urbanSTL

ttricamo wrote: Yep. The sales pitch for most municipalities is representation (on issues that are all but trivial) and safety (from a muni police that is most often I'll equipped to handle major issues). It's beyond me that the large majority of people that continually vote for and support these small munis don't understand their tax dollars could be far better spent. Even more of an irony is this is the same constituency that bags on federal tax waste.

Can you explain how one can "continually vote for ... these small munis"? How many votes have we had on whether or not to support municipalities?

I will say that I pay three times more in taxes each year to St. Louis city via the earnings tax as I do to my muni via property tax.

And I don't have to think hard to tell you which one gives me much better value for my money.

I don't really have a problem with all the munis per se.... But I would like to see more consolidation or contracting out to the County for public safety, particularly in NoCo. And fewer school systems, which I think is the greatest need to address but which BT seems to want to avoid.

Yes, via an amendment. Don't know if the legislature can so something on its own. Is the Board of Freeholders just one way or does it exclude the legislature from doing something. It certainly doesn't exclude creating districts. Did any of them not have a local vote to go with them (SLCC, Bi-State, etc). Maybe they could just make disincorporation easier or put in a muni accountability system (which has been submitted in the leg a couple tyears ago)

If you touch the schools, the white people in the county would start a political civil war so that their kids would not have to go to school with "those people". If they lost the war, they would just move to St. Charles or to the segregated suburbs in another city. They are already jumpy after Ferguson, and I doubt their attachment to St. Louis would compel them to take imagined risks with their own children so that black kids could have a good education and a fair chance at life as well.

Ebsy wrote:If you touch the schools, the white people in the county would start a political civil war so that their kids would not have to go to school with "those people". If they lost the war, they would just move to St. Charles or to the segregated suburbs in another city. They are already jumpy after Ferguson, and I doubt their attachment to St. Louis would compel them to take imagined risks with their own children so that black kids could have a good education and a fair chance at life as well.

I'm going to call bullsh*t on this one. My graduating class in parkway was probably 20% black thanks to the voluntary transit program and there was no exodus from Chesterfield to St. Charles. The area boomed and continues to do so.

The bigger issue is that we've been busing black kids to white schools in the county for decades and it doesn't seem to have really made an impact on the level on racial disparities, tension, and segregation in the region.

Bringing up Parkway as a pillar of voluntary transfer is a bit laughable.

I pretty much live under the assumption that almost everyone in St. Louis, City, County etc., is racist. Almost every black citizen mistrusts white people and the institutions they built, and almost all white people are to some extent scared of black people, no matter how liberal or openminded they might claim to be. People who protest that they are not racist almost always follow that proclamation with what is at least a racially insensitive statement, if not something that is obviously racist.

I am a black male. Went to Parkway Central while living in N St. Louis. Spent many nights at white friends house. There were three friends of mube that moved in with different families in Chesterfield. Andy Seeger (Seeger Toyota) was one of those homes. I know there are some racists people...I did not have too many experiences. With us leaving the city, it did seem like we abandoned St louis city public schools.

Do we really have more school districts than we need? I can think of a few that could probably be consolidated with others, but it seems to me that reducing the number of municipalities is a much more pressing issue.

Ebsy wrote:Bringing up Parkway as a pillar of voluntary transfer is a bit laughable.

I attended schools in three other states before moving to St. Louis, and that includes elementary and Jr. High in the supposed beacon of diversity Houston, TX. Parkway schools had by far the most diverse student body that I encountered in all the places I lived. The environment was pretty much as johndavis described. Kids got along and I think everyone benefited from being around each other.

I recognize how segregated the St. Louis region is, but there is also an entire generation of kids from St. Louis county who grew up with integrated schools. So I think it's unfair to broadly say that white county residents are opposed to sending their kids to school with black kids when it's been happening all over the county for decades.

Unfortunately, integrated schools haven't resulted in an integrated metro area. To the contrary, I've always thought deseg reinforced existing patterns by forcing whites to move to the county to attending county schools while allowing blacks to remain in the city. How crazy is it that black families can stay in the city and freely send their kids to county schools but white families don't have the same option?

From what I can tell, there are 23 school districts in St. Louis County (not including the Special School District). That doesn't seem particularly excessive to me, although I'm not sure how that compares to similar metro areas. There are a handful of inner-ring districts that could/should be consolidated - Affton/Bayless/Hancock Place and Maplewood-Richmond Heights/Brentwood, for example - along with a few outliers like Valley Park, which could be added to Rockwood or Parkway, but the rest appear to serve fairly good-sized geographic areas.

roger wyoming II wrote: Just as we have too many police agencies and fire districts, we have too many school districts. And I believe ending the sending of our poor and minorities into segregated schools is a far more pressing issue than cosmetic surgery of reducing the number of municipalities. It is possible to achieve greater integration without reducing the number of districts, but it would be more orderly if you had fewer.

I don't disagree with you that merging school districts could benefit the region, but I think it's likely to be an order of magnitude less helpful than more professional safety and municipal services and improved economic development. I think underperformance in schools has a lot more to do with subpar home life than subpar schooling. If there's any chance that merging schools would complicate more important and pressing service mergers, I would readily leave them out of the equation.

danryan1 wrote:How crazy is it that black families can stay in the city and freely send their kids to county schools but white families don't have the same option?

It would be crazy if that were actually a true statement.

About 600 or so white students from the county attend the magnet schools. There are supposed to be about 2000 more, but no one else from the county has signed up.