We Should All Repent, St. Louis

“We’re not a poor city, we’re a cheap city,” Tishaura Jones, our new mayor, has said repeatedly on the campaign trail. St. Louis is rife with examples of people choosing the cheap option, deferring maintenance while buildings crumble and people leave. Cheap happens when people make decisions for their own benefit in the moment, not considering long term impacts, likely unintended consequences, or the greater good of the communities in which they live.

We’re a cheap city, and we are a tired city. We are a complacent city, we are an often selfish city. Living in the dysfunction created by cheap decisions makes people tired, and tired people have less capacity to make good choices. Those of us who have the financial capacity to overcome the dysfunction of the city, to be cushioned from it, are often complacent about the realities that plague the less fortunate. And all of those things work together to create a city where selfishness is seen as the only path to success. We are a city in which too many people have chosen individual, family, or business success over the flourishing of the city as a whole — the flourishing of groups to which we may not belong, of neighborhoods that aren’t ours, of children to whom we are not related. This indifference (when it isn’t straight racist malevolence) has and will continue to destroy our city, whether it is white flight and policies designed to hurt our city’s Black citizens, or this current moment with public officials engaged in ego-driven posturing and non-profits more interested in perpetuating themselves as necessary institutions than either group creating actual change for those who need it most.

The city’s relationship with its own school district is a manifestation of the way cheapness, tiredness, complacency, and selfishness end up harming the lives of our most vulnerable citizens and our greatest resource — our precious children.

SLPS is, as superintendent Kelvin Adams has said, downstream of a lot of other people’s decisions — some straight evil, some misguided, some occurring because of passivity or self-interest. And now today, we have a district that is 80% Black in a city that is 45% Black, a district with so many families in poverty that there is community-wide free breakfast and lunch except for the 3 or 4 gated schools where resourced families congregate, a district that serves around 4000 unhoused children — around 20% of the district’s enrolled students, as well as very sick children, incarcerated children, the majority of ESOL students, to name a few. The district is far from perfect, and the state government certainly bears much responsibility for the continual defunding of public education in the state. But we the region, the city, the institutions, we the citizens and parents of the city need to own our actions that have harmed the district — which harms our most vulnerable children. We need to repent, and ask what we can do to make it right.

In the region, everyone who left the city for “better” (and/or whiter schools) plays a role, although white flight must shoulder the vast majority of the blame, not Black parents trying to do their best. Regional nonprofit institutions are complicit as they allow wealthy county (and certain city neighborhoods) residents feel generous about helping those poor unfortunate [Black is understood] city children, while exacerbating the class divide and instead of causing actual change, allowing bad faith actors to to exploit the situations and use our city public school children as PR material.

It would take a book to talk about the ways the city, both government and citizens, has harmed the school district and those it serves. Not even going as far back as pre-civil rights — we can start in the 90s when voters elected members of the Citizens Council to the school board, to the destruction of thriving Black neighborhoods for monuments and highways to systematic disinvestment in North City and the policies that allow people like McKee to buy properties and just sit on them. And let’s not forget what Mayor Slay did, when he made his own slate of school board members whose choice to hire outside management hurt an already struggling district and led to the formation of a state appointed board and away from elected governance.

Schools need children to stay open, and whether it was the whites leaving freely or Black people being displaced or reluctantly leaving because the city refuses to adequately manage their section of the city, a great deal of blame can go to the city government. Not only has it pursued development plans that ignore the existence of families and especially low income families, used tax abatements/incentives to lure development without acknowledging the immediate cost to SLPS (and its students and families), its leadership past and present refuse to invest in relationships with SLPS unless it is politically expedient or good public relations.

And individuals and parents, particularly white and/or affluent and resourced families in the city have much to answer for as well. In the quest to “do what’s best for [my] family,” they (we — I must include myself in here as well) have rarely considered if what’s best for our family is harmful to our community — or if our measure of what is best has been malformed by racism, classism, and reliance on measures that have been developed to bring profit for a few, not designed to promote the common good. We let GreatSchools direct us in our homebuying or we opt out of “those” schools so we can stay in our dream home in Shaw, or our luxury renovation on the edge of Dutchtown. We may say “nobody goes to public schools” or “of course you can’t use those schools,” or consider the gifted SLPS schools as the only possible public school option for our children. We all too often create a life and culture that ignores the impact of our choices on segregation and other ills. It allows us to ignore the children going to school in our own neighborhoods who most need directed attention to flourish. This islanding effect allows people to stay in their own little affinity groups, rather than be fully engaged in the needs and lives of our neighbors, both to give and receive. When resourced people ignore their “bad” neighborhood school as an option for their children, or even as a place that matters for their neighborhood’s flourishing, the school loses the resources and networks those parents have access to, and those families miss out on the joys (and struggle) of vulnerability and solidarity.

My family has been at one of those “terrible” (2/10 score!) neighborhood SLPS schools for 5.5 years now. When we started public school in Alabama at our Title I zoned school there, I assumed that our family would be a blessing to the school, with all our resources and connections. As it turned out, that first year I was pregnant or had an newborn and was barely able to get our pre-K kid (now a 7th grader) to school on time, let alone advocate or provide. And from Alabama to St. Louis, the reality that we were and are the ones who need our school, a lot more than they needed us, was — and remains — humbling. But allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, to accept free lunches, free coats, all the times I just had to shake my head and say, “I’m sorry, we just couldn’t get it together,” and accept our teachers’ grace, has been life-altering. My kids have learned that despite all their privileges, all their parents’ education, they are not better or more special or more deserving than their classmates, but can use all their gifts to make things better for everyone. We have learned to live in solidarity with our neighbors, to allow their struggles to be our struggles and our struggles to be their struggles. This education has brought not only peace as we live a shared life — not with competition and scarcity, but full of joy and a depth — but also a richness amidst the struggles, that sorting ourselves into a socioeconomically similar bubble could never provide.

We cannot, as a city, continue to ignore SLPS until there is a crisis, whether it be school closings to argue about or a pandemic that demonstrates that SLPS is still the best way to make sure our more vulnerable families are connected to the resources they need.

Our school (and your zoned school) may have fewer resources but they are full of God’s beloved children, of precious souls who should have the same life chances as a kid in Clayton. Even if resourced families never come to their school, if no privileged families choose to experience the joy of shared struggles and vulnerabilities, our district’s children deserve SO MUCH MORE than they are getting. They deserve more than the best efforts of an underfunded, neglected, and sometimes wrong-headed school district that has to pick up the pieces of bad policy decisions and individual decisions motivated by fear and/or internalized racism. They deserve better than the best efforts of a cobbled together network of nonprofits whose work (while we are so thankful for it), cannot meet the needs of every child in the district, and in some cases is still inequitably distributed. For our whole city to flourish, for families with children to stay, and population decline to end, we need a city who is meeting the needs of our families before their children ever get to school — a city, perhaps, where children are not affected by gun violence, a city who has corrected its environmental racism so that children aren’t growing up with preventable medical conditions like lead poisoning or asthma, a city willing to do what it takes to prioritize stable affordable housing for families, not tiny luxury apartments for singles who would never consider living with their future children in the city because they “can’t” use “those” schools, and can’t afford private or parochial school. Our children deserve a city that is connected to and supportive of its own school district, whose citizens pour philanthropic resources into the district, not this continual distraction and fracturing created by new efforts to re-imagine education without elected governance. The parents of our children deserve a neighborhood school that is a relief from the burden of too many choices; they deserve to have the only navigation they do be a ten or fifteen minute walk. They deserve a school that brings them joy because they know nobody will love and serve their kids like the schools that are already part of their community — and have been for many years.

We all know that despite my children’s own positive experience and the rosy picture I envision, it doesn’t match reality for many families. I want to say that we will not get to that reality that all our children deserve without repentance. I need to repent. You need to repent. The city government needs to repent. The county schools who’ve benefited from white flight and segregation and redlining need to repent (and give us money). Nonprofits need to repent. Employers need to repent. Landlords need to repent a whole lot. Former mayors need to repent. The district needs to repent. Parents need to repent. Children need to repent (but not that much). Until the ways that public education in St. Louis has been perverted or subverted by racism, classism, self-protection, self-interest, and special interests have been named and reckoned with, the reality I long to see for every child in St. Louis will not exist. We must repent and recommit ourselves to the idea of public education as a public good, not just for kids — all the kids — but for all our communities and our city as a whole, not because we’ve trained up workers for the future, but because we have raised citizens with love and care who will become capable adults who know they have the support of their neighborhood, their city behind them. When we act in the best interests of all our children and especially the most vulnerable, we will see a flourishing city.