At her inauguration last Tuesday, St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer pledged to build a better future for all of the city’s children. Somewhat curiously, though, she made no reference to local schools.
Addressing a crowd at City Hall just one week after unseating incumbent and fellow Democrat Tishaura Jones, Spencer opted not to mention a district that was shaken last year by scandal and a wave of staff terminations. The omission reflects the political reality that, unlike their counterparts in cities like New York and Washington, St. Louis mayors are given no control over public education. With little official influence, Spencer will instead have to appeal to the seven-member school board, which itself gained three new members on the day she was elected.
St. Louis Schools Head into Uncertainty Following Superintendent’s Ouster
Former board member Dorothy Rohde-Collins said she believed the turnover on the school board, which included the defeat of its president, could yield huge benefits for students and families. Still, she called it “endlessly frustrating” that the city’s leaders haven’t devoted more time and care to the problems of the district in recent decades.
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“The inability of mayors to engage with the education system is the number-one thing that’s holding the city back,” said Rohde-Collins, who served from 2017 to 2021 and now writes about city politics on the platform Substack. “They don’t have statutory authority — they can’t do the budget, they don’t appoint members to the board — but they should be able to pay attention and understand the issues.”
Those issues include not just the controversial hiring of former Superintendent Keisha Scarlett, who was terminated in October amid an investigation into her alleged misuse of district funds. They also extend to the persistent decline in student enrollment at St. Louis Public Schools, now reduced by nearly 90 percent since its peak in the 1960s. With aging, under-utilized facilities sprinkled throughout the city, local authorities will have to make agonizing decisions about how to manage a decline in numbers while attempting to boost academic results.
John Wright, Sr., who attended public schools in St. Louis before embarking on a career in education that culminated in appointments as both a superintendent and board member, said the newly elected board members needed to quickly develop a plan of action. Simply following the example of less crisis-plagued districts, he added, would be an important first step.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you,” Wright observed. “There are models out there of functioning school systems, and it’s a matter of exploring those: What do they have that we don’t have? What are good board members doing across the country that we aren’t doing?”
Keisha Scarlett scandal
Some of the biggest governance challenges facing the new board arose during the tumultuous tenure of the previous superintendent.
Announced to great fanfare in 2023 after a nationwide search, Scarlett listed school improvement and academic achievement among her top priorities. But after just a year in the job, she was placed on a leave of absence as questions grew about her personnel choices and spending practices.
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Scarlett was accused of favoritism in hiring after giving jobs to a group of personal friends and former colleagues. Board members also claimed they had been deceived about the salaries of top staffers, which sometimes exceeded $200,000. Scarlett herself wracked up thousands of dollars in charges on perks like flowers and meals during her time in office, a later audit would reveal. Most of Scarlett’s aides, including her chief of staff and chief financial officer, were let go precipitously, leaving the district without a leadership team.
In a striking twist, however, Scarlett’s hand-picked deputy was appointed as her replacement after no search process. Most board members defended the decision as necessary for the sake of stability, but by that point, dissension had already exploded into public view; in the middle of a January board meeting, member Sadie Weiss abruptly quit, lamenting the body’s previous failures in oversight.
Rohde-Collins said she was dismayed by the organizational chaos enshrouding local schools, with board members demanding one anothers’ resignations even as basic services like bus transportation fell through, stranding thousands of students at the beginning of this school year.
“It feels like we’re all trapped in this ridiculous movie here in St. Louis, and no one would believe that it’s real life,” Rohde-Collins said. “It doesn’t feel like anyone is sorry that these things happened and that we’re having so much turmoil.”
Three seats were contested in this month’s elections, including two vacated by incumbents who declined to run for another term. Board President Antionette Cousins, the target of substantial criticism for the district’s dysfunction, sought reelection, but finished fourth out of 12 candidates.
Byron Clemens, a longtime organizer with the American Federation of Teachers’ local affiliate, said he was heartened by voters’ attention to the school board elections, which typically receive much less coverage than the mayor’s race. The top two vote getters in the field, he added, each tallied more votes than Mayor Jones received in her failed reelection bid.
“Despite the low turnout, the public is engaged with education,” Clemens said. “That’s important, that people believe in an elected board and support public schools.”
‘Everybody is in trouble’
But any post-inaugural honeymoon will likely be brief.
The three new board members did not run as a unified slate; just one, Brian Marston, won the endorsement of Clemens’s union, which also backed Cousins’s unsuccessful bid. Another, veteran school administrator Karen Collins-Adams, is the wife of Dr. Kelvin Adams, the long-serving superintendent who preceded Scarlett. Reaching a consensus on the district’s leadership, including the future of Superintendent Millicent Borishade, will likely absorb much of their attention in the coming months.
Beyond the day-to-day necessity of rebuilding trust with families and district staff, St. Louis must soon confront the structural problem of plummeting headcounts. State data indicate that the district has lost 3,000 students since the pandemic, with enrollment falling to around 16,000 from a peak of roughly 115,000 a half-century ago. Only one year over the last 35 has seen the total number of public schools stay the same from beginning to end, with 85 opening and 104 closing since 1991.
Further closures and consolidations are regarded by most observers as inevitable. Wright, who remembers school days spent in overflowing classrooms, said that abandoned and dilapidated facilities now blight neighborhoods, often causing residents to move. Many of the oldest schools in the city, including some that educated African American children in the era of segregation, are likely destined for demolition, he added.
“You can see the windows broken out from blocks away,” he said. “I went to four different elementary schools, and they’re all closed.”
Any plans to shrink St. Louis’s K–12 footprint will require tough political compromises with families and educators, who usually dread school consolidations. Mayor Spencer has not yet stated a position on the future of the district’s facilities or finances; reached for comment, her deputy communications director said that schools would be included on the agenda of one of her half-dozen advisory committees. But Rohde-Collins said that her input could be critical given both the disputatious nature of building closures and the recent acrimony on the school board.
“That’s where a mayor could come in, by bringing people together, starting conversations, and making it a real priority for the next four years to say, ‘We have to figure this out because everybody is in trouble.’ A mayor could change the trajectory of the city by focusing on it.”