting those students who are really struggling, to set them up for success as well? Those are things that our team is really excited to dig into and reflect on.”

Ten years ago, Camden Prep became one of the first schools in New Jersey’s to attempt to resuscitate a chronically poor-performing elementary school.

That same year, Maurquay Moody started fourth grade at Camden Prep, in a classroom dubbed “The College of New Jersey.” Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit charter operator tasked with turning around Maurquay’s neighborhood school, names each classroom after a college in an effort to raise postsecondary expectations.

The state had recently taken control of K-12 schools in Camden, a city then-Gov. Chris Christie had called “a human catastrophe.” Barely 20% of students could read at grade level, and fewer than half graduated high school. Twenty-three of the city’s 26 schools were among the lowest-achieving in the state. 

Over the next few years, like many other urban districts beset by plummeting property values and spiking rates of poverty and crime, Camden welcomed several new public charter schools and turned over its most chronically failing schools to education nonprofits, which rebranded them as renaissance schools. 

Today, Camden is considered one of the country’s most innovative districts. More than two-thirds of students attend public charter or renaissance schools, enrollment is climbing and the city is steadily, if incrementally, closing performance gaps among low-income kids.

To be sure, the school system has a long way to go: The majority of students still don’t read on grade level, chronic absenteeism is on the rise and budget constraints present a serious challenge. 

But shows that low-income kids in Camden boosted their proficiency on state standardized exams by 21 points between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years. And in doing so, they closed a longstanding performance gap with peers statewide by 42%. 

Maurquay was among those who benefited from this evolution. And in a full-circle testament to just how far the city has come, in August he stepped onto The College of New Jersey’s real-life campus as a freshman – a first-generation college student with a full scholarship. 

Camden isn’t the only low-income city where students in charter or renaissance-like schools are closing learning gaps with their more affluent peers. 

A from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that over the last decade, low-income students in large districts that aggressively expanded public school choices have started to catch up to their peers statewide — and performance levels are rising in both charter and district-led schools. In fact, in the 10 districts with the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, low-income students citywide closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25% to 40%. (The analysis doesn’t include New Orleans, where 100% of district students attend charter schools.)

“We just wanted to … see if the impact was spilling over,” says Tressa Pankovits, co-director of PPI’s Reinventing Public Schools project. “We were really surprised by the amount of gap closure between students citywide and the statewide averages. It wasn’t just single digits. It was well into double digits.”&�Բ�����;

The analysis examined data from cities across the country where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and where at least a third of kids attend a public charter or charter-like school. The researchers used average standardized test scores from third through eighth grade. 

The researchers underscored that the one-third proportion is not a guaranteed or proven tipping point, but that in nearly every case where those schools reached or exceeded that enrollment level, academic growth rose across the city for all low-income students.

“There has been slow but steady progress in Camden,”says Giana Campbell, executive director of the Camden Education Fund. “Sure, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but when we look at where the city was 10 years ago, we’re really, really encouraged by the progress that we’re seeing across the city.”

“We knew a time in Camden where we didn’t have this diversity of school types and progress wasn’t what it is today. The proficiency scores in Camden in 2010 were just criminal. There wasn’t much lower we could go,” she says. “And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that being one of the most innovative school systems, with all these different school types, that we’ve been able to see the progress that we have today.”

New Jersey is home to another standout in PPI’s report: Newark, where 35% of students are enrolled in public charter schools and the performance gap closed by 45% across the same 12-year period.

Missouri boasts two school systems making similar progress. In Kansas City, where 46% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all students closed by 31% between the 2010-11 school year and 2022-23. And in St. Louis, where 39% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap closed by 30%.

Hannah Lofthus, founder and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, says the report’s findings reflect what she has experienced over the last 15 years in Kansas City, which offers enrollment in neighborhood schools; charter schools; “signature” schools, which focus on college preparation; and career and technical schools. Kauffman consists of two charter middle schools and a charter high school.

“We said, ‘How can we figure out what works for kids and then replicate that,’” she explains. The daughter of two public school teachers, she says collaboration among the various types of schools in the city has been key to the big gains posted by low-income students. “We have kids coming to us in fifth grade 15% proficient in reading and math, and they leave somewhere around 70% proficient.”

Pankovits cautions that the analysis shows correlation, not causation. And while the increases demonstrate significant academic growth, proficiency is still low for the majority of students in these districts. 

But Pankovits also says the report refutes that charters drain district schools of the best students and resources, to the detriment of those left behind. Instead, she argues, the increasing enrollment in charter schools creates “a positive competitive dynamic,” and that the report’s findings should bolster policymakers’ confidence in the potential for fixing underperforming schools for all students in low-income communities. 

Effectively, a rising tide lifts all boats: When looking only at traditional district schools in Camden, for example, low-income students closed 35% of the proficiency gap during the same decade-long window, versus 42% for the district overall.

Like Camden, Indianapolis has traditional district schools, charters and so-called innovation schools that it uses to drive its academic turnaround. The report found that in the city, where 58% of students are enrolled in public charter schools or innovation schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all kids statewide closed by 23% between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years.

“The report confirms what we’ve seen in Indianapolis for a long time,” says Brandon Brown, CEO of the , a nonprofit that supports the city’s charter and innovation schools. “And a lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district. It really tends to lift many of the outcomes for schools of all types.”

“I think we’ve shown in Indianapolis that it’s hard and it’s not a straight line and we don’t always agree, but when these systems work together, the chances that kids are going to benefit will go way up,” he says. “And I think we’ve seen that here very clearly.”

The report comes as America’s schools are still trying to chart a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which set students back academically and decreased enrollment. A from National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that over the past five years, charter schools gained nearly 400,000 students, while district schools lost 1.75 million. Hispanic and Black families are increasingly choosing charters, the report shows, with Hispanic enrollment growing 18 times faster in charters than in district schools. 

In Indianapolis, enrollment is on the rise, and at the highest point in more than a decade — a fact Brown credits to the public school choices that families have. For the first time, he says, parents from adjacent school districts are opting into the city system. 

“Large urban districts across the country that are facing massive enrollment declines should look at Indianapolis and see the collaboration to create high-quality options for families, and see it as a way to mitigate negative impacts on enrollment,” Brown says. “When system leaders can work together, it tends to grow enrollment, and that stands in stark contrast to a lot of school districts across the country.”

Correction: The former Camden Prep student’s name is Maurquay Moody.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

The direction of the 18,000-student St. Louis Public Schools will be set as its leaders await the outcome of an audit by the state of Missouri. The district’s chief financial officer recently announced that her office has turned over most of the financial and administrative records requested by state officials, including receipts and contracts “.” Meanwhile, Scarlett that she will appeal her firing under the terms of her contract. 

The state of the district has stirred concern among city leaders over the past few months, with Mayor Tishaura Jones at the beginning of the school year “unacceptable.” In a statement shared with The 74, a group of four former school board members, including two former chairs, called on the current board to win back the faith of community members.

“The current state of affairs at SLPS cannot continue,” reads. “The lack of transparency surrounding the leadership change and new school year has eroded the trust of stakeholders and damaged the district’s reputation. The public deserves and is legally entitled to clear, honest information about the superintendent investigation and transportation struggles as well as common back-to-school topics like academics, finances, administrative vacancies, enrollment, and attendance.”

Responsibility for addressing those problems will now fall to interim Superintendent Millicent Borishade, whom Scarlett originally brought to St. Louis to serve as chief of schools. Borishade is one of a handful of high-level administrators — most of whom have — who previously knew or worked alongside Scarlett when she held a leadership role in Seattle Public Schools.

But Borishade will first to hold the job. In a press release announcing her appointment, the district noted that its interim chief had filed paperwork to obtain a Missouri superintendent certification, and that her service in the role would depend on her receiving one. After initially stating that she held such certificates in both Illinois and Washington State, the district’s press office later clarified that Borishade had only held them in the past. 

The school board’s vote, taken in a special session, terminated Scarlettt’s contract only a year after she took the job. Though her arrival was for an academic turnaround in one of America’s worst-performing school systems, Scarlett took criticism for her hiring and spending practices, which subsequently led not only to the state-led audit, but also to an internal investigation.

Byron Clemens, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers’ St. Louis affiliate, wrote in an email that Scarlett had a right to due process and that the district needed to carry on in its improvement efforts, including an expansion of public preschool and recruiting more teachers.

“We don’t have the luxury of clutching our pearls and getting lost in anxiety,” Clemens said. “We are there for the children of St. Louis every day — we weathered the pandemic, and we will get through this as well.”

The hurried leadership handover is just one of a mounting series of challenges facing St. Louis Public Schools at the outset of the 2024–25 academic year. When a major bus provider unexpectedly pulled out of its contract with the district, officials had to assemble a patchwork transportation plan involving over a dozen vendors to fill the void in August. In all, over a thousand families were left without a reliable way to send their children to school, with some being issued gas cards to cover their driving costs.

Short-term finances have also been called into question. After beginning last year with a $17 million surplus, the district that it will enter a $35 million deficit in 2024–25 — though those figures are still only estimates, and are being considered.

Even these setbacks are only the latest to afflict St. Louis Public Schools, which has lost the vast majority of its enrollment over the last half-century as families fled for charter schools, private alternatives or nearby suburban districts. Local education observers have to shutter under-enrolled facilities, both to offload costs and right-size a system that enrolls only about one-sixth the students it did in the 1960s. 

Even in the midst of a pandemic that inflicted significant harm on children around the country, St. Louis was particularly hard-hit, with testing data indicating that COVID cost the average student the equivalent of 0.8 years of reading instruction and more than twice that in math. An analysis conducted by The 74’s Chad Aldeman found that only about one-in-five St. Louis third graders are reading on grade level, far fewer than the city’s underlying levels of poverty would predict.

Krystal Barnett, a mother and CEO of the parent advocacy group , has since this summer for failing to communicate with parents about transportation issues and called on school board members to resign over what she called failures of leadership. In an email to The 74, she said she wanted to know more about the grounds for Scarlett’s appeal.

“We need leaders over our schools that will hold themselves to a standard and not compromise,” she wrote.

Current school board vice president Matt Davis declined to comment on thes vote to fire Scarlett.

Decades of research has shown that growing up in poverty hurts academic outcomes. So what can reasonably be expected of children in places like St. Louis? Through no fault of their own, they are more likely to have lower reading and math scores. But how much lower? 

Policymakers rarely ask these types of questions. But without controlling for poverty, a school or district might look “bad” mainly because its students started off further behind. On the other end, a school might look “good” largely because its students came in the door with numerous advantages.

In a recent analysis with The 74’s Eamonn Fitzmaurice, I went looking for school districts across the country that were outperforming expectations. Given their demographics, which were doing the best job of helping students learn to read? Unfortunately, St. Louis was not one of those positive outliers. 

The chart below from our analysis shows the state of Missouri. Each district is one dot. The diagonal red line in the graph is called the best fit line. It shows the relationship between poverty and reading scores. Like other states’, Missouri’s line slopes downward from left to right, indicating that, in general, third-grade reading proficiency tends to fall as poverty rises. 

INTERACTIVE

Missouri Third Grade Reading Proficiency

But there are districts above and below the best fit line. St. Louis is near the bottom right, meaning its third-grade reading scores are well below what might be expected based on its student poverty level. 

It’s certainly not alone. For example, other high-poverty school districts surrounding St. Louis, notably Ferguson-Florissant, Riverview Gardens, Normandy Schools Collaborative and University City, are also underperforming. Indeed, the St. Louis branch of the NAACP a formal civil rights complaint about low literacy levels across school districts in the area. 

This type of analysis also helps uncover districts that are doing a truly exceptional job of helping kids learn to read. For example, Greenville has a similar poverty level as St. Louis but helps a much higher percentage of students read proficiently by third grade. Similarly, Poplar Bluff has about the same poverty level as Ferguson does but gets four times as many third graders reading proficiently. 

In general, lower-poverty districts have higher literacy rates, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. In fact, several of the wealthier school districts in St. Louis County, such as Webster Groves, Brentwood, Ladue and Clayton are all clustered at the top left of the graph. They have very low poverty and some of the highest reading scores in the state. But, importantly, this type of comparison makes clear that those districts are not merely coasting on their student demographics — they are helping students outperform their already-high expectations. 

The relationship between a district’s poverty rate and its reading scores varies across states. In Missouri, the connection is weaker than it is in most others. That is, the red line in Missouri’s graph is flatter, and the dots are farther above and below the line than they are in other states. This could be due to the large number of districts Missouri has, how students are sorted across those districts or differences in the tests the states use.

Controlling for district demographics is especially important in an analysis like this, focused on early reading skills. Unlike math, where learning is more directly tied to school-based instruction, literacy is multi-faceted and interrelated with vocabulary and other background knowledge that children acquire at home. (St. Louis has similar underperformance in math, but that’s the subject for another piece.) 

The state of Missouri is working to revamp its approach to literacy, and local activists are taking matters into their own hands to help more students learn to read. Comparing poverty levels and student performance can help policymakers identify which schools and districts are adding value for students and which could be doing better. For now at least, St. Louis appears to be underperforming on this metric. 

Superintendent Keisha Scarlett — hired last year to great fanfare as the first Black woman to lead the district — has that most observers believe she will not return from. Her departure has only contributed to the organizational chaos surrounding the district, which also includes most of Scarlett’s senior staff similarly heading for the door. Worse still, an ongoing transportation meltdown continues to prevent many students from receiving bus services since classes began on August 19.

It has been another devastating setback to a district that was already grappling with huge academic and fiscal challenges. The city’s students, poor and non-white, have long posted standardized test scores near the bottom of Missouri’s state rankings. Over decades, chronic disappointment led parents to abandon local schools in droves, reducing total enrollment to less than one-sixth of its former size. And the pandemic exacted a significant toll on kids still in attendance, with estimating that math performance was set back by more than 1.5 years. 

The latest news is “the last thing the district needed,” sighed John Wright Sr., a veteran educator who once served as St. Louis’s interim school superintendent and more recently held a seat on its school board. 

The converging crises of leadership and capacity may soon trigger intervention from either voters or Missouri authorities. St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has already called for an investigation into the district’s mismanagement from the state auditor’s office, which has obliged a previously planned audit. And next spring, the electorate will have the opportunity to vote out the school board’s president and vice president, who have each faced calls to resign. 

The situation came to a head in late July, that Scarlett would be placed on leave and replaced in the interim with deputy superintendent Millicent Borishade. The surprise development followed the district’s newly hired communications director intended to live, at least part-time, in Houston while serving in a position that would pay her up to $185,000 annually. 

In the weeks that followed, six senior staffers, including SLPS’s chief financial officer, chief of staff, and deputy chief of operations, . Most had worked with Scarlett at her previous district, Seattle Public Schools, and according to reporting from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, all were hired to six-figure salaries. 

Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis branch of the NAACP, called it “unfortunate” that the school system lost much of its top talent as the school year began, but added that the public perception of favoritism likely proved too damning for the school board not to act.

“I don’t have a problem with somebody coming in to manage operations saying, ‘I need to bring a new team around me,’ instead of relying on the team that’s already in place,” said Pruitt. “But if they did that without going through the proper procedures, that’s a problem.”

‘We were not consulted’

Alongside state authorities, the St. Louis Board of Education has initiated their own audit of Scarlett’s spending and hiring practices. The outcome of that investigation, which will likely determine the superintendent’s fate, is expected to be released this month.

Matt Davis, the board’s vice president, told The 74 that his concerns were first raised in June, when he reviewed a report from the district’s human resources department indicating that an outgoing staffer had earned compensation in excess of $185,000 — an upper bound for senior employees that had been negotiated between the board and Scarlett. 

While the board voted to approve the hires, he said, it had largely left decisions on compensation to the district chief. That deference was viewed as necessary given a widely held perception that previous superintendents due to micromanagement.

“We were not consulted on the setting of their salaries, as far as I understand it,” Davis said. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but we were finding out stuff in the newspaper that we weren’t aware of.”

Still, he conceded, he could not rule out the possibility that the board had authorized salaries in excess of its own informal maximum with Scarlett, possibly in the course of another vote. Davis had no recollection of having done so, he said, and the results of the internal audit would offer an answer.

“I don’t want to think that we voted on something — which is unfortunately possible — that was included in a packet of other stuff and I don’t know about it,” he reflected. “If that was the case, that was really dishonest because it was not our expectation of what should happen.”

‘What’s next?’

The NAACP’s Pruitt has not hidden his displeasure with the performance of the school district recently. In mid-August, his organization filed a complaint against St. Louis Public Schools — alongside 33 other districts in the St. Louis area — with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, pointing to markedly lower rates of reading proficiency for Black children relative to their white peers. 

Those dismal achievement levels, along with the sudden staffing purge, come in stark contrast to the high expectations Scarlett’s arrival last year. Brought aboard after the 14-year tenure of her predecessor in the role, she explained that she felt her hiring had been part of a “divine plan” to turn the district around and among her top priorities. 

Instead, her leadership became entangled with logistical and budgetary challenges. In March, the district’s primary transportation contractor, the Missouri Central School Bus Co., said it of its contract with SLPS, arguing that inflation had increased its costs. A frenetic search for alternatives yielded to fill the void, but of the revised plan, leaving about 1,000 students without an easy way to get to school. 

Worse still, the district’s finances seemingly collapsed over the course of the last year. In , St. Louis Public Schools was projecting a $35 million deficit after beginning last year with a $17 million surplus. Other record-keeping concerns arose around the district’s latest internal audit, to Missouri authorities months late and only after the state began withholding millions of dollars in funding.

Wright chalked up the managerial missteps to “incompetence” from district leaders, combined with a school board that didn’t offer necessary oversight.

“That’s how superintendents get in trouble: Their boards don’t ask questions,” Wright said. “Eventually, things fall apart because the board just trusted the superintendent.”&�Բ�����;

Davis countered that the deficit projected for the coming academic year is not set in stone, and that the district had deliberately set a course to spend down a large surplus swollen with federal COVID relief dollars. 

“This was a surprise to no one,” he said, adding that cuts had been discussed in public meetings throughout the pandemic. “This was all planned deficit spending. You can watch board meetings going back three years.”

The rapidly growing list of controversies in the St. Louis Public Schools has led to public dissension — including from within the district itself. The personnel and financial decisions now being criticized were authorized by the school board, under the leadership of President Antionette Cousins and Vice President Matt Davis; in the wake of Scarlett’s downfall, a fellow board member demanded that the pair resign, that they had succeeded in quashing public scrutiny of Scarlett’s shortcomings. 

Cousins and Davis have both said they will not resign, but their seats will be contested in elections next April. 

Krystal Barnett, a mother and the CEO of local parent advocacy group , said she believed the board’s leadership “has to go,” while adding that her own organization had no political function or power to endorse candidates. Going forward, she said she hoped Bridge 2 Hope could collaborate with the NAACP and other community forces to push for greater improvements on areas of critical need, especially early literacy.

“Now that the state auditor is here, what’s next? Set some new goals and metrics, and then what’s next? Get some new people on that board, and then what’s next? By next school year, we should be moving in the direction of creating a space where kids can actually grow each year.” 

Last spring, the St. Louis Public Schools parent had to drive his four children to different schools after the district’s bus contractor . It wasn’t uncommon for some of his kids to miss the first class of the day because of the trek across town. This summer, Dorsey was hoping the new school year would bring improved transportation. Instead, he is once again in the driver’s seat — which he fears will hinder his children’s education.

“I have to make sure everybody gets to school on time. I don’t want them to miss any more time in class,” Dorsey said. “So it’s just going to be a real hectic time in the morning — just trying to move through traffic and hustle and bustle.”

Dorsey is one of thousands of St. Louis parents — — who have had to scramble to make alternative plans for their kids because of bus driver shortages. 

of 400 school districts by HopSkipDrive, a national student transportation company, found that 91% reported being impacted by a bus driver shortage in 2024. The numbers were 92% in 2023 and 88% in 2022.

About 60% said shortages had forced them to cut back on bus services. More than a third (38%) of the districts said staffers are taking time away from their jobs to drive school buses or vans.

“My fear is that at some point we are going to cross the point of no return,” said Keith Galloway, a senior vice president with Student Transportation of America, in an .

“We have to somehow figure out how we will continue to partner with school districts, keep our costs under control and also be in a position where we can recruit and retain school bus drivers, mechanics, dispatchers and managers to operate the business,” he said. 

In St. Louis, after the bus company pulled out last spring, district officials cobbled together an emergency transportation plan involving yellow buses, taxis and private rideshare cars from nearly 20 vendors.

On Aug. 19, the first day of school,  roughly 6,400 students were supposed to be transported by yellow buses, 6,200 by cabs or rideshare cars and 1,450 by public transit. But the day before, three bus vendors , leaving more than 1,000 students in limbo.

In lieu of bus transportation, some parents received temporary gas cards, according to the district. Dorsey was one of them — his 10th grader at Nottingham CAJT High School was assigned to a bus, while his eighth grader at Compton-Drew ILC Middle School received a $25 gas card. His other two children attend charter schools.

“The card probably won’t last two days of picking up and dropping off,” Dorsey said.

He said he adjusted his work schedule so he can bring his children to school, but picking them up will be a problem. His shift starts at 3 p.m., so he either will have to get to work late or take his kids out of class early.

“I know it’s going to be a lot with the upcoming school year, especially with these kids trying to figure out how to ride public transportation or even jumping in a cab with a stranger,” Dorsey said. “It’s going to be hard for the parents to instill that confidence in their children. It’s going to be hard for the parents to even try to make sure that their children are at the bus stops and get to work. It’s a lot for us right now.”

The HopSkipDrive study also surveyed 500 parents and found 79% said they are managing school transportation on their own and 62% said driving their children has caused them to miss work. About 63% said their kids would miss less school if more convenient transportation were available.

HopSkipDrive is one of the rideshare vendors that recently partnered with St. Louis Public Schools to cover transportation. Earlier this year, Patricia Ludwig left her job as a bus driver in the St. Louis area to become a driver with HopSkipDrive because of her arthritis. 

Ludwig said the job is easier because she uses her own car. She uses company software to pick up as many routes as she wants and transports only a few children at a time. Ludwig said she drives kids of all ages.

“You can offer certain things you can’t offer with the school bus, because it’s a much more personalized and intimate experience,” Ludwig said. “You’re not on a bus with 30 to 70 other kids, right? You’re just with three or four children. It’s much more like carpooling.”

Drivers with HopSkipDrive go through a rigorous background and certification process, and their cars have to be inspected, according to the company. Drivers communicate directly with parents, pick up children at their door and can wait for students if they are running late.

Square Watson, chief operations officer for St. Louis Public Schools, said at an Aug. 13 school board meeting that the district is ensuring safety for students using rideshare companies and public transit by patrolling routes, monitoring driver progress using GPS and stationing volunteers at stops. All vehicles transporting children require windshield decals, and drivers have to wear identification badges.

Officials haven’t said how long the district will use rideshare companies or taxis. Watson said the district hopes to bring on more traditional school buses as the year continues.

“Everyone is in this together as we arm up and get ourselves ready for the start of school. Will it look ugly? Yes,” Watson said. “I mean, we’ve got lemons and we’re making lemonade.”

The branch filed a complaint Aug. 19 with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against 34 school districts in the city and county of St. Louis because of disparities in reading proficiency for Black students.

It’s the second time the St. Louis NAACP is bringing student literacy into the spotlight. Earlier this year, the organization launched a campaign called Right to Read that also focuses on improving reading scores for Black students in city and county schools.

Adolphus Pruitt, the organization’s president, said federal officials will assess the complaint, and if it’s within the office’s jurisdiction, will launch an investigation to determine whether the argument is valid.

In the complaint, the organization said low reading proficiency rates for St. Louis Black students “underscores the urgent need for targeted interventions in the region’s schools.”

“The districts are facing one of the steepest post-pandemic climbs, with significant learning losses that require immediate and sustained attention,” it said. “Addressing these challenges will require a comprehensive approach, potentially involving increased funding, innovative teaching strategies, enhanced support services and community engagement to improve educational outcomes for the region’s students.”

If the complaint is valid, the office “would ask the school districts to take certain actions to remediate things,” Pruitt said. “We’re very early in the process.”

In 2023, reading proficiency scores were at 42% for all Missouri third graders, but only  21% for Black third graders, according to state data.

In St. Louis Public Schools — one of the districts included in the complaint — 14% of Black third graders scored as proficient in reading on standardized tests, versus 61% of their white classmates. The district didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

The chapter is calling on community members to help boost student literacy. At a press conference Aug. 20, representatives asked the public to support existing reading programs, create new initiatives and dedicate personal time to participating in literacy activities with children.

Pruitt said that since the filing, he has heard mostly positive feedback from local nonprofits and educators.

“They’ve called in and said, ‘We think you’re doing the right thing. We’re glad to see it.’ Of course, we got some comments from people who say we’re barking up the wrong tree,” Pruitt said. “That’s especially with some of the districts that are predominantly white. Even though their kids — Black or white — are performing poorly.”

In addition to the 34 districts, the complaint names the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Pruitt said state education officials have to be kept accountable along with schools for low reading scores.

“They’re the ones who make sure that the districts are performing,” he said. “It’s like an employee is doing something that they’re not supposed to be doing, and you got a supervisor that’s managing him — well, you have to look at the management.”

The department recently focused on improving literacy in a called Missouri Read, Lead, Exceed, which aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction — part of the science of reading. The state also passed a literacy law last year, requiring schools to create success plans for students with reading deficiencies.

The St. Louis NAACP’s Right to Read is designed to help close the literacy gap between Black students and the state average. There’s a focus on third grade because that 1 in 6 children who aren’t reading proficiently by then won’t graduate from high school on time.

Pruitt said that by 2030, the NAACP branch wants all children in the city and county of St. Louis to receive the materials and support they need to help get them reading well by third grade. But he realized the Right to Read campaign wouldn’t achieve that goal without help from the Office for Civil Rights.

“We just need to get more people involved in doing certain things,” Pruitt said. “We [filed the complaint] because once we saw the enormity of the problem, Right to Read —  strictly on an emotional and volunteerism point — is not going to work.”

was founded by Keyon Watkins in 2020. The club originally consisted of Watkins and about 15 of his friends meeting on Facetime or Zoom to discuss books like The Art of War and The Four Agreements. But when tragedy struck his family on Mother’s Day two years later, Watkins knew he wanted to do more.

On May 8, 2022, Watkins’s brother Damon Hawkins was fatally shot in a parking lot.

“My older brother was very intelligent,” Watkins said. “However, he couldn’t read. When you can’t read, you have limited options in life. What could the trajectory of his life have been if he knew how to read?”

Because his brother couldn’t read, he didn’t graduate from high school. Watkins, his mother and his niece helped Hawkins fill out job applications, but Hawkins’s lack of literacy, Watkins said, limited his options for jobs, as well as housing. Watkins described the area where his brother lived as “terrible.” He was killed by one of his neighbors. 

Watkins said his brother’s death motivated him to against gun violence and expand Black Men Read to become a nonprofit that could help young children improve their literacy.

St. Louis has struggled for years to raise reading proficiency for its students. As of 2021, only of K-12 Black public school students in the city were proficient readers, in comparison to 55% of white students. 

shows that third graders who aren’t proficient in reading by the end of the school year are four times less likely to graduate from high school than students who are. In 2021, only Black third graders in St. Louis public schools scored as proficient or advanced in English Language Arts.

Missouri passed a law in 2022 to require schools to focus on science of reading strategies to improve literacy. But Watkins and other community members aren’t waiting.

In 2022, his organization worked with Head Start programs to read to preschoolers. Soon after volunteering with Head Start, he and eight members of the group began reaching out to members of the community who might be interested in tutoring older students.The organization volunteered twice a week at Barack Obama Elementary School for the second half of the 2023-24 school year. Its members worked with 15 students in first to fifth grade after school and hope to expand to more schools in the Normandy School District soon.

Tutors are required to pass a background screening and undergo training. They worked with Webster University to receive proper tutoring training and used techniques from the , which teaches linguistic and reading comprehension, to guide their lessons. Watkins hopes to offer this training for parents in the future so they can implement these methods at home.

The organization also made a concerted effort to maintain enthusiasm around reading throughout the summer. In June, Black Men Read launched a summer reading program at the First Baptist Church of Meacham Park’s education center. It is hosting about 30 kids on Wednesdays and Thursdays for about 3½ hours. The program began with individual testing to assess each student’s reading level and includes one-on-one tutoring throughout the day.

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“We focus on phonics and sight words. We also have flashcards that will have a story with no words, just pictures so they can visually arrange what happens, first, second and third, to help with reading comprehension. We try to make it fun. We have sight word bingo and crossword puzzles to keep them engaged,” Watkins said.

The summer program includes other activities like slime making and guided workouts from a physical trainer. Black Men Read also partnered with another local organization called to provide each child with a book to take home.

With the school year approaching, two of the biggest challenges Watkins and his team are facing are finding enough volunteer tutors and financial assistance. He said the community has been supportive, but he is hoping to obtain grants soon.

, which works to “highlight the racist educational status quo,” according to its Instagram page, helps bolster Black Men Read’s literacy efforts while holding the local school board accountable for what it believes are low expectations for Black students. 

“We know that poverty and all these things affect learning, and we have to do what we can to address it, but we also have to start with the belief that despite our kids’ challenges, they can succeed,” said coalition founder Chester Asher. “But the longer we persist in this sense of pity that all these poor children can’t do anything because of their struggle, we just enable and feed a cycle of poverty.”

Black Men Read and Coalition with STL Kids have partnered to recruit 100 new tutors. On Aug. 16, they will hold a training session for new tutors focused on the science of reading and the five pillars of literacy: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

His mother and father, who immigrated illegally to St. Louis before he was born, returned to Mexico when he was still in middle school. It was a necessary step — back in their hometown, Joseph’s grandmother was homebound and badly in need of care — but it left him alone with the choice of where to enroll after he graduated from , the Hispanic-majority Catholic school he’d attended since his elementary years. 

He moved in with his older sister and brother-in-law, who were happy to drive him to school interviews and open houses. Yet he was still faced with the complexity of the city’s sprawling Catholic education sector, which serves thousands of families as an alternative to the chronically struggling St. Louis public school district. 

Each choice bore a heady price tag and an unfamiliar name: Christian Brothers College High School, Chaminade College Preparatory School, St. John Vianney High School. “I had no idea what high school to go to,” Joseph remembered. “I didn’t even know all these schools existed.” 

Fortunately, he’d been dealt a trump card before the process even began. Beginning in sixth grade, Joseph participated in , a nonprofit initiative that provides hundreds of St. Louis-area students with after-school activities, high school and postsecondary counseling and financial assistance. Embedded in three Catholic middle schools, including St. Cecilia’s, Access Academies staffers help families send their children to the schools they want and make sure they stay on track to succeed after graduation. In total, the program has awarded $9 million in scholarships since its founding in 2005. 

Perhaps more importantly, it offers a model of intensive support that bolsters local institutions while helping profoundly disadvantaged children transition to adulthood. Across St. Louis, live below the poverty line — more than double the national average — while fewer than one-quarter of all K–12 students can read or do math at grade level. In a city that has for not helping young people to thrive, the aid provided by Access Academies allows families to choose their next steps without having to decamp for the suburbs. 

Participating students — about 500 currently, distributed among middle schools, high schools, and universities — receive benefits ranging from tutoring to summer academies to care packages in their college dorms. And to a large extent, , with 97 percent of Access Academies students graduating high school on time;93 percent are accepted to a post-secondary institution. 

Above all, said Shelly Williams, Access Academies’ executive director, they get the chance to see the possibilities that await them outside their neighborhoods and nearby schools.

“A lot of our kids simply don’t have that opportunity, whether they’re in charter or public schools,” Williams said. Whether or not a student happens to live in one of St. Louis’s prosperous neighborhoods is “sort of the indicator of whether you have access to opportunity,” she added.

Joseph is now a freshman at Saint Louis University, deciding between majoring in business or engineering. Five years after his largely self-directed high school search, he said the organization laid a path to his success in college and beyond.

“Access was feeding me information, like: ‘This high school is good, this high school is also good. What’s the difference between both of them?’ And it wasn’t ever a financial problem because they could help me.”

Staying ‘10 steps ahead’

Many St. Louis parents are just as daunted by the high school and college application processes as Joseph was in eighth grade.

The local K–12 menu is overstuffed with options, including traditional neighborhood schools, charters and a few highly regarded magnet programs. To make things even more complicated, St. Louis is home to one of the largest Catholic school sectors in the country — the city was founded by French settlers and named after a Catholic saint — and for over a century, the Archdiocese of St. Louis has of pupils in both the city and surrounding St. Louis County.

Families historically opted for private or parochial schools out of necessity as well as religious devotion. St. Louis Public Schools has long been one of the most troubled school systems in the country, routinely posting dreadful standardized test scores even before the learning catastrophe of COVID-19. In just over 50 years, the district lost 85 percent of its students, and the vast majority of those left are poor.

But the cost of going private can be prohibitive. Annual tuition at the highly regarded (and secular) John Burroughs School, which produced Mad Men star Jon Hamm and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, $35,000. The comparatively cheap Nerinx Hall, a Catholic girls school in suburban Webster Groves, over $18,000 to attend this year.

Access Academies offers substantial financial aid to participating families, in high school scholarships and secondary costs (application, uniform, and technology fees can also be steep) last year. The organization also works directly with high schools to negotiate discounts for families that still struggle with the bill.

But Williams said that logistical help can be no less crucial, especially as students begin to survey their prospects after high school. The procedural obstacles woven into the college search, including arranging campus visits and wrangling tax documents to complete financial aid forms, from enrolling in college every year. 

“It’s layers and layers of things, and there needs to be someone here to help them navigate those layers and stay on top of the laws, which are constantly changing,” Williams said, noting that the federal financial aid form this year. “We have to stay 10 steps ahead of all the systems, try to prepare our families in the meantime and be emotionally supportive too.”

Both raw application numbers and public opinion polling show that interest in college has declined somewhat since the pandemic, but in Missouri, the trend seems to go back a decade or more. According to from Saint Louis University’s Policy Research in Missouri Education Center, the rate of Missourians immediately enrolling in either a two- or four-year college after graduating high school fell from 69 percent in 2011 to 62 percent in 2019. When then-Gov. Eric Greitens eliminated state funding for high school juniors to sit for the ACT, the rate of students taking that exam fell by 15 percentage points.

Access Academies requires its students to take the ACT and provides a free preparatory course on Saturday mornings. It also hosts bilingual seminars on how to fill out financial aid forms (dubbed “FAFSA Frenzies”) and pushes students to identify schools or vocational programs that interest them in their early high school years. 

The strategy is specifically tailored for the kids served by Access. Carolyn Dubuque, the organization’s director of mission effectiveness, said that many of the private schools in the area expect students to take the initiative in contacting their college offices. But students like Joseph, who was a starting forward on his high school soccer team, helped look after five nieces and nephews, and worked a construction job in his senior year, may not be prepared to do that. 

“You can’t spit in St. Louis and not hit a Catholic high school,” Dubuque observed. “But these Catholic high schools are not designed for our kids — underserved, first-generation students.”

Each Access Academies middle school (St. Cecilia’s and St. Louis Catholic Academy in St. Louis proper, as well as Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School in East St. Louis, Illinois) is staffed with graduate support directors who follow all of the program’s students throughout their time in high school. If the students wish to, they may continue to receive services — including counseling and “micro-scholarships” tied to GPA and career benchmarks — while enrolled in college.

Amy Clark, Access’s director of college and career initiatives, said that her job often involved cajoling high schoolers and their parents to keep working through a nasty labyrinth of paperwork and email portals.

“A lot of the help isn’t us making magic happen,” Clark said. “It’s: ‘Open up your email with me, and let’s go through this. Don’t be overwhelmed with this form, let’s just get it submitted.’” 

‘Engaging with an existing community’

Admissions essays and summer internships seem like distant concepts at Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School. 

In part, that’s because of its setting. East St. Louis, which looks out at the hopeful curve of the Gateway Arch from just across the Mississippi River, is and most crime-plagued communities. The most recent issued by Illinois shows that just 13 percent of the local school district’s students scored proficient in reading in 2023, while less than 6 percent scored proficient in math. 

Situated on a quiet stretch of the aptly named Church Lane, the school exudes a placid feel. On a Thursday afternoon just before Thanksgiving, the walls were bedecked with pictures of prominent Catholics, including that of Sister Thea herself, a who evangelized to African Americans through music and dance. The building recently finished a multi-year effort to install soundproof windows that, according to the school’s advancement director, could withstand a chunk of asphalt being dropped on them — which is nearly 10 years ago to the ones they replaced. 

At 3:00, neat lines of kindergartners and elementary schoolers trooped homeward for the day. Once they left, middle schoolers poured into their after-school activities, and the hallways began to echo with the sounds of music lessons and word problems.

Access Academies’ contact with students begins with supplementary offerings for sixth and seventh graders, who choose among dozens of enrichment programs including cooking, public speaking, robotics and sewing. Eighth graders are increasingly steered toward researching and applying to high schools, but they are also free to take part.

In one classroom, Sara Mullins, a volunteer with the local nonprofit , gently worked with eight pupils as they plinked on electronic keyboards. Down the hall, Sister Thea Bowman alumnus Paris Grimmett walked a larger group through the differences between checking and savings accounts as part of his personal finance education program, . Annamary King, a math instructor who also offers free tutoring to high schoolers struggling at their next destination, explained to her math club, the PI-thons.

“When the sixth graders realize they’re going to be staying until five o’clock, their reaction is, ‘Do we really have to do this?’” said Mary McGeathy, the school’s former principal and a current reading instructor. “But when they get into it, there are very few complaints.”

Enrollment in St. Louis-area Catholic schools has eroded over the last two decades, and after multiple closures, Sister Thea Bowman is the last one remaining in East St. Louis. Its student body, which hovered around 80 in the early 2000s, numbers more than 100 today, even after COVID dealt a to the Catholic sector nationwide. 

Williams, the Access Academies executive director, said that the original aim of the organization was to put down roots in established schools that might otherwise be vulnerable, rather than presenting local communities with a potted reform.

“The idea was to strengthen the communities where they were instead of creating anew,” Williams said. “If you’re engaging with an existing community and listening to what they’re saying, people will absorb and participate in that differently.”

The school’s partnership with Access Academies has helped attract and retain families who might have otherwise slipped away. Along with the cost-free enrichment and mentoring, middle schoolers have become eligible for scholarships that will allow them to continue attending private schools after they graduate — a major attraction for parents. In prior years, eighth graders largely matriculated either to the local public high school or a handful of other Catholic alternatives in nearby Belleville and Waterloo. Now a sizable majority cross the river to attend schools in Missouri, even if they have to take multiple buses to commute. 

Carmelita Spencer, a former math and science teacher at Sister Thea Bowman, now works as the school’s Access Academies graduate support director. A proud native of East St. Louis, she nevertheless harbored hopes that the availability of scholarships and counseling would open students’ minds to the possibility of attending school somewhere other than their hometown. 

Now she spends most days on the road, crisscrossing between high schools to arrange meetings with her students and their teachers. The constant driving puts more miles on her car — an old loaner from her sister — but she relishes the chance to advocate for her old elementary schoolers.

“I know my students’ abilities, so it’s easier for me to advocate for them when it’s time for them to go to high school,” Spencer said. “I have students who struggle, and I’m able to go the school and say, ‘We need to put special support in place for this student.'”

Making ‘that dream come true’

In some ways, Remy and Giovanni Valenzuela need less than the typical Access Academies student in the way of special support. For one thing, they’ve got each other to lean on.

The brothers are both seniors at St. Mary’s High School, just a few minutes from their home in South St. Louis. The school has served local families as a neighborhood institution for the better part of a century; Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, the son of Italian immigrants, attended in the 1930s.

Remy and Gio are succeeding in their classes while juggling evening shifts as a dishwasher and line cook at a local Olive Garden. They are also making plans to attend college this fall — acceptance letters have arrived from Central Michigan University and the University of Wyoming, as well as local options Maryville University and Fontbonne University — and have long planned to join the Army or Marines, following a path traveled by their parents, grandfathers and a slew of cousins.

But even while crediting their own diligence and attentive parents, both acknowledge that they might not be in the same enviable position without the help of Access Academies. The boys only moved to St. Cecilia’s in second grade after Remy, the older brother by a year, struggled to pick up math at a well-regarded magnet school. Their mother, Kim, worried that his academic needs wouldn’t be met without more support and smaller class sizes.

During their time in middle and high school, the brothers took advantage of the benefits available to all Access students: afterschool enrichment, financial aid, admissions counseling, and multiple practice runs at the ACT (which Gio credits with lifting his score from 18 to 25 out of a possible 36). But their graduate support directors also pushed them to enjoy the aspects of high school that make the hard work worthwhile.

“I wrestled and lost a ton of weight because of it,” Gio said. “I became the secretary of the National Honors Society this year. Access was willing to help pay for my clubs and my college-credit classes. And they were able to take the strain off our parents so that we could actually enjoy our time in high school.”

Kim Valenzuela is spread thin as a mother, nurse and occasional caregiver to her husband’s parents, who live with the family. She said the years of assistance provided by Access gave her the assurance that her sons would find their way in a city where too many young men fail to reach college or a productive career.

A recent parent meeting took her back to St. Cecilia’s, where she sat in a room covered in the names of Access students and the high schools they wished to attend. On one wall were Remy and Gio’s names and their hoped-for destination, St. Mary’s, which they’d scrawled as sixth graders. Kim said the ritual, and the memory it evoked of her sons as pre-teens, encapsulated what the program helps families like hers achieve.

“They want to know what your plan is for high school and college,” she said. “You lay this plan out, and they help you make that dream come true.”

Their teacher, Sonya Taylor, was leading a lesson designed to help them recognize sound and letter patterns. In a piping, resonant voice — she stretches it out Sundays as a singer and worship leader at her church — Taylor called out a string of words for the class to echo, clapping simultaneously, before repeating the sound they had in common.

“Say ‘rub, tribe, scrub’!”&�Բ�����;

“RUB, TRIBE, SCRUB!”&�Բ�����;

“What’s the end sound?” she trilled in syncopated eighth-notes.

“Buh-Buh-Buh,” answered all 20 students, sounding like a school of fish.

The lesson comes from of phonemic tutorials, one of four reading-specific programs in use at KIPP Wisdom. Taylor’s class, along with their schoolmates in grades 1–4, are taught for hours each week how to pick apart the phonics code through a sequence of clapping, call-and-response, group discussion and independent study. The aim is to identify which letter combinations produce certain sounds and, with enough practice, to get a successful start on reading. 

As in dozens of other states over the last decade, that students between kindergarten and the third grade be screened for reading challenges. It’s part of a widespread campaign among educators and activists to bring English language arts into closer alignment with the “science of reading,” the sprawling body of psychological and neuroscientific research exploring how people come to understand the written word. And in Missouri, where reading scores ranked around the middle of the pack nationally even before the pandemic, school leaders hope the new regime of testing and additional support will help kids recover from suffered over the last few years. 

Kim Stuckey is president of the Missouri chapter of the , an organization dedicated to spreading awareness of the science of reading. In an email, she called the state’s actions a positive step, while cautioning that more substance is needed to change how teaching candidates are trained around literacy.

“Building teacher knowledge is critical to transforming reading outcomes for all children,” Stuckey wrote in an email. “That said, teacher preparation programs need to align their coursework with science-of-reading research so that everyone is moving in the same direction.”

KIPP St. Louis, which operates six schools throughout the city, executed its own turn to the science of reading even before the change in law. The in the United States, enrolling roughly 120,000 students across nearly 300 campuses, KIPP is completing a gradual overhaul of its literacy instruction, which will take effect for all of its schools by 2025. Over the last few years, that revision has brought new curricula, training and focus to a local network that was already seeing some impressive results: from Saint Louis University’s Policy Research in Missouri Education Center, KIPP Victory Academy (Wisdom’s sister school) posted the best scores for reading growth of any elementary school on Missouri’s 2021 state standardized testing. 

Victory’s principal, Cetera Altepeter, said that KIPP leaders in St. Louis were eager to change their approach, in part because they felt local students “weren’t mastering” the building blocks of literacy.

“We knew that we needed to explore other things and make sure we were staying up on the science and the research,” Altepeter said. “Now we’re starting to see the impact.”&�Բ�����;

‘There was no strategy for them’

KIPP has long been one of the most well-known and respected names within the charter sector. The network’s rapid spread was fueled by in federal grants, awarded largely in recognition of its success raising the achievement of disadvantaged kids. 

The evidence of that success mounted over the last decade, with a from the research group Mathematica showing that attending both a KIPP middle and high school made students more likely to attend and graduate from college.

But within the organization, some believed they could improve upon their work in foundational literacy. Chief Schools Officer Jim Manly, who previously served for eight years as the superintendent of KIPP’s schools in New York City, remembered that when he was hired in 2014, a kind of agnosticism prevailed on elementary reading strategy — perhaps because KIPP’s national network begin in a middle school. 

“One of the things I found when I got there was that they didn’t really have a point of view about early literacy and teaching kids to read, at least in New York City,” Manly said. 

At the same time, galvanized of nationwide failure to lift reading scores or to impart reading knowledge, states like Mississippi, Nevada, and Michigan began to require evidence-based practices in the classroom and new resources for schools and teachers. 

KIPP made its own move in 2019, piloting a series of measures in New York City designed to improve both instruction and professional capacity. Incoming students were tested on reading performance using , with struggling readers assigned to additional reading intervention blocks and elementary reading staff encouraged to take LETRS, on literacy acquisition. 

Even as COVID disrupted the work of schools around the country, the changes road-tested in New York were brought to six more of KIPP’s 27 regions in the 2020–21 school year, followed by an additional seven in 2021–22. By 2024–25, all 27 regions will have adopted the early literacy agenda.

KIPP St. Louis was one of one of the first regions to opt into the initiative. For years, KIPP Victory and KIPP Wisdom (a third elementary school, KIPP Wonder, was opened in 2019) relied heavily on , through which pupils are taught strategies — such as using context clues or looking for pictures — to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. Angela Jackson, the region’s head of elementary literacy instruction, said that doubts were building about the effectiveness of those methods.

“We knew that when kids get to longer texts, pictures go away, and there was actually no strategy for them,” recalled Jackson, who worked as a second- and fourth-grade teacher at KIPP Victory before taking her current job. “There were voices around the buildings: ‘I don’t think we’re doing this correctly. There has to be a better way.'”

Whether the new way will prove to be the better way remains to be seen. But data from system-wide mCLASS assessments (a literacy screening test administered throughout the academic year) offer some early signs of progress. In a sampling of students from 12 KIPP regions in the beginning stages of implementing the network’s early literacy program, just 22 percent were meeting or exceeding grade-level benchmarks at the beginning of the 2022–23 school year. By the end of that year, 66 percent were — equivalent to the national mCLASS sample. 

Kelly Haywood said she has seen some of the same promising early returns in St. Louis. The mother of two daughters at St. Louis’s KIPP Wonder Academy, she has visited and observed Heggerty sessions in her daughter Londyn’s kindergarten class. While reading together at home, the two use some of the same methods to make sense of unfamiliar vocabulary.

“She picks up on those strategies they use in school,” Haywood said. “I’ll ask her, ‘What does this say?’ and if she doesn’t know the word, we’ll sound it out. That has really helped with both of them.”

Reading’s role in learning recovery

KIPP St. Louis’s course correction has now been underway since the early stages of the pandemic, and while substantial changes have already been achieved, much more work remains.

Teachers at KIPP Wisdom and Victory are currently employing parts of four different reading programs. While each brings its own strengths, using such a broad array of materials comes with the risk of teacher burnout.

In the coming years, Jackson hopes to streamline by moving all three KIPP elementary schools toward the curriculum, which places a heavy emphasis on the explicit teaching of academic content and the cultivation of students’ subject-matter knowledge. A showed that schools relying on the Core Knowledge sequence saw large improvements in ELA, math, and science scores. 

LETRS training will also be made available to new teachers joining KIPP schools in St. Louis, Jackson added, with stipends available for those choosing to take the course in their off-hours. Roughly 70 percent of elementary literacy teachers in the region have already absorbed the first LETRS volume, which includes worth of sessions on phonics and decoding. 

One of them is Erica Williams, who teaches third graders. A St. Louis native and a gregarious personality in the hallways of KIPP Wisdom, Williams came to the profession by an unconventional route: Over a decade ago, concerned over her young son falling behind on reading and developmental milestones, she began volunteering in his Head Start program. After that experience led her to experiment with substitute-teaching, Williams eventually became a lead teacher in her own classroom and earned a master’s degree. 

Literacy training in her preparation program was “pretty surface-level,” Williams recalled, with little emphasis on the mechanics of sound and word formation. By contrast, she said, her experience with LETRS opened her eyes to the “ever-involving” process of how young brains develop. 

“I’m doing it to become more effective as a teacher,” Williams said. “I’m intrigued by it, and I also see the need.”&�Բ�����;

The need, particularly after the COVID era, is greater than ever. In spite of the impressive growth statistics flagged by Saint Louis University researchers, of KIPP Victory’s third and fourth graders demonstrated basic literacy skills on Missouri’s 2023 round of state standardized tests. Far beyond St. Louis, one of the most troubled school districts in the country, Missouri’s reading scores on the 2022 NAEP exam to their lowest level in decades. 

In response, Missouri’s legislature has adopted an initiative , which mandates that schools test their youngest students for reading challenges, develop improvement plans for those that fall behind and regularly communicate with parents on their progress throughout the school year. 

Rebecca Treiman, who researches language development at Washington University in St. Louis, called those proposals “good steps.” But she argued that even high-quality training and classroom materials would have a limited impact if teacher turnover in Missouri, during the pandemic, did not abate. Both in the state are among the lowest in the country, a fact that some have blamed for ongoing churn.

“You might have a trained teacher, but teachers need experience putting this into practice,” Treiman said. “Making sure kids go to school every day, and making sure that teacher salaries are good enough, is really important.”

KIPP St. Louis Executive Director Garrett applauded the change in policy and said schools in the network were benefiting from it, while noting that the local affiliate ”started basically putting all our teachers through that a year ahead.”

Jackson said that Missouri’s new laws around student assessment and family outreach would present schools with the challenge of hiring new interventionists to devise personalized action plans and work with parents; with many already operating under a manpower deficit, that task could be significant. 

Still, she added, higher standards could ultimately galvanize improvement, both inside and outside the charter sector. 

“It’s a lot to take hold of, and it’s going to hold us accountable,” she said. “We are identifying kids who are at risk, we are telling parents that we’re doing something about it, and from that perspective, I think it’s great.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the City Fund provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.

The St. Louis NAACP recently launched the “Right to Read” campaign, which focuses on improving proficiency and educational equity for students of color. Its mission: By 2030, all children in the city and county of St. Louis will receive the materials and support they need to help get them reading well by third grade.

The campaign began with a Jan. 17 screening of a film it’s named after, called . The documentary follows Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who filed a petition with the school district demanding change because of low reading scores. LeVar Burton, who hosted the television series Reading Rainbow for 23 years, was an executive producer.

The St. Louis NAACP will soon launch a listening tour to get feedback from superintendents, teachers, parents and nonprofits about how to improve student reading.

Education chairman Ian Buchanan said the chapter plans on partnering with local school districts in the coming months in order to reach that goal. 

“This extreme crisis in literacy has impacted Black and brown students more acutely than others. And so, given this reality, we want to take a stand and put a line in the sand to say, ‘Hey, we know that we can do better and we know that we can do better collectively,’ ” Buchanan said. “So this is a call to action for all school districts to recalibrate, to recommit and to be more deeply committed to improving literacy scores.”

With more than 16,500 students, St. Louis Public Schools has had bleak reading scores for the past 10 years. But the disparity between Black and white students has been skyrocketing. In 2013, 19% of Black third graders scored as proficient in reading on standardized tests, versus 43% of their white classmates. But by last year, that disparity had increased by 23 points, to 14% versus 61%.

that students with low literacy rates have a higher risk of dropping out of high school, entering poverty or becoming involved in the criminal justice system.

“You have a young African American, male or female, who may be a parent, who dropped out of high school — their literacy level is extremely poor and there’s no way that didn’t create this burden, blocking (them) from opportunities and being successful in the long haul,” chapter president Adolphus Pruitt said. “So we thought of economic empowerment and literacy as being one in the same.”

Missouri’s reading proficiency scores have also declined over the last decade. For third graders, scores dropped from 48% in 2013 to 42% in 2023. These results prompted a new literacy law to be passed last year, requiring schools to create success plans for students with reading deficiencies.

The law is part of a comprehensive plan, , that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, part of the science of reading.

Buchanan said Right to Read’s initial goal is to close the literacy gap between Black students and the state average. There’s a focus on third grade because that 1 in 6 children who aren’t reading proficiently by then won’t graduate from high school on time.

Even school districts in higher-income communities have wide gaps between Black student reading proficiency and the state average. 

For example, just 9% of students in the Kirkwood School District qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, but only 33% of Black students were reading proficiently at the end of third grade in 2023, according to state data. 

“The data tells us that all we really need to do in order to first eliminate the gap between Black students and the state average is to move, on average, one or two students per third grade, per school, per year to proficiency,” Buchanan said.

Other local nonprofits that are committed to boosting student literacy are partnering with Right to Read this year. For example, parent advocacy group has been managing a literacy campaign called Bridge 2 Freedom since last summer. 

The campaign distributes books, hosts essay writing contests and is part of a free parent academy that teaches families to become better advocates for their children and connects them to services and academic resources.

“A lot of our parents who come into the program didn’t know that they had rights. They didn’t know the right questions to ask,” said CEO Krystal Barnett. “They didn’t know that they could ask for their kids’ reading scores. They didn’t even know that a report card was not an accurate depiction of what a child can do in school.” The academy, she said, “puts people in the position to make different decisions and to get better results.”

More than 300 parents have participated in Bridge 2 Hope’s parent academy. Other organizations around the U.S. have pursued similar paths of making parents education advocates, such as Oakland REACH, which worked with its local NAACP branch to push the Oakland Unified district to adopt a research-based reading program.

Barnett added, “I think the Right to Read will open the eyes of people about what strong reading instruction can actually do for a child.”

Another St. Louis initiative is training older adults as tutors to help advance student reading proficiency. The Oasis Institute partners seniors with students in kindergarten through third grade who need academic or social emotional support. A found that the parent-led tutoring effort produced similar gains in reading for youngsters as instruction from classroom teachers.

Nonprofit is also teaming up with Right to Read. The organization was launched in 2020 as a local chapter of the , a national organization that has more than 300 branches across the U.S. 

Founder Lisa Greening said Turn the Page STL is a network of nonprofits with one goal in mind: improving St. Louis students’ reading proficiency. 

The organization is especially focusing on the area’s lowest-performing districts, where Greening said Black and brown children still receive an inequitable education.

“We have the resources here in St. Louis. We’re just not connecting with each other,” she said. “I don’t know anything more important than a child being able to read, because that is one of the most critical self-determinants of life.”

Buchanan said pulling together resources across the St. Louis community to help dissolve systemic inequities is essential.

“Literacy is an issue across the board, even with affluent students,” he said. “But one of the things that history tells us is that when white America has the flu or a cold, Black America has pneumonia.”

The two had just finished reading , a popular children’s book about a boy and his pet bug. Now it was time for Harlan, a first grader at Bayless Elementary School in St. Louis County, to review the plot and characters with his tutor. But while his vocabulary was improving, he appeared hesitant about speaking and writing prompts like these. 

“In the beginning, there was a fly,” said Marge. Clad in white sneakers and a floral print shirt on a sunny November morning, she gave off the air of a gentle but insistent grandparent. “And then he was caught, where — in a jar? And then what happened?”

For a moment, Harlan grimaced. Then, gripping a pen topped with an electric light, he began writing in an unsteady script.

Mangelsdorf spends several days each week in empty classrooms and corridors like these, working with kids through Oasis Intergenerational Tutoring. The program, which pairs volunteers with students for 30–45 minutes each week, is overseen by , a St. Louis-based nonprofit that promotes healthy aging through a mix of community involvement and continuing education. According to the Institute’s leadership, intergenerational tutoring has spread to 15 states, though its greatest concentration is in Missouri, where it began 35 years ago. 

Participating students between kindergarten and the third grade are identified by their teachers as needing academic or social-emotional support. And while some skew younger, the average volunteer is around 72 years old, with many resembling Mangelsdorf, a mother of three grown children who has lived in nearby Affton for her entire life. After 22 years tutoring in Bayless Elementary and other schools, Oasis has become her later-life mission. 

It’s a form of service that addresses critical needs arising from the educational catastrophe of COVID-19. Harlan and his classmates were toddlers when schools began to close in March 2020. Nearly four years later, standardized testing results indicate that elementary schoolers around the country lost the equivalent of years of learning, with still reading and doing math at a lower level than they did before the pandemic. Driven by desperation, and financed by millions of dollars in federal funds, states and districts have built up their own tutoring efforts or contracted with existing ones. 

Oasis’s model holds a unique appeal. Its workforce of largely retired volunteers cost districts a comparative pittance in fees, making their continuing presence sustainable even after COVID recovery grants expire this year. What’s more, their time in schools yields a secondary benefit to the tutors themselves, who remain engaged in the wider world rather than receding into inactivity. Some spend over a decade in the program, building friendships with school staff and their fellow tutors, said Paul Weiss, Oasis’s president.

“The theme is: How do we connect older adults with each other, ideas, and activities in ways that increase the footprint of their lives?” said Weiss. “And how do we position older adults to be more than a population that’s served, but to be a population that is a vital part of American life?”

For her part, Mangelsdorf said she appreciates the opportunity to watch local kids grow throughout the school year. At the end of her session with Harlan, she announced that she would ask that his teacher bump up the difficulty level of his reading materials. Reaching into her bag, she produced a handful of seasonal stickers — accumulated over the years along with an array of children’s books that she awards as prizes — and let him choose between pumpkins and Pilgrims. 

“You really did pretty good, okay? And you tried.”

A nationwide experiment

Mangelsdorf, and thousands like her, are participating in a kind of nationwide experiment in high-dosage tutoring, which has raised the hopes of both families and policymakers over the last few years of hampered learning.

The excitement emerged from a remarkable empirical consensus, which shows one-on-one and small-group tutoring to be among the most effective educational reforms that schools can use to lift student achievement. , gathering the results of 96 randomized controlled trials, showcased the wide scope of tutoring offerings that deliver significant learning advantages, including both reading- and math-focused programs that employed either professional educators or community volunteers.

Advocates quickly embraced tutoring as a solution to students’ clear backsliding during the transition to virtual learning. But questions remained about whether the approach could be successfully scaled up.

To reach the tens of millions of kids who fell behind during COVID, districts needed to recruit an army of educators at a moment when most adults were still concerned about the danger of stepping into schools. Teachers and paraprofessionals, generally found to be the most effective tutors, were experiencing historic levels of burnout, while both private- and public-sector employers struggled to fill openings.

States did what they could to fill the gap, with of pandemic spending plans showing that districts planned to commit $3 billion to tutoring initiatives. With nearly $200 billion in federal ESSER money expiring next year, however, schools are already feeling a pinch in core academic programs, let alone supplemental offerings.

Access to Oasis tutors costs districts and schools a nominal fee, which Weiss estimates supports roughly 6 percent of the program’s total price tag. Offerings , include reading material and workbooks, summer training for tutors, further coaching during the school year and sometimes help with building program-specific libraries. In cases where those costs are prohibitive, the program sometimes offers discounts. And the Oasis Institute, which operates physical locations in , has recently introduced tutoring programs in southeast Alabama, upstate New York, and the San Antonio area.

Tutors don’t typically bring prior instructional experience to their work (though most are former parents, and many volunteer in a variety of school settings outside of Oasis), but their involvement generally adheres to the guidelines for successful tutoring programs laid out in prior research: It is principally geared toward honing elementary reading skills, conducted at regular intervals and delivered during the school day.

Though Oasis hasn’t yet undergone a rigorous study, the terms of one of its federal grants require the organization to provide proof of its effectiveness. In a sample of 300 students, 97 percent of students working with an Oasis tutor showed improvement in reading performance on a range of standardized exams. In a 2023 survey of educators in schools where Oasis works, 80 percent of classroom teachers said they’d seen improvement in their students’ reading skills, and 67 percent said they’d perceived an improvement in those students’ attitudes at school. Virtually every administrator polled said they would continue to welcome Oasis tutors in their schools.

Jason Sefrit is one of the program’s loudest advocates. The district superintendent in the city of St. Charles — a northwestern suburb of St. Louis, and one of Missouri’s largest cities — said the assistance offered through Oasis provided a sorely needed asset as his schools worked to bring children back to pre-pandemic levels of achievement. In his daily visits to district campuses, Sefrit said, he often walks past half a dozen Oasis tutors huddling with pupils in the halls.

“It’s not a want, it’s a necessity,” he remarked. “These kids rely on their tutors each week to support them.”

That support goes beyond schoolwork. Though tutors are typically assigned to different students each year, they often cultivate deep ties with children by learning their interests and listening to their stories. Some students come from unstable families, while others are simply grateful to have a regular, unfiltered interaction with an adult who isn’t a teacher or an adult who isn’t a teacher or family member. 

Stacy Butz said that academic gains are cemented by familiarity and mutual trust between adults and students. A reading specialist who has spent 28 years in schools, she also coordinates Oasis’s tutoring efforts at her St. Louis County school district of Ladue. Even before taking on that role, she was impressed by how close students grew to their tutors.

“In a half-hour, they’re able to make gains in reading, writing, and communication skills and develop this beautiful relationship along the way,” said Butz. “A lot of surrogate grandparents are developed because of the connections that are made.”

Over nearly a quarter-century working as a tutor, Mangelsdorf said her students confided so much to her about their home lives and families that she sometimes feels “like a confessor.” The intimacy she forms with kids like Harlan doesn’t just provide immense personal satisfaction. It’s a necessary component to helping them advance.

The fulfillment she gets from that challenge is distinct from what she experienced in her days as a small business owner — or even from her work as an advocate for disabled adults, which she began after raising a child with special needs. One of her daughters, a teacher, also spends her life helping kids; but the interpersonal effects of one-on-one tutoring differ even from those of classroom instruction.

“It’s got to come from within the tutor, and it’s got to draw out of the kid what they need,” she reflected. “I know a lot comes from the teachers, so I’m not taking anything away from any teacher. But maybe my little bit of input pushes a student past where they already were.”

‘Older adults don’t get looked at’

Whatever the effects of tutoring on young kids, Oasis’s work is also meant to help their volunteers.

Gerontologists have long observed the dangerous tendency of seniors to become disconnected from the world outside their homes. The loss of job and social responsibilities, as well as declining physical mobility, to higher levels of mortality and severe health problems, including dementia. 

More than one-quarter of American seniors — far more than similarly aged people in other countries, and more than the combined numbers of those living with their adult children or extended relatives. In conducted earlier this year by the University of Michigan, one-in-three Americans between the ages of 50 and 80 said they only infrequently had contact with family, friends, or neighbors, a significant jump from 2018. 

Weiss said that pervasive isolation was what motivated Oasis Institute founder Marylen Mann to look for more opportunities for older adults to contribute. In visits to senior living facilities in the early 1980s, he said, Mann saw residents’ basic needs being attended to, but lamented that their wisdom and life experience were being allowed to wither.  

“One of the things that’s hardest is that older adults don’t get looked at,” Weiss said. “They don’t get touched, they don’t get engaged with.”

But when given the chance to be active and help others, seniors’ quality of life can dramatically improve. A found that adults over 50 who volunteered at least two hours per week were less likely to express loneliness, depression and hopelessness and more likely to be optimistic and purposeful. Putting them in direct contact with school-aged children might be the best way to leverage their talents, especially given America’s growing number of seniors; by the 2030s, , people over the age of 65 will outnumber those under 18. 

Butz said that the benefits of tutoring could be measured in the ties strengthened between local community members. Volunteers often encounter their pupils around their neighborhoods and attend milestone events like elementary school graduations.

Asked to name memorable tutors from her years of working alongside them, she recited a litany of Silent Generation names: Thelma, who stayed with Oasis until she turned 90; Bernard, who spread a love of chess through his students to the rest of their elementary school; Ray, who taught his student to ride a bike in the school parking lot.

“They are taxpayers, and the more opportunities they have to come into our buildings and volunteer their time, the better,” Butz said. “Many of our tutors are previous parents as well — their kids went to our elementary schools, and now they’re giving back.”

‘More positive than playing checkers’

Nick Hall has tutored for nearly a decade in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, where he, his father, children, and grandchildren all attended. The former sales executive was initially hesitant to be paired with young children, but his reservations evaporated upon contact with his first student: Kanye, a first-grader who was capable of excelling academically but struggled at times with classroom behavior. 

The two forged a bond, in part because Hall himself dealt with disciplinary problems in school. “There are teachers all over the St. Louis area spinning in their graves about the idea of me having anything to do with kids learning anything,” he said.

As he moved through the rest of his elementary years, Kanye would bump into Hall around his elementary school, stopping to crack jokes or occasionally play basketball. Courtside banter sometimes turned to friendly advice on how to stay out of trouble.

Hall kept up his school visits, but the two lost touch as Kanye advanced through middle and high school. Hall said he asked after his former pupil, hoping for good news about his academic and social progress. But the pandemic made it impossible to connect. 

This fall, after working with district officials to arrange a visit during the school day, Hall surprised Kanye in the middle of a class period. He hardly recognized the high school junior, who has sprung up well over six feet. Now Hall hopes they can occasionally meet for lunch as the transition from K–12 approaches.

Not every tutor-pupil pairing sparks the same magic, he acknowledged, and a disappointing experience of online tutoring during the pandemic was much less productive than face-to-face interactions. But Hall said he’ll keep working in schools for at least a few more years, perhaps until he reaches the 12-year mark. He likes the symmetry of the dozen years he spent as a student in Ferguson and a subsequent dozen spent working with students.

“It gives people like me — who are looking for something to do that’s more positive than just playing checkers in the afternoon at the senior center — something to do and a place to do it,” he concluded. “IIt gives you more than a little bit of satisfaction about how you spent your afternoon when you get done with one of these sessions.”

She chose to enroll her daughter in Atlas Elementary, a public charter school in the city’s Downtown West neighborhood. Her daughter settled into kindergarten, but Lowman didn’t feel at home in her old hometown.

Volunteering at a school enrollment fair, Lowman stopped and talked with the women at the table. What happened next would help Lowman find a community and become deeply involved in her daughter’s education. She spent the next several months engaged in a combination of research and learning, being coached to understand how to create change in schools.

Founded in January 2022 by a former educator, ActivateSTL trains parents and teens in St. Louis to advocate for quality education. This training and support is needed, parents say, because public schools in St. Louis are so inequitable and on standardized tests. White children are than Black children to attend schools where it’s the norm for students to meet math and language arts standards, according to Missouri state data.

In June, ActivateSTL began its first training cohort with 17 parents and 11 students. It started with a data download: Who’s in charge of traditional public and charter schools — from local school boards to state officials — how do St. Louis’s suspension rates vary by race and gender and what are the student proficiency outcomes at the state, district and individual school levels?

“I had no clue that public school scores were as low as they were,” said Lowman. “Looking at those numbers, that was disheartening. Since then, I’ve been more involved, and not just in the fun stuff, for my kid and others as well.”

That’s the kind of insider understanding that Tiara Jordan wanted to give parents when she started ActivateSTL. Jordan, who is Black, attended mostly white schools when her parents moved the family to an affluent district outside of Flint, Michigan. She saw how assertive white parents were about advocating for their children. Later, while studying to become a teacher, she saw how broken and under-resourced many urban schools are. 

“I was blessed and fortunate,” she said. “Not everybody has the resources to up and move to a better school district.”

Jordan worked as a teacher and principal in Chicago, Cleveland and New York. She opened new charter schools in Chicago and Brooklyn and experienced the benefits that charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, can offer communities where public schools are failing. When she moved to St. Louis in 2019, she connected with the St. Louis-based education nonprofit and was struck by how much work needed to be done to address inequities in the city’s schools. 

“How is it that Chicago, D.C. and other cities have figured this out [better]?,” she recalls wondering. “What is happening in St. Louis that it could be so behind in funding, and proficiency levels?”

But she was new to town, so she spent some time meeting with parents and education advocates and was struck again: so many parents weren’t aware of how badly the city’s schools were struggling. 

“I didn’t want to define what ActivateSTL was without knowing the community,” she says. “We’re mobilizing parents and developing their leadership skills, so they can drive the plan of attack.”

Fully funded by the Opportunity Trust, ActivateSTL has three full-time employees, including Jordan and St. Louis educator LaShonda Hill. They are part of a national movement that has only grown since the pandemic — with groups like and the — to help parents become smarter public education consumers and savvier advocates for change. 

Parents, Jordan says, have more power than they realize to put pressure on state, district and charter officials.

“Our end goal is to get parents in seats of power,” Jordan said. “Going to a I saw how much influence parents could have.”

With support, parents with ideas for how schools can improve might be able to make positive changes. After moving her dyslexic daughter out of several schools because they weren’t providing adequate support, Kathryn Bonney found a private school that offered life-changing tutoring.

“The impact it had on my child was night and day. Utterly transformative,” said Bonney, who is white.

She wondered, what would it take to bring this kind of high-quality tutoring to all St. Louis children with dyslexia? She happened to have a conversation with Tiara Jordan, who encouraged her to pursue the question. 

“ActivateSTL is specifically geared toward parent organizing and leadership,” Bonney said. “Parents like me who have really big ideas.”

She joined the training cohort and got help fleshing out her goal — to have tutors trained in a highly structured, phonics-focused method of reading instruction, present in all St. Louis elementary schools. In addition to meeting other parents passionate about advocacy, she found a mentor in Jordan who assigned Bonney homework to advance the tutoring project: create a pitch deck in PowerPoint or meet with tutoring providers, for example. She also checked in every week to see what progress was being made, Bonney said.

Jordan has an understanding of how educational systems work: who makes decisions at school sites as well as downtown at the central office and in the state capitol. She passes that knowledge on to parents and helps them understand how they can ask for what they want.

When Shae Lowman’s first-grade daughter was struggling with reading, Lowman didn’t know where to begin to address the problem. 

“Tiara did a presentation about who to start with,” Lowman said. “I sent my daughter’s teacher a text and the next week they had my daughter reading. Having the courage and support to point out the discrepancies my daughter was having is fabulous.”

Older students, Jordan believes, can advocate for themselves, with the right support. During a summer training cohort for high school students, 10 teenagers were paid $20 an hour to meet every day for a month. Jordan explained the history and principles of public education and took students on field trips, showing them what the affluent schools in St. Louis look like. They got a bird’s eye view of how unequal school funding really is.

“I want to be an actor and my school took away the theater program,” said Alana Wilson, a senior at KIPP High School. The ActivateSTL training included information about budget transparency, which means parents and students have a right to see how money is spent at the school. “Why is my intended major being replaced with political science?” Wilson asked. 

Wilson, who said she is usually “shy and quiet” has now joined the student council. Together with other members, she asked to meet with the school principal to present a petition, signed by students who want bottled water to be available in the cafeteria in addition to milk, but the principal said it wasn’t her decision to make. Wilson said she’s trying to figure out a different way to handle the situation.

“Before the cohort, I never would have opened my mouth,” Wilson said. “I learned that I have a voice and I don’t have to be silenced by the system.”

The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to The 74. 

While her son, Roy, would ace spelling tests at the Leadership School in St. Louis, Missouri, his mom said, he would cry while doing homework because he couldn’t read any of the questions.

Ross-Porter’s realization solidified when she received a letter in the mail from his public charter school — part of a new statewide literacy awareness campaign — informing her that Roy had a reading deficiency.

“He made it through kindergarten and first grade and nobody said he was behind or he needed tutoring or extra help,” Ross-Porter said. “I don’t know where the disconnect is.”

Ross-Porter is like many parents around the St. Louis area who are now receiving the same letters in the mail, explaining that their child scored below grade level in reading.

The letters are coming as a surprise for some who are unaware of how their child is really doing in school, said Rachel Powers, a partner with a St. Louis education foundation.

“Parents really just don’t know. Everyone thinks, ‘My kid is good. My kid is fine’,” Powers said. “Or maybe they’re like, ‘Something seems off, but I don’t really know what to do about it. The report card seems OK, but they are struggling with their homework.’”

The Opportunity Trust and , a national parent advocacy organization, announced on Oct. 24 the launch of . It’s an awareness campaign for Missouri families in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County, they said,to improve the gap between the perception and reality of their child’s progress in the classroom.

Go Beyond Grades STL is partnering with St. Louis nonprofits to connect with parents in order to help them understand their child’s achievement scores and teach them how to communicate with schools, along with offering them other resources. It’s also working with schools to improve relationships between teachers and families.

The campaign is part of a national Go Beyond Grades movement organized earlier this year by Learning Heroes, in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

Learning Heroes representative David Park said the organization created the national Go Beyond Grades campaign because of the increasing number of parents who are unaware of how their child is doing at school.

“There’s a significant amount of parents who believe their child is fine — and it’s not their fault,” Park said. “Eighty percent of students nationally come home with a B or above on their report card.”

In the St. Louis area, that number is nearly 90%, according to an August survey commissioned by Learning Heroes and conducted by Edge Research, a Virginia-based research firm. The survey found that 96% of St. Louis parents believed their child was at grade level in reading and 94% thought their child was at grade level in math.

Most students aren’t even close, Powers said.

St. Louis has been hit especially hard by the pandemic, which burdened elementary and middle schoolers with some of the worst learning damage suffered by any students in the United States, recent research shows.

In 2022, 42% of students in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County were at grade level for reading, while 36% were at grade level for math, according to .

In just the City of St. Louis, the numbers drop to 23% for reading and 17% for math.

“Parent-teacher conferences are 15 minutes (long),” Park said. “What we’re pushing more than anything is ongoing communication with the child’s teacher — setting up a learning plan and touching base regularly — that’s what teachers say is the most important.”

Ross-Porter said that would be essential for her. The second-grade mom said she can’t understand Roy’s achievement scores and what they mean for her son’s progress. She said she doesn’t even know what the school letter about Roy’s reading scores really means.

Mary LaPak, a representative for Rockwood School District, the largest public school system in the St. Louis area, said while the district hasn’t worked with Go Beyond Grades STL, it values a trusting relationship between parents and teachers.

“We encourage transparency and recognize that open communication is vital between parents and Rockwood staff in order to support all students,” LaPak said in an email. “Rockwood parents are essential partners and allies in the education of our children.”

Powers said parent-teacher communication about the recent reading letters is one of the main reasons The Opportunity Trust launched Go Beyond Grades in the St. Louis area. The letters are part of a new literacy law passed earlier this year in Missouri.

The legislative piece was included in the , created by the state education department. It’s a comprehensive plan that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, a part of the science of reading, in order to improve the .

The law requires schools to identify students who are reading at one or more grade levels below what they should be. If a student is found with a reading deficiency, parents are sent a reading success plan, which provides a set of goals and skills needed in order for the child to reach their grade level. 

“We wanted to get the word out about what that law means for families, what it means for schools, how families and teachers and educators connect and work together to really address this issue that is happening,” Powers said. 

Powers said staff with Go Beyond Grades have been contacting St. Louis area schools to pinpoint when letters will be sent and learn how they plan on implementing the reading success plans. They also have been talking to parents about what they can expect if they receive a letter and what resources they should seek out to help their child.

“We want to make sure parents don’t just get a letter at their house and then they go on about their business,” Powers said. “And then it kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Like, no, this is really important, this really means something if you’re getting this letter, this is really important for your family.”

When parents are involved in their children’s schooling, students show higher academic achievement, school engagement and motivation, according to a of 448 independent studies on parent involvement.

High levels of family engagement also helped decrease chronic absenteeism for students before the pandemic, according to research by Learning Heroes and other partners.

Ross-Porter said her involvement in Go Beyond Grades STL prepared her for October parent-teacher conferences. She and Powers worked together to decipher Roy’s test scores so she could arrive armed with a long list of questions to ask Roy’s teacher.

“The questions that she gave me were able to get me better answers, just because of the way the questions are worded,” Ross-Porter said.

Powers said she hopes Go Beyond Grades STL can one day go beyond the boundaries of the St. Louis area and help parents across Missouri. For now, billboards are going up around the city and county to alert families to the importance of being involved in their child’s education.

“How do we make sure folks are clear about what to expect from their schools and how to partner with their educators to really support their children? Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re fighting for,” Powers said. “What we’re trying to really support is our kids, so they can have a strong future with the basics of reading and math.”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to The 74. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to Learning Heroes and The 74.

Two St. Louis-area school districts will return to full local governance after years of state education officials overseeing their boards.

The Missouri State Board of Education decided Tuesday that Riverview Gardens School District and Normandy Schools Collaborative had shown enough progress to return to traditional school-board elections.

The state currently has appointed board members at Riverview Gardens and Normandy to create administrative boards, which will dissolve at the end of June.

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Missouri Commissioner of Education Margie Vandeven described Tuesday’s vote as a “big deal” and thanked state-appointed board members for their assistance.

Although the state has provided oversight during the past decade, leaders say it is not a “state takeover,” as some describe it. Local administrators have established programs and hired staff to improve their educational offerings, allowing them to show the state board that learning is growing.

“You hear the term ‘state takeover,’ but it’s still all the people in the community,” Normandy Schools Collaborative Superintendent Michael Triplett told The Independent.

Riverview Gardens Superintendent Joylynn Pruitt-Adams said people view it as a takeover because of the state’s appointment of board members. But the state, she said, serves an advisory role.

“The state appointed the members so that they could do the governance piece and make sure that things were going as the state wanted them to go in that direction,” she said.

The state sought extra oversight of Riverview Gardens and Normandy Schools Collaborative after the districts’ school performance scores, which are assessed annually, dipped into the unaccredited range.

Riverview Gardens received scores in the unaccredited range from 2008 to 2016, and Normandy was unaccredited from 2013 to 2017, according to Department of Elementary and Secondary Education data.

Both districts are currently provisionally accredited.

The school districts have been required to give regular performance updates to the state board over this time, which ends with Tuesday’s vote. Some board members expressed a desire to have these reports continue along with other provisionally accredited schools.

The state’s scoring system for district performance to the Missouri School Improvement Program 6 (MSIP6), and more districts scored in the provisionally accredited range. Riverview Gardens and Normandy Schools Collaborative are among 112 local educational agencies in the range, and two charter schools scored in the unaccredited range.

DESE is not using the first two years of MSIP6 data for accreditation.

Over a decade

Riverview Gardens School District has had a special administrative board since May 2010 with three state-appointed members.

The district has been shifting toward local control since December 2021, when the State Board of Education approved a local election for two Riverview board members.

In October 2022, the state board approved an additional three locally elected board members, whom voters chose in April.

When the administrative board dissolves, Riverview Gardens’ community members can vote for two school-board members to fill the spots left vacant by the current state appointees.

Normandy Schools Collaborative, previously the Normandy School District, has had a joint executive governing board instead of a traditional school board since 2014.

In December 2021, the State Board of Education voted to begin Normandy’s transition toward local governance. The seven-member board gained two locally-elected leaders in June 2022 and an additional two in June of this year.

When the joint executive governing board dissolves on June 30, 2024, three locally elected board members can fill the state’s vacant spots.

Candidate filing for both boards will be open Dec. 5-26.

Administrators from Normandy Schools Collaborative and Riverview Gardens are hopeful that the right candidates will choose to get involved in the district.

“We have a board that is focused on our students and how we can progress, how we can get our students to be more productive citizens, build communities, environments where they want to be, where they’re learning and growing and where it’s a family nurturing environment,” said Tanya Patton, who will become Riverview Gardens’ incoming interim superintendent.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

Abandoned by and dogged by a for poor performance, the local school system shrank over the past few decades to a fraction of its former size. If they choose to stay in the area, a sizable number of parents now either opt for a charter alternative or shell out for private tuition.

But Barnett, a mother of two, was dissatisfied with the pandemic-era instruction her daughter had received at a nearby private school and wanted to make a change. It was the exact kind of move she often recommends to other families as the CEO of , an activist group she founded in 2019 to lobby for better educational services throughout the city and empower parents to advocate for their kids. 

Soon, however, Barnett was alarmed to see her daughter floundering even before she’d gotten a chance to settle in. She’d never experienced significant disciplinary problems before, but within days, she was involved in a fight and placed on a behavior plan. Barnett attributed the struggles to the “vast difference” between her daughter’s prior experience of school and the new environment she was adapting to.

“It was our first week in St. Louis Public Schools,” she said.

The institutional troubles facing St. Louis students are typical of those that have marked much of the city’s last half-century. As in other regional metropolises that faltered in the middle of the last century — from Detroit to Cleveland, Milwaukee to Memphis — disorder rose, the middle class fled and public services like K–12 education unraveled spectacularly. 

The situation now appears especially dire to many onlookers. A national study this spring , showing that the pandemic saddled St. Louis elementary and middle schoolers with some of the worst learning damage suffered by any students in the United States. The district is also navigating a generational shift in leadership, with Superintendent Kelvin Adams retiring last December after 14 years of service; his successor, former Seattle Public Schools administrator Keisha Scarlett, only took office in July.

Collin Hitt, the executive director of the Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRIME) Center at Saint Louis University, said that the task ahead is to not only turn around learning outcomes in the short term, but also set a sensible course for the transformation of the district into a smaller, more successful entity for the foreseeable future.

“You’ve got some kids two or three grade levels behind where we would have expected them to be if not for everything that’s happened over the past four years,” Hitt said. “Recovering from that has got to be the focus of the education policy conversation for the next decade.”

‘Upheaval, turnover, chaos’

Missouri is not a high-flier nationally, ranking for the most part around the middle of the pack in test scores and graduation rates. But it would be impossible to overlook St. Louis and its vicinity as the most educationally woeful community within its borders. A 2019 inventory of the weakest schools in the state — those performing among the bottom 5 percent of all that receive Title I funds, which are themselves only granted to schools enrolling high percentages of students from low-income families — , with over one-quarter in the city itself. 

Decades of failure, segregation and financial dysfunction finally led the Missouri State Board of Education to in 2007, turning its governance over to a three-member administrative board appointed by both state and local leaders. After a dizzying sequence of seven superintendents in the space of five years, Adams’s lengthy tenure , though he held far less authority than chiefs in other districts.

In 2011, Kelly Garrett became the executive director at KIPP St. Louis, a charter network that has grown to six schools in the last decade. Garrett credited the former superintendent with steadying the ship given the “insane amount of managerial upheaval, turnover, chaos” that preceded him. But after previously working to seed charters in districts like Houston, Memphis, and Boston, he said the change on display closer to home fell short of the transformational.

“The goal was stability, which was not a bad goal at the time,” Garrett said. “The past 12 years, we’ve seen stability, but we’ve also seen further deterioration of the district.”

The administrative panel to restore control to a locally elected board, even as serious concerns remained. In that year’s administration of the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) standardized tests, the district’s schools were awarded just 78 percent of all possible points — much lower than Missouri’s state average of 90 percent, or even the 88 percent earned by similarly troubled Kansas City.

After the ravages of the pandemic, those numbers . The state average in 2022 fell from 90 percent to just 65 percent, while St. Louis Public Schools earned a staggeringly low 31 percent. , no more than 56 percent in any grade scored at or above the level of Basic ( as demonstrating “a partial or uneven command of” the test’s necessary skills and processes) in English; two-thirds or more students in all grades scored below that level in math. 

Recent research suggests that while Missouri students absorbed a sizable blow from COVID, the once-in-a-century emergency left a particularly distinct mark on St. Louis. In May, conducted by Harvard economist Thomas Kane and Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon found that the city — along with a handful of others, including New Haven, Connecticut, and Richmond, Virginia — in academic performance anywhere in the United States.

While Kansas City is home to approximately the same percentage of students from low-income families, its average drops in learning were not as severe: the equivalent of -0.52 grade level in reading and -0.95 grade level in math from 2019 and 2022, compared with St. Louis’s slide of -0.81 grade level in reading and -1.64 grade levels in math. The split between the two districts is all the more notable given that, according to Kane and Reardon’s data, Kansas City students spent considerably more time in virtual instruction than their St. Louis counterparts.

In Kane’s view, learning loss of that magnitude is likely irrevocable without drastic changes to instruction. He believes the same old quality of teaching, delivered in the same quantity as before the pandemic, couldn’t possibly make up the difference.

“If I’ve lost a year and a half of school, or more, it is just impossible to imagine making up for that lost ground without additional instructional time,” Kane argued. “Otherwise, it’s imagining that teachers are teaching 150 percent of what they would normally teach within the school calendar, and that’s unreasonable to hope for.”

For parents like Jen Wadley, it can seem optimistic to even expect more than a year of stability from local schools. 

As COVID shuttered schools throughout the city in early 2020, she learned that Carondelet Leadership Academy, the K–8 charter school attended by all three of her children, due to persistently poor academic results. Similar news came the following January, when Cleveland Naval JROTC — a her oldest son, Troy, attended as a freshman — was similarly targeted for after a year substantially spent in remote learning. 

In a process she called “chaotic,” Troy moved on as a sophomore to a public magnet program, Central Visual and Performing Arts, for his third school in three years. “The options were very limited for high schools in the city,” Wadley said. “Finding a school in St. Louis City — an adequate school — is a job within itself.”

Representatives from St. Louis Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.

A shrinking district

Major urban districts like St. Louis were once hulking entities dotted throughout the Midwest, each serving six-figure student bodies. So plentiful and diverse were the schools that locals still frequently resort to the introductory “”: Where did you go to high school? 

But total enrollment in the district , almost unbelievably, from a peak of about 115,000 in 1967 to under 17,000 in 2022 — a reduction of more than 85 percent. This is a proportionately greater decline than the broader city’s contraction from over 850,000 residents in 1950 to roughly 285,000 today. 

The gradual dissipation of huge swaths of school-age children is a factor of multiple trends. Births throughout much of the metropolitan area , resulting in fewer and smaller young families within the district. According to produced by the PRiME Center, the elementary-aged population of St. Louis fell from 17,300 to just 15,300 between 2010 and 2019. Over 60 percent of the city’s neighborhoods lost children between the ages of 5 and 9, with an average decline of about one-third, and no area saw a greater drop than traditionally African American North St. Louis.

Barnett of Bridge 2 Hope — who was raised in north St. Louis but attended school in the suburbs through — reported that large areas of the city have been transformed by the departure of families to nearby suburbs like Eureka and Ladue, each located across the county line. While speculating that many students would prefer to attend schools in their own slice of the city, she said that it was difficult to contest the perception that “schools there are better.”

“My whole neighborhood looks different,” Barnett said. “All those people are in west County, north County, south County now. I don’t know if the experience is better, but the education is better. The chance to give your child a great education is a great chance.”

The end result is , with a few enrolling just 100 students or so. Former Superintendent Adams shuttered . The district intended to attract developers to its acres of surplus properties.

But in a shrinking city like St. Louis, closures also devastate families and alumni, which look to schools as anchors of their communities. When officials considered closing Sumner High School in the historically African American neighborhood of The Ville, at the prospect of losing an institution that once schooled luminaries like Chuck Berry, Tina Turner and Dick Gregory. after an eleventh-hour organizing drive, but the necessities driving it have only grown greater since.

John Wright Sr., a Sumner alumnus, later enjoyed a career as one of the region’s most distinguished educators. After serving as a teacher, administrator and superintendent at the suburban Normandy and Kinloch districts, he led St. Louis Public Schools as an interim chief in 2008. In retirement, he has also advised both mayors and Missouri governors on K–12 education, and served another brief term on the St. Louis Board of Education last year. 

Wright’s perspective dates back to the 1940s, when he attended three different local schools before the fifth grade due to overcrowding. At that time, he recollected, a typical classroom might hold 40–50 students and even elementary schools sometimes consisted of multiple buildings. Now, many have fallen into dilapidation and disuse. 

While a disappointment to some, Wright said, the diminished scale of St. Louis Public Schools could become an asset to Keisha Scarlett, the incoming superintendent. Rather than presiding over mass building campaigns, he argued, she could mostly focus on consolidating assets and improving outcomes for the students who remain.

“It’s a matter of how you use that smaller size to bring about change,” Wright said. “What’s left of the population has stabilized, so how do you improve matters now that you’ve got a size that you can put your arms around?”

‘Poised for rebirth’?

Scarlett’s arrival this summer has been seized upon by some parents and educators as a cause for hope. 

Amidst a around the district, the 24-year veteran of Seattle Public Schools is already leading around 21 schools. She that the city is “poised for a rebirth” in the years to come. Whatever her long-term vision, however, even the prospect of fully staffing classrooms this September is looking hazy. District representatives that 15 percent of its teaching positions, amounting to nearly 280 jobs, were as yet unfilled. 

Another lingering question is how Scarlett will choose to deploy two sources of newly available money. According to Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, St. Louis Public Schools in federal COVID relief funds since 2020, only 13.7 percent of which has yet been spent. (Federal law stipulates that 30 percent of such aid must be spent directly on learning recovery; the offers little in the way of specifics.) In a hopeful sign of public faith, voters a $160 million bond issue last year to fund building repairs and upgrades.

City leaders, meanwhile, have devoted the last two years drafting to address the most pressing issues confronting both traditional and charter schools. But while some observers applaud the efforts at strategic thinking in a system that has too often veered from one emergency to the next, the 128-page document for on how to stem the migration of families to suburbs or offload unneeded building inventory. Some of its recommendations essentially advise still more planning.

A further worry, highlighted by Scarlett in an interview with a local news station, is the threat to students posed by violence in school facilities or elsewhere. The city has been one of America’s most crime-afflicted for decades, and scores of children in the St. Louis area with guns in 2022. KIPP’s Garrett said the local levels of gunplay seemed unique.

“I’ve personally watched — within 100 yards of me sitting in a chair or standing at a window — four different shootings in my day-to-day activities,” Garrett said. “The access to weapons and the level of violence in the community is constantly present.”

The community’s worst fears , when a former student broke into Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and shot nine people with an assault rifle. A 61-year-old teacher and a 15-year-old student were killed, along with the perpetrator after a shootout with police.

Though enrolled in his second year at the school, Jen Wadley’s son Troy wasn’t present on the day of the attack. Still, the tragedy threw up yet another obstacle in the way of his education. Having already sat through months of virtual instruction in the eighth and ninth grades and switching to a new high school as a sophomore, he didn’t return to in-person classes after the shooting. 

Even outside of school, driver shortages have forced St. Louis Public Schools to bus routes, including to credit-recovery programs over the summer. Heading into what should be his senior year, Wadley said, her oldest son has spent almost as much time outside of high school as in, and the status of his graduation credits is still unclear. She worries that he views his time at school with more apathy than interest.

“It’s hard enough to get a kid to participate in high school,” Wadley said. “But then they’re thrown so many curveballs — their dream school closed, there’s a school shooting, there are no buses — and they just get to the point where they don’t care.”

“We know that there are obstacles at every stage of the educational system in America, especially for urban youth and Black girls,” says Cynthia Chapple, founder and managing director. “Students need to feel supported, seen and heard in certain spaces.” 

Since launching Black Girls Do STEM in 2019, Chapple has engaged students at five partner middle schools in St. Louis. Monthly Saturday activities bring students together with mentors to work on projects and experiments in materials science, engineering, technology, cosmetic science and more. The girls also go on field trips and meet Black women who are leaders in the STEM community.

This year, more than 100 girls are participating, guided by over a dozen volunteer mentors. In the first year, the students are introduced to a variety of STEM fields, engaging in a new activity each month. In the second year, they choose from one of five tracks — aviation and aerospace, cosmetic science, cybersecurity, agriculture technology, and construction and civil engineering — helping to anchor their STEM interests. When the students reach high school, the organization can provide tutoring, with the goal of supporting them throughout their STEM pursuits while encouraging them to stay focused on advanced math and science. 

“It is so powerful to sit with someone who you feel like you connect with on personal levels,” Chapple says. “You build trust with them and relationship. When you tell them something is possible, they start to believe it more than if a random stranger told them. I think it is tremendous, and why our mentoring network is so critical.”

The program focuses on creating a space that prizes curiosity and exploration — and the girls start to value that in themselves, Chapple says. “We will be successful if girls walk out of this with a renewed sense of who they are,” she says. “The core is how do we develop this young person into believing big of themselves and a mindset to push through challenges and building resilience that doesn’t come from trauma.” 

At Ferguson, Sam Brotherton, a math instructional support leader, says Black Girls Do STEM has proven “extremely valuable” for his students. “The girls who attend the Saturday program get to experience science in ways that are relevant to them, while developing a support network in addition to what the school offers,” he says. “Overall, our girls are more interested in the STEM field and get the opportunity to meet more local professionals to extend their network and knowledge of STEM careers.”

Chapple left her job in applied sciences — she has worked in forensic, food and materials science — to focus on Black Girls Do STEM. The community-based program has target demographics and identifies school partners in areas of St. Louis where the occupations of the community’s adults do not commonly fall within STEM fields.

The organization comes into the schools through hands-on learning experiences or special events to introduce the program and invite students to join the Saturday sessions. Representatives are also present at community fairs and festivals. About 75% of the girls are students at target schools, but Black Girls Do STEM also accepts students from across greater St. Louis. 

Chapple focused on middle schoolers because students at that age are at a pivotal development stage where they form their identity, yet are curious enough to ask questions and try new challenges. “That is the best age to get them to develop their confidence and awareness around things that are challenging and finding the fun and joy in doing things that may not come to them super easily,” she says. 

The program mixes activities and field trips — students have visited Boeing, Washington University’s engineering labs, the Saint Louis Zoo veterinary science clinic and more — to expose the girls to a wide range of STEM worlds. 

Black Girls Do STEM is funded by grants and community support. During the pandemic, much of the program went virtual, and the organization has retained a small cohort of students from across the country who access the program virtually. Chapple says her dream is to keep building the program, offering new opportunities for students while expanding its networks and reach beyond St. Louis. 

“We are real people right here in front of you, investing our time in you and belief in you,” Chapple says. “This is possible. We have done it. I have made products on the shelf that people use every day, that go into devices you use every day. This is regular, everyday stuff.”

Some of them are in the alley out back, cutting through tough plywood with circular saws, while others are inside using impact drivers to join pieces of framework. Other girls will be stationed next to a laser printer, creating decals and decorations.

“It is just a symphony of chaos, but it’s amazing,” said Kelli Best-Oliver, who oversees the work along with a group of volunteers. “They’re all doing it relatively independently and, you know, there’s music playing, and it’s just this diverse group of kids. The culture that we’re creating here is something special.”&�Բ�����;

The project — building a structure for a hole of miniature golf — is just one of many happening at , a nonprofit that provides after-school and summer programming for girls and gender-expansive youth, ages 10 to 16.

LitShop offers book clubs and writing sessions along with workshops focused on building and construction — carpentry, printmaking, fiber arts or architecture.

Many of the resulting projects benefit the community. The miniature golf structure will go to a local arts association. The students also recently built a wheelchair ramp for a St. Louis resident.

“We will have kids who are attracted to us for one reason or another — they are either a bookworm or emerging writer, or they really want to get their hands dirty and make a lot of noise and learn how to use tools,” said Kelli Best-Oliver, LitShop’s founder. “It really opens kids’ eyes up to what they don’t even know because they’re not doing it at school.”

Best-Oliver, who worked as a literacy and language arts curriculum coordinator for St. Louis Public Schools for more than 15 years, said there are minimal opportunities in the city’s schools to take classes centered on construction and building. The push to pursue admission to college also discourages students from considering other options, like the trades industries, she said. 

“We need to validate and affirm that building trades are just as valuable to both our communities and society, but can also be a tool for economic mobility. (Students) just don’t know because we’re not even giving them that information,” she said. “They don’t even know it’s an option for them.”

Female students receive even less exposure to the construction trades than boys, she said. That’s why LitShop is geared toward girls — to give them a chance to break into male-dominated jobs. Only 11% of workers in the industry are female, according to by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Best-Oliver said it’s also crucial for LitShop to be open to gender-expansive youth, as LGBTQ+ people have an even smaller presence in the building trades.

“Especially in Missouri, it literally can save lives to validate a kid’s gender identity, in a safe and affirming place where they can be themselves,” she said.

Best-Oliver said she doesn’t want to inspire girls just to explore the trades industry, but also science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A lot of LitShop projects are STEM-based, such as a circuitry class the organization offered in early May. Students learned about wiring, batteries and circuits and how to make sculptures with LED-light fixtures.

According to the , only about 28% of STEM employees in the U.S. are female.

Even if the girls don’t pursue a STEM career, Best-Oliver, said they will be gaining important skills for any path they take in the future. It’s “valuable and rad for girls to know how to use a circular saw,” she said. “It’s just a very powerful and empowering thing.”

For sixth-grader Stella Andersen, LitShop has given her an outlet for not only learning to use tools, but for exploring her passion for writing.

Stella has been with LitShop for three years and said she was initially attracted to its literacy component. One of her first projects was to read a novel and create a “twinkle board” — a large wooden sign with lights that spell out a specific word related to the novel.

She contributes to the organization’s publication, called LitMag, which features writing and art from the students, but also enjoys participating in group building projects like the mini-golf hole.

“It’s fun when people are walking by and they just look through the door and it’s funny to see them trying to figure out what LitShop is and what’s happening,” Stella said.

LitShop is based on a similar organization in Berkeley, California, called , which Best-Oliver visited in 2019. At the time, she was disillusioned with her job in the 20,000-student St. Louis district and frustrated with how test-driven curriculum was, especially in underfunded urban areas.

“When I walked in, I was just like, ‘This is it. If I don’t do something like this in St. Louis, someone else is going to do it,’ ” Best-Oliver said. “I was going to be stuck in my current job shaking my fist because I didn’t have the courage to strike out on my own.”

Emily Pilloton-Lam founded the California organization in 2008. At first, it was open to all students, but Pilloton-Lam shifted to focus on girls and gender-expansive youth in 2013 and changed the name to match. 

When she created the organization, Pilloton-Lam said, she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that even though the work was powerful, it was alienating the girls because they still felt like they didn’t fully belong working alongside the boys.

“It’s the thing that I have experienced as an educator, working with students, and I’m leading a build and I’m in charge and no one treats me like I’m in charge. I started to see some of those same feelings manifest with my female students,” Pilloton-Lam said. “I call it the social calculus of being a woman — you walk into a room or onto a construction site and you’re constantly having to calibrate, ‘How do I prove that I belong here?’ ”

Best-Oliver took her inspiration from Pilloton-Lam and created a pilot program of LitShop that started in St. Louis classrooms. She began by teaching students construction and writing skills in schools during the day, with the help of district staff. The pilot program was a success, and at the end of the school year, Best-Oliver quit her job to make LitShop its own organization.

The pandemic forced her to switch from in-person to virtual programming. The organization finally transitioned from being school-based to standing on its own after Best-Oliver purchased the building that now houses the storefront workshop.

LitShop currently has about 100 students enrolled, and Best-Oliver hopes to increase that number if the organization can secure more grant funding. All programs and workshops are free to students.

The nonprofit is gearing up to offer its summer programs: a print shop for making merchandise, like T-shirts; a woodworking and writer’s workshop; architectural model making; a furniture project; a book club; and a paper mache workshop.

“What we’re doing on paper can sound cool, but it can also sound confusing, like, ‘I don’t get how these things fit together.’ But if you come to our shop, and you see what we’re doing, nobody comes here and says, ‘This is lame,’ ” Best-Oliver said. “Everybody leaves here being like, ‘This is awesome. How can I get involved?’ We are doing something that nobody is doing. And it is really cool to walk into a place and see a 12-year-old on power tools.”

But during the first semester of an elective class called Next Prep, the 14-year-old found she has an interest in medicine. 

“I probably like science more than I thought I did,” she said on a Zoom call from the Next Prep classroom. Like all ninth-graders at Kairos, a public charter school, Alyssa meets with an academic coach at least once a week. “Me and my coach, we talk about the short term, like my grades. My Next Prep class is about the future.”

Offered in two St. Louis high schools, Next Prep is a pilot program that helps teens start early in figuring out what they might want to do after graduation. The class starts in ninth grade and begins with exploring each student’s strengths and talents. Later, the class dives into learning about careers by visiting employers and talking directly with professionals. Hands-on and personal, the course is meant to lay out the stepping stones from high school to a meaningful career. 

In just about any other public high school, Alyssa and her classmates wouldn’t begin talking about their postsecondary options until junior year. Discussions about internships and other types of career preparation might not happen at all. 

This approach may contribute to concerning postsecondary outcomes for many students. According to , of the class entering college in 2010, only 21% of Black students graduated in four years, compared with 32% of Hispanic, 45% of white and 50% of Asian students. Separate data collected by the shows that 65% of Black students who entered college in 2020 returned for their sophomore year in 2021, versus 75% of students overall. 

In Missouri, data released last year showed that of Black students who started college in 2016 completed an undergraduate degree. in 2016 showed that Black St. Louis residents over 25 who enrolled in college were over 40% more likely than white students not to graduate.

“Part of our work is to help students understand themselves, what fires them up and what they like,” said Jesse Dixon, a partner at the St. Louis-based education nonprofit , which launched in 2019 and since developed the Next Prep curriculum. “Whether a student is choosing four-year college or not, if they have a plan, they’re much more likely to persist.”

But before students can make a plan, they have to attend school. After the pandemic, , mostly in districts where classes had been conducted remotely. This trend demonstrates declining student engagement, Dixon said. While developing the Next Prep course, he spoke with students, many of whom had taken jobs during the pandemic. Students said their high school class content didn’t seem important once they were working.

“The disconnect between relevant job preparation and what they were doing in high school was hard to ignore,” Dixon said. Attendance rates dropped because students didn’t feel that high school was relevant to their lives. “Next Prep is intended to try to address this gap that students have become more aware of.”

The pilot course aims to expose students to the range of postsecondary options and explain precisely how they need to prepare in order to pursue specific plans. 

“I taught for five years, mostly at high schools, and one thing that always stood out is the information gap,” said Riley Foster, an education innovation fellow with the Opportunity Trust and the Next Prep instructor at Kairos Academies, where the student body is almost 60% Black. “Students didn’t know what people in specific careers did and how much school they’d need to have that career.”

Some also often didn’t know the difference between an associate and a bachelor’s degree, Foster said, or that many careers require additional schooling after graduation from a four-year college.

During the first semester of Next Prep, students take personality tests to figure out what interests them — whether they prefer helping people, building or fixing things, or working alone with data, for example. The second semester is all about career exploration, including health, business, education and engineering. It’s a brand-new program at Kairos, which started with a middle school and expanded to offer high school this year. Half of the 140 ninth-graders were randomly assigned to Next Prep, but next year all ninth- and 10th-graders will participate. 

Nilesh Patel, principal of Kairos Academies High School, welcomed the idea of starting early to help teens figure out what they want to do.

“The reality we see in high-performing charters is that we have great college acceptance rates, but our college retention rates are terrible,” said Patel. “If we get kids into college without the skills to stay in, what’s the point?”&�Բ�����;

Beyond learning about education and training, Riley said, her students are hungry to know more about real careers and hear directly from working people, so she asks speakers to come to class and talk about their jobs. That’s how Alyssa Boehle discovered a passion for counseling. When six therapists visited the class to share their work, she learned about a type of counseling she’d never heard of before.

“There was an art therapist who started her own business,” said Alyssa. “I found it really interesting to hear how she made the connections to start her own business.”&�Բ�����;

Students have also gone on field trips to visit big employers. Barnes-Jewish Hospital, for example, offers paid jobs for high schoolers and college tuition assistance.

Tenth-graders will dig deeper into their identified career interests, shadowing people who work in the field. They’ll also focus on soft skills, including interviewing and conflict resolution. Eleventh-graders will do internships in their chosen area. During their senior year, students can take dual-enrollment courses in a local community college, pursue a professional certificate or dive deeper into an internship.

“The important thing is to start with self-awareness,” Foster said. “Students need to learn a vocabulary to express their strengths and interests and that those things map to careers.”