A Better Place for Your Guilt
St. Louis is a complicated city, a divided city, an unequal city, a beautiful city. And, even though I forget sometimes, for many people St. Louis refers to a whole region with the same qualities, a region where geography based on zip code, neighborhood or even by block can lead to vastly different experiences for its citizens. It’s sometimes difficult to hold in tension the comfort and apparent prosperity of the suburbs, the beauty and goodness of our pretty old city, and the poverty and deep hurt existing side by side.
If you’re reading this, you probably, like me, live in a situation of privilege that allows us to exert choice, and autonomy over almost every aspect of our lives. The messages “you gotta do what’s best for you” and “leave the people who are holding you back” have infiltrated every aspect of our lives, from Instagram self-help posts to sermons and celebrity messages. If you have the right situations and capability, your future is one big glittering decision tree of potential ready to be maximized.
And when we have those situations and capabilities AND children, the decision tree extends not just to our own lives, but also to theirs, and there is an added moral weight to the decisions we make. We want our children to have every possible choice, to reach their full potential. We don’t want to make parenting or life decisions that will limit the choices they have.
The reality, of course, is that none of us have as much control over our lives as we’d like to believe. The pandemic has shown us that, for sure. We can’t control the weather, we can’t control cells mutating into cancer, we can’t control the behavior of others. It’s painful to admit. Many of us work very hard to ignore that fact for as long as we can. We see this clearly in the way those of us with the privilege to control most aspects of our lives attempt to guarantee the very best outcomes for our children.
I was homeschooled until 9th grade, and then I was in private schools for high school. I never got the memo that where you live determines how good the schools your kids attend will be. When I reached adulthood and parenthood and home ownership, I was taken aback at the messaging with which the rest of my peers (and their parents) had been inundated. I didn’t realize that you could have an affordable house or “good” schools, but not both.
You can’t really talk about housing prices and good schools without talking about race and segregation. Actually, scratch that. You absolutely can, but it requires a specific kind of deliberate ignorance, coded language, and a resigned complicity. And though we are really good at it, there’s been enough written about it that I will not belabor the point.
As a parent at a neighborhood school, it is very difficult for me not to take a black and white view of other parents’ choices (but I promise I still love you, even if I disagree). It is difficult not to count up all we lose as a community when all our community kids are fragmented into schools across the city. As an SLPS parent, for me, we lose the funding attached to your kid, we lose the access to resources you may have, we lose your power and privilege exerted on our behalf. Most importantly, we lose your ability to know the people at our neighborhood schools, to see the individual human beings, the children, the faculty, the staff, the parents, who actually do exist, and are not just one blob of bad test scores or poverty porn.
But I’m trying to grow into the gray, and I invite you to join me there.
The trajectory of your family’s future can be changed from the single-minded pursuit of individual good to a recognition of the beauty of making decisions that benefit your entire community, not just the people who are like you or share your values. You can move from a trajectory that hoards all the goodness to one that shares and while yes, I think a good and easy way to do that is to go to a neighborhood school, if you cannot bear to do that, if you don’t want to rip your children away from the relationships they have been building for years, there are still opportunities to do the work.
If these things are resonating with you, if you have made decisions that are “best for your family” that have isolated your family from all the questionable elements in the world, or even if you are a very good family that makes a point to serve the poor but doesn’t relate to any poor people from a point of reciprocity, there is good news, y’all.
Here is the good news: you do not have to go all Rich Young Ruler (sell all your goods and give them to the poor) to atone for the decisions you made while you were in thrall to individualism, unchecked capitalism and/or white supremacy’s version of what’s best.
Even if you only change your bearing on your family’s ethical compass by a couple degrees, once you are moving forward on your new course, the longer you’ve been doing it, the closer towards a better future that isn’t guided by selfishness you’ll get, and the less confused your children will be by the difference between your words and your actions.
And though I am primarily writing to parents, of course this can apply to non-parents as well. Public schools are a public good; we need our whole community, not just parents, to love our schools, our educators, our children. Your St. Louis property tax makes up a significant part of our budget, whether you have no kids, grown kids, or a house full of kids.
So let’s get started. Stop and take stock. Does your life match what you think you believe? Are you comfortably insulated from the hard things of life that are caused by systemic issues? What’s the playground at your neighborhood park like? Is your life (not your school or your workplace only) integrated enough that when it is time to rally and yell Black Lives Matter, you are not just sad and worried for the five black people you know, but you are sad and worried for your own self — not for your own safety, but for the loved ones whose precarity has been revealed again, and how you would hurt if they were gone. Are you in any reciprocal relationships with people in poverty/struggling financially that are not just your helping them, but your receiving from them as they are able to bless you?
Do you like your answers? If you don’t (and y’all, if this were a test, I wouldn’t get an A, no worries), just stop and take a moment and breathe deeply. More good news is that your position right now, the place on the graph where your life right now — is it insulated and isolated? — we can use that. Yes, you probably can and should make some adjustments to your course, but where you are right now can still be a place where you can be on the side of alllll the little children in the world.
Earlier, I said that sending your kids to a neighborhood school in the city is a “good and easy way” to stop hoarding and start sharing. And if you are white, possibly repairing. And for me, it’s easier because when you are advocating for good things for your kids, unless you’re doing it way wrong, you will also be advocating for good things for all the kids at your school and hopefully also the district. [Note: if you are at a magnet school that can’t even qualify for Title I funds, please don’t get complacent.] Sure you may have to deal with all the not-being-a-white-savior stuff if applicable, but if you make a stink about something and get funding for art supplies or whatever, it’s not just art supplies for your kid, it’s for all the kids in the school, right? That’s what I mean by easy.
But there’s a good and hard way too, and guess what? You can totally do it! I just need you to live your life with a binocular focus. At the same time as you are making decisions about what’s good for your kid and how you can advocate for them, advocate for the good of the kids who go to school with my kids, the kids who are enrolled in the north city neighborhood schools, the ESOL students, the five thousand or so homeless students that SLPS serves.
Ultimately, many of the biggest issues that affect SLPS are created by our state legislature. If you have found yourself with contacts and relationships with people who have power, either governmentally or financially, simply advocate for public education to continue existing, for its funding to be increased, for past and present racist decisions to be reversed. In Missouri (and many other states), public education is under siege, and Kansas City and St. Louis are most targeted. These are the cities where many people equate “public school” with “poor black kids,” and are comfortable with their educational precarity. I know that school choice is a bright glittering thing, but I promise you we don’t want to end up like New Orleans. There the eradication of all public zoned schools has made school choice into a “school hope” situation — hopefully you will do everything exactly right and be able to get into the school you want, but the lottery decides for you. You don’t really have a choice.
If you are in a place with some power or some connection to power, you can be the person who says, “Yes, I know where my kids go to school, but I care about our public schools and the children in them as well, and I will vote accordingly — please listen to me.” Bother your elected officials early and often. Ask your friends who may not have a dog…I mean a kid in the fight to do it as a personal favor for you.
And while I’m on that note, I’d appreciate it if you would also lobby for policies that would help St. Louis families. Our high poverty school district would be directly and positively affected by a higher minimum wage, by jobs in the city, by housing rules that honor tenants — and affordable housing for families, by public transit that works for the lives of people without cars in the region, not for the people coming in from the county to work downtown or watch the Cardinals or the Blues.
Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others. (Yes, that’s Philippians 2:4, I’m sorry, I am a pastor’s wife.)
If you live in the city, another thing you can do is look up your neighborhood school (look up your address here!) and ask the principal and the Family Community Specialist what they need to flourish and then rally your networks and resources to make it happen. It would also be fine to ask a school in North City, if you live in South City. Instead of giving money or support only to yet another educational non-profit organization, give money directly to the PTO of your neighborhood school, or to the SLPS Foundation’s account for that school. As you consider supporting the school your children (or your loved ones’ children) are enrolled in, spend some time thinking about supporting your neighborhood school as well.
If you are part of a faith community, bring up SLPS at prayer time as often as you can, particularly if you have your kids enrolled in religious schools. Take the time to pray for SLPS as an institution, that it would be wise and just, pray for the leaders there, pray that everyone who works there would be someone who loves children and especially Black children. Pray against corruption, and against politicking with children’s lives. Pray for the school board members. Pray for the superintendent. Pray for the principals who lead schools. Pray for the network superintendents who lead the principals. Pray for the teachers. Pray for the staff — the secretaries, the aides, the resource officers, the janitors, the lunch ladies. Pray for the nurses. Pray for the librarians. Pray for the special education teachers. Pray for the students. Pray for their parents/guardians. Pray a special prayer for North City schools and all the other ones that feel abandoned by the city. Pray specific things for them. You can even pray evangelizing prayers — if you think your faith is the best faith for people, then pray for that goodness to come to everybody. But, and this is an important part — I need you to pray in such a way that SLPS becomes a vibrant and dynamic collection of individual humans, who in my faith are all made in the image of God, who have agency and live within systems of oppression, who are not merely a blob of inner city poverty, but real live people who exist and breathe just the same as you.
I need you to stitch the existence of the school district and the grown ups and children in them into your consciousness. If you don’t have space for the entire district, just pick one school. And yes, if you’re white, you can show up and help without being a white savior, while you use the power of your whiteness for good. “What do you need?” “Where can I advocate for you?” “What can I do to help?” are all powerful words that acknowledge your access to resources but put you in the passenger seat.
“Emily, this sounds like a whole lot of work.” Yes, it is. And you don’t have to do all of it at once. Pick one thing and grow into it. Be prepared for heartbreak and frustration, the same heartbreak and frustration that parents already in the district have felt, that your deliberate ignorance has fueled. I’m sorry, but I do want you to feel the weight of your complicity and complacency. Your family’s thriving — and I get that it may be precarious — how many of us making decisions about education for our children are millennials, struggling with the reality that actually our life hasn’t turned out like we thought it would? — has come at a cost, and it is children who are paying that cost for you. That’s a hard truth, but you can face it. Don’t look away: find a better place for your guilt. Do the work to make it right.
