^ I don't disagree, I just think that there is a huge perception problem with SLPS, ESPECIALLY from non-StL natives considering locating here (and large employers in particular). One look at an old school building and the pre-conception that SLPS has not and cannot provide a decent education and can immediately turn to places like Chesterfield and see the benefits... if they even keep the Metro area on the list at all.
Granted, a new "sexy" school building alone isn't going to right the ship, but if parents and chldren get excited and energized over the new facility and a fresh outlook, I think it's worth losing an old school or two - there are many others all over the city.
There's plenty of underused land in the Grand corridor. If a new building is best for kids, then I would think the win-win choice is to sell Shennandoah and use the proceeds to buy that grocery store at Grand and Magnolia to build a new school there. The sites are about the same size. Or use some of the fields in the Gate District. Or emiment domain some of SLU's acreage. This need not be a battle between preservation and kids. The Shenandoah site is actually pretty small. There may be better locations for a new building.
jem79c wrote:Granted, a new "sexy" school building alone isn't going to right the ship...
Mark Groth wrote:Did the Carnahan School of the Future on Broadway near Gasconade change the face of the SLPS to a "sexy new look". I think not.
Exactly. Whatever SLPS would build to replace Shenandoah would, I'm sure, be adequately modern on the inside and utterly cheap-looking and uninspired on the outside. Hodgen is another example: new =/= sexy.
Mark Groth wrote:Did the Carnahan School of the Future on Broadway near Gasconade change the face of the SLPS to a "sexy new look". I think not.
No kidding. It looks like a medium-security correctional facility to me. It's not exactly the most inspiring environment for students.
Even if current buildings cannot be used for this new school for whatever reason, why does SLPS think demolishing Shenandoah is the answer, especially since it could be repurposed? It isn't like there aren't any clean-slate sites on which a new school could be built. I bet SLPS has some vacant property of its own.
If there is new construction--whether replacement on another site or an addition to Shenandoah--then the SLPSD has an opportunity to showcase a transformed district.
Example: Plan for $20 million 100,000 s.f. addition to Robbins Elementary School, Trenton, NJ...
^At which point all the usual suspects will start crying foul over why the city would 'foot the bill' to build a flashy new school for a 'failing school system'.
Let's think these things through.
As for Mark's question about the cost of retrofitting the old buildings: "relatively phenomenal" would be the answer you're looking for. We will find plenty of heretofore unknown asbestos. We will find all manner of undocumented modifications to the buildings. We will be forced to install highly inefficient (read: marginally functional) runs of ductwork due to limitations of existing designs. I could go on but I shouldn't need to. Renovation, in this context, is a non-starter.
A few people seem to have jumped to the thoroughly illogical conclusion that those who are advocating for new construction feel that a new school would somehow be 'sexier' than the existing structures.
While I admire the mental gymnastics at work there, the entire premise of that assertion is not even broken. Yes, the school will most assuredly look like a flimsy generic crapshack with a brick facade that they won't even bother to match to any of the common historic red brick tones. Yep, it'll be that awful orangey-red brick that makes your stomach churn no matter how many times you see it.
It sucks and I don't like it one bit either - but that's not the central issue here. Given the state of the district, we need only be concerned with schools being operationally efficient and offering programs/incentives that attract parents as well as good teachers. If the windows and siding are vinyl, we'll just have to suck it up and deal with it until things at SLPS are in a better state.
Actually, the city's budget for this project could do something pretty cool. The average cost per s.f. for a new construction elementary school, once you include union labor, architectural fees, etc -- is around $165/s.f. You need about 140 s.f. of building per child. The city wants a building for 600 kids. That means it will cost $13.8 million for an average school building.
SLPS has a budget of $17.6 million for this new school. That size budget should allow for a very nice renovation or a quite nice new building ... one 27% nicer than average. And yes, that budget could purchase an 84,000 s.f. version of the 100,000 s.f. Robbins Elementary design I posted above.
It could also purchase vinyl and orange brick crap. Good design often comes with the same budget as crap design.
Is it possible St. Louisans settle for crap just because that's what we expect? Could this be a self-fulfilling prophecy?
The northside is dotted with vacant Board of Education buildings. Many are in severely deteriorated condition and are a threat to neighborhood safety. People say LRA is a problem landord, but the Board of Education is no better. Some have sat vacant and abandoned for years. Something needs to be done.
More magnet/choice schools with specializations are replacing the traditional model which all-too-often had become general failures. Interesting note that if high schools were taken out of the equation, SLPS would be fully accredited. Further evidence that despite its challenges, SLPS is heading in the right direction.
I heard on the radio that people are moving into the unaccredited districts in order to send their kid anywhere. I'll be curious to see how big of a phenomenon this becomes.
I often end up in conversations where the SLPS and perceptions of it are the biggest impediment for living in the city. I've wondered how much an effect a guarantee to parents that they could send their kids where they wanted would have.
On a micro-level, I definitely hear the sentiment about SLPS being an important reason to live in the county and not the city from friends/acquaintances with kids or thinking about kids. I hate hearing it.
Giving a guarantee that parents in the city could send their kids anywhere might be a good way to get people to move back into the city, but I'd still struggle with that because of the message it sends.
If I had the time, I'd love to delve into a real project about this, but I find the frequent blaming of academic struggles on our schools and the teachers within them to be such hogwash.
First off, we still don't have a good way to measure academic success. The standardized tests are so flawed. I don't have a solution that isn't, but it just needs to be noted that those test scores absolutely don't tell a whole or accurate story.
Beyond that, academic struggles follow poverty. That is pretty clear at this point. Exactly what causes that isn't necessarily clear, and it's probably a combination of things.
In some cases you have academic struggles because the schools and parents can't afford to give the students the best resources to learn with.
In some cases you have academic struggles because the parents (or quite often singular parent) have to spend so much time working to avoid poverty (IOW, working for a wage) that they aren't able to give their child the time that's really needed to reenforce the learning that is done at school.
And in some cases you have parents who just don't care enough and/or aren't educated enough to reenforce those ideas, and that lack of caring or education may be what led to their poverty in the first place.
I don't want to generalize, so I wouldn't want to paint anyone with just one of those scenarios, but I think they call come into play in poverty-stricken schools.
And unfortunately, the parents who do have the time and resources and care to reenforce learning start pinning the academic issues of their children's peers on the teachers and leave for other schools. It just worsens the problem.
I'm still a ways away from having children, let alone children who are of school-age, but I'm determined to put mine through SLPS. And I believe we need more of that for SLPS to continue to improve.
The one concern I leave out in all of this is safety. I can't really speak to gang-culture or violence around the schools, but it obviously matters. You have to be able to feel like your kids will be safe when they walk out the building to the bus or to their home or wherever.
quincunx wrote:I heard on the radio that people are moving into the unaccredited districts in order to send their kid anywhere. I'll be curious to see how big of a phenomenon this becomes.
I often end up in conversations where the SLPS and perceptions of it are the biggest impediment for living in the city. I've wondered how much an effect a guarantee to parents that they could send their kids where they wanted would have.
Wow, that's pretty creative. I suppose renting would be a smart move; otherwise buying a house and the legislature changing the law to no longer allow such moves might get you stuck. There sure are a lot of kinks to work out (fundamentally is how can unaccredited districts ever recover if they are on the hook for all that lost revenue?) but it also really seems like there are some real benefits that may come from this regional cooperation. (In a way, this kind of situation almost became constitutional requirement back in the 70s when the school busing cases were being decided.... iirc. the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against a case I believe in Detroit/Wayne County that would have required county-wide busing rather than just within the district. Had it gone the other way, the fate of cities may have been different.)
So to your question, yes, I think a significant number of young families would remain or stay, in the City if they could have their kids go to county schools. Many of these target parents also desire strong neighborhood schools... so what I imagine the terrain looking like in such a situation is more city population growth, perhaps with a particular attractiveness to border neighborhoods, and the development of more quality neighborhood-based schools (whether charter or full public) like Citygarden Montessori. And SLPS would really have to reinvent itself.
jstriebel wrote:On a micro-level, I definitely hear the sentiment about SLPS being an important reason to live in the county and not the city from friends/acquaintances with kids or thinking about kids. I hate hearing it. .
Abolish the KC school District and put pieces in the neighboring districts? I think this is something to talk about here and may be the outcome for Normandy and Riverview Gardens since they've lost a lot of students and money. The Independence SD already took a piece a few years ago. There was a bill sponsored by Sen. Jane Cunningham last year SB 706. Nextstl was on this over a year ago
^ SLPS is making progress towards full accreditation and hopefully KC can as well.... abolishing large school districts should only be considered as a last resort for districts that make no progress after state takeover. Again though, it will certainly be a challenge to make that progress if your budget is slashed as your kids can move to another district. So the question is how to mitigate that so you give districts a chance. For smaller districts like Normandy and Riverview, I do think it makes sense to talk about merging districts as part of an overall county reform.... can't recall the exact number but I think that there are around 20 districts in the county. That's crazy.
To give credit to Missouri, I do think that they are trying to do the best for the struggling districts.... in PA and others, I think state takeover is an attempt to ramrod school reform grifting at the expense of kids. Philly just had to borrow $50 million just to open schools this fall as the state slashes funding.
Rather than the KC plan, why not just start a full on voucher program for unaccredited districts? Given the staggering number of private institutions in the StL area it could really take some crowding pressure off of MRH, Clayton, UCity and other proximate districts that I'm sure many would cite in opposition to massive transfers... Moreover, it might encourage the young and middle/upper middle to move back into the city and still have private school as a feasible financial option.
can't recall the exact number but I think that there are around 20 districts in the county. That's crazy.
How many districts do comparable metro areas have? I've never really thought of STL as having an excessive number of school districts. Sure, there are some smaller ones (like Brentwood, for instance) that could be merged with larger ones (like Webster or MRH), but it seems like many of the districts serve fairly large areas.
^^ The terms vouchers, school choice, and others all generally refer to the same type of program - however - each program is uniqe and has it's own caveats and complications.
IN GENERAL, though, a voucher program allows students to transfer out of their normally assigned schooland into another school, and apply a voucher towards their tuition at that school. The new school can often be public, private, magnet, charter, etc etc. The voucher amount is typically the amount of "per pupil spending" provided by that district.
jstriebel wrote:Can you explain how vouchers would work just a bit? I've heard the term before as it pertains to education, but I'm not totally clear on what it is.
Typically it means that parents can take the state funds given to a public school district for their child attending it to a private school. It's intended to extend school choice beyond those who can afford it and end public school monopolies and introduce competition.
One big problem people have with them is state money ending up at religious schools. They think it's a violation of the 1st Amendment. Or that the schools have no obligation to meet curriculum or other standards.
We're seeing a taste of school choice in the transfers out of Normandy and RG. I think it'd be better if they also had the option of sending their kid to a private school nearby rather than have to take them to a school far away.
Another issue for full on vouchers in St Louis is that so many students already go to private schools here that all the vouchers they'd get would be a huge amount for the state to come up with, or make the voucher amount smaller. Means testing may be required.
. 
