What do you do with an idea?

If you only know me from these posts or my twice monthly appearances on the school board YouTube show, there’s something you may not know about me.

I’m short. Like short short. Most middle schoolers are taller than me and on the spectrum of Simone Biles to Kevin Hart I fall about halfway. In my mind though I’m six feet tall and generally project vibes to match, so I hear a lot of “Oh! I thought you’d be taller!”

Nope.

Quinta Brunson’s April SNL monologue was perfect. The best monologue all season, if you ask me, and the most memorable since Ryan Gosling broke up with Ken through a Taylor Swift ballad. Like Dwayne Wade (lol, you really should watch it), Quinta helped me feel seen. I’m sure a lot of us shorties did. It isn’t too often that we get to see a woman go out on stage and proudly celebrate a characteristic that many people view as a flaw or, at the very least, something others think we’d change if we could.

As a woman who is 5-foot-2 only when I put a little extra stretch into it, I know how hard it is to be taken seriously in a sea of six foot tall men. So often, too often, height translates to power and dominance and competence and I just don’t look the part. I love seeing other short women in positions of authority. It completely disrupts everything we think we know about who gets to be in charge. And as far as I’m concerned, the more we can disrupt the conventional power grid the better. After all, where has relying on it gotten us really?

I don’t have Quinta’s gift of comedic timing and I’m definitely not going to do a song and dance, but I do have this platform I try to use to elevate ideas that wouldn’t otherwise get much attention. But maybe it could also help others feel seen.

And no, not the 5’5” and under club.

The people whose ideas are too big to squeeze into the lanes they’ve been assigned. Ideas so big they nag and nag and nag demanding to be set free.

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Way back at the end of 2019, I made the very first draft of what would later grow into a moratorium and the citywide plan. It was a mess. Sharpie scrawled on the back of some stapled set of papers I found on my kitchen counter. Arrows and lists of names and concentric circles, a matrix of timelines and processes, all feeble attempts to visualize what was taking shape inside my brain. I remember sliding it across a Bread Co. table to a then-friend, a relationship that’s since fallen apart, become a casualty of St. Louis education politics.

“There isn’t anyone on here that thinks I can do something like this.”

The look in his eye said he wasn’t so sure I could either.

But I knew. And my idea did too.

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In his very lovely children’s picture book, What Do You Do With an Idea?, Kobi Yamada articulates the experience of having a big idea far better than I ever could. Take five minutes to watch the read aloud by the author and then come back. Yes, I am serious. Don’t try to act like your day can’t be improved by hearing an inspirational children’s book.

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Okay, so citywide plan was my big idea, the one I keep trying to walk away from, to ignore, to abandon. But it keeps following me, demanding my attention. Every time I try to quit I get a two-ish week reprieve, but then I’m back to frantically typing out ideas and plans in the middle of the night more furiously than ever and stopping mid-walk in the park to capture the thoughts that are going so fast my legs can’t keep up.

St. Louis deserves more. St. Louis is capable of so much more. But we’ll never get there if we don’t engage in real strategic planning that cuts across all our factions, political divides, and neighborhoods.

I don’t know how to stop pushing on this.

But where has that persistence gotten me? Where has it gotten us?

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I poured so much into the developing the citywide plan into what I thought that idea could be. I analyzed the 2020 community visioning workshop data and pulled out all the ways in which the workshop participants found the city to be complicit in dysfunctional, chaotic mess that is our public education system. I’ve never shared it publicly before (read it here); other than me there’s probably fewer than five or ten people who have seen it, but at this point why hide it? This idea refuses to go away, so we might as well feed it.

From there I was drafting work groups, committees, and timelines (I’m intentionally keeping these proprietary intellectual property for now), looking for ways to target policy solutions to the problems our committee members identified. And, for a while, it seemed like the Citywide Plan for Education could be that thing we so desperately needed. The thing we still need. There was a website and committee meetings, news coverage and community events.

We were so close.

But instead of digging in, the work got easier. It stayed superficial instead of cutting deep through the layers of generational trauma and mistrust that form the skeleton of St. Louis. As things in St. Louis so often do, the process culminated in a report anyway. A report that explicitly stated the need for a Phase Two, countless goals claiming to be so urgent they had a 12-18 month deadline for completion. Well, Phase Two never actualized and that deadline was six months ago but that doesn’t stop the superintendent and upper-level administrators from referencing it on a regular basis.

That report, The Blueprint as it’s now called, is an alibi of sorts, a coverup. A sparkly facade that hides the darkness beneath. It still exists, not as a benchmark to measure progress or goals to reach, but as a strategy trotted out under false pretenses to pretend and protect, to defend the lack of real work in progress.

Not only did it get us no where, but we’re worse off. The new Reimagine SLPS plan is built on this stack of lies all but ensuring that process will lead to no where too. Or at least no where we want to go.

When it was released, I went on record, calling it a disappointment. I’ve talked and written about those feelings a lot before and I’m sure I will again, but I’ve never shared that it was the first and only time I’ve ever cried in an interview. I had to stop, take a break, and reset. The heartbreak strangled my throat as I mourned for the time wasted and opportunities lost, realized that we might not ever get another chance to pull people together with the express purpose of making our City better by making public education better.

But then I learned about the 1985 Long Range Plan, another big idea that never found its wings. If that could fail, evaporate into what-could-have-been, and then see a new iteration of the same big idea decades later, then all hope was not lost for my big idea. The challenge now is to make sure it’s not forty years that pass before we try again.

We have to rally sooner this time.

This city has been in a state of decline for 75 years. There’s no excuse for our inaction in the past, no justification for the response to take a “day by day” approach or count on people returning after this disaster when they never have before.

We can’t afford to delay the real work any longer.

But that’s exactly what’s happening.

So far the official government response to the tornado has been pitiful. Lots of conversations about how to get money and how to clean up, but shockingly little about human-centered needs like shelter, food, and supplies. Well-established advocacy groups have stood in the gap, attempting to save our city at the expense of the health and well-being of their own members. Regular, everyday people are stretching their budgets to include donations of food, toiletries, and cleaning products, clearing local store shelves of tarps and batteries even as billion-dollar companies and their CEOs make donations that pale in comparison to their balance sheet value.

We need a real plan more than ever.

I’m not sure what I’m proposing here. If I’m being honest my brain is a messy swirl of ideas and feelings and worries that I’m having trouble pulling apart into something productive and meaningful. Yet, over the past few years, I’ve learned that the way to get through that is put some words down on the page, to follow the sentences one after the other until they lead me where I want to go, where we need to go. It will take more than one or two of these essays to find my way out, but each one gets us a little farther and a little closer to Citywide Plan (Dorothy’s Version).

Thanks for reading.