Please...

It’s true: It’s not what you say, it’s what you keep saying.

But, you guys, I’m tired. Like so, so, so tired. I’ve been saying the same thing for so long now and it doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.

A highly unstable system of pubic schools, October 10, 2023
St. Louis deserves new school buildings, January 11, 2024
School closure is back in the news, June 10, 2024
Write for the ghosts, March 10, 2025
Where did it start? When does it end? April 28, 2025
What do you do with an idea? June 5, 2025
We are in the middle, September 29, 2025
We didn’t have to end up here, October 6, 2025
The process of school closure: A refresher, October 13, 2025
What if trust is more powerful than power? November 12, 2025

I’ll let you click through the backstory while I get straight to the point.

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To the members of the Board of Education of the City of St. Louis:

Please make a plan for our school buildings before you do anything else. Don’t sell a school or tear down a building, don’t relocate or consolidate programs, don’t reopen tornado damaged schools. Hold off on making costly repairs, moving grades, and changing school start times. Stop everything and commit to developing a big picture, strategic, long term vision. Our beloved school district’s (and maybe even our city’s) continued existence depends on it.

Please decide how many schools we need, where they should be located, and how they should interact with our city’s neighborhoods.

Please stop spending money on school relocations, tornado repairs, and other capital improvements until we figure those first three things out.

Please don’t demolish or sell any of our city’s historic buildings just yet. Postpone issuing the RFP. Take the buildings off the market. (Perhaps, also, explain to your broker that saying a vacant schools is suitable for “continued educational use” and suggesting its sale to “another school” is fraught. Or are we selling to charters now? And, if so, we should definitely hear more about that!)

Please discuss the Demographic and Facility Condition dashboards. We waited a long time and paid a lot of money for them. You bragged about how cool they were and how much data they contained, yet you haven’t talked about them since or explained how they’d be used in decision making. Or even what decision you’d be making or when.

Please ask for help.

And, if you refuse to do any of the above, then please, please. . .

PLEASE be forthcoming and transparent about the decisions you’re making and why.

Make your scoring matrices and the data you depend on public.

Describe the community engagement process, who you talked to, and what you learned.

State your pros and cons. Tell us why you’re doing what you’re doing and what harm will come to the district if you don’t.

Name the consultants you’re using, what value they provide, and why they’ve been selected to do the work

Determine the impact on the budget. Accurately and consistently calculate costs. Honestly portray potential reimbursements and the timeline for receiving them. Or even if it’s likely we’ll receive them at all.

So far, we haven’t seen any of this. From where we sit, on the other side of the dais or the other end of a Zoom, it’s just one hastily made decision after another. Nothing connects to anything else, no acknowledgment of the past, no preview of the future.

What’s the rush, anyway? Not everything needs to happen right now. Most of these decisions cannot be undone. We can’t un-demolish a building or un-traumatize people after closing their school. Any of the decisions that can be relatively easily reversed (like start times for example) may trigger a multitude of unintended consequences (either in initial implementation or in reversal) we’ll never fully understand but we will still pay a price for in potential loss of enrollment, disrupted learning, and lowered staff morale.

Please slow down, regroup, and give this another go.

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I am not against closing schools. I am not opposed to tearing down buildings, either. We need to do these things. We must. In fact, we are already too far behind.

It’s not that I want to see the tornado damaged schools stay closed forever. (Most of them probably shouldn’t have closed in the first place). And, it’s not that I think we should have underenrolled programs at multiple schools when one fully-enrolled program would suffice or start high school at the crack of dawn just for fun or leave three kids in a classroom to be able to say a school goes through sixth grade.

However, I am against making these changes without a long-term plan and I refuse to enable the arrogant, foolish idea that positive, long-lasting improvement can come without one.

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Five years ago I voted to close schools because there was no viable alternative, because of the misguided belief the district could lead a citywide plan, because I thought we all wanted our city to be the best it could be.

It’s been five years of living with my proprietary blend of pride and regret.

Five years of experience and building expertise, very niche, very specific expertise in school closure and the policy process surrounding it.

Five years of searching through newspapers, combing through history, scanning library shelves, and crunching numbers trying to understand why we’re like this.

Five years of hunting ghosts.

Five years of op-eds, interviews, guest lectures.

Five years of offering up ideas for free in emails and government platforms, at community engagement events, and through behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

Five years in coffee shops with politicians and wanna-be politicians, reporters and moms and grad students, allies and enemies, anyone who would listen, or even just pretend to listen for an hour or two or more.

Five years of living in a world that revolves around school closure and carrying the weight of a school district that never, not once, not even for one day, had a plan.

And, if that’s not enough to convince you to listen to me, then nothing will.