St. Louis Public Schools Lawsuit

SouthCityJR · PostApr 19, 2016#12016-04-19T21:30+00:00

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/educ ... c6e72.html

Does anyone have more information about this? I'm by no means an expert on this, but it does seem troubling for the public schools to take this action right after voters approved the property tax hike. The possibility of bankrupting the charter schools would be disruptive, to say the least.

roger wyoming II · PostApr 20, 2016#22016-04-20T13:11+00:00

I'm not sure of the details either; I guess the way I look at it is that if the sales tax that voters approved is indeed meant to continue the deseg plan then only charters that specifically incur costs to implement that plan should get any money from the tax. It appears that is not the case in a lot of instances and other charters may be getting more than their fair share.

If this is the case, moving forward I'd definitely like to see SLPS at least collect what it is entitled to and perhaps get some form of additional revenue from DESE to make amends but I'm not too hot on having that come from making charters fork over $$ as they seem to be caught more in the middle than anything else.

lindenwood4 · PostApr 26, 2016#32016-04-26T02:21+00:00

From the email that my kids school sent out today:

"You may have heard that St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) has filed a lawsuit against the state of Missouri, claiming that charter schools should not have received funds from a desegregation local sales tax. SLPS is requesting a return of these funds, which were paid to charter schools because the State of Missouri determined that charter schools are entitled to receive the funding in question. If the suit were successful, it would result in charter schools having to pay back approximately $42 million dollars to SLPS. For (school), the estimated to cost our small school is approximately $90,000 for each year of operation. Further, SLPS is requesting that charter schools do not receive these funds moving forward."

hiddeninput · PostMay 12, 2016#42016-05-12T16:06+00:00

St. Louis Public Radio has put up a fairly detailed story on the lawsuit today.

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/old ... d-charters

At a minimum, it certainly sounds like there's going to be a lack of trust between the charter schools and SLPS following this.

Speaking personally, I think SLPS need to make an effort to explain to both explain this lawsuit and the timing of the lawsuit.

onecity · PostMay 12, 2016#52016-05-12T17:36+00:00

Could parents reasonably sue SLPS for not making an effort to balance the income demographics of the student body to reflect the region?

roger wyoming II · PostMay 13, 2016#62016-05-13T22:30+00:00

SLPS has a statment on the lawsuit on their homepage as well as a link to the suit and 1999 settlement agreement:

http://www.slps.org/

hebeters2 · PostAug 31, 2016#72016-08-31T00:31+00:00

The Economic Recovery Hasn’t Reached America’s Schools
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/th ... s-schools/