During the first two weeks of classes, St. Louis Public Schools worked with community ambassadors who reported back to district leaders about the overall functioning of schools.
Acting Superintendent Millicent Borishade said earlier this week the ambassadors include volunteers from the community and school staff who have been providing feedback about school meals, the cleanliness of school buildings, and the efficiency of bus routes and alternate transportation vendors.
She said ambassadors selected schools they wanted to partner with. Transportation leaders said earlier this week they hadn’t received any reports of safety violations at the schools, nor regarding transportation, including for students who take public transit.
The district has worked to place kids in taxis with decals and identifier numbers, provide gas cards to parents and bus passes for Metro Transit as a means to get kids to school, and utilize buses from other vendors like First Student and Xtra Care Services.
SLPS Chief Operations Officer Square Watson said they would meet with transportation vendors on Friday about safety protocols after several public complaints arose about vendors running red lights and kids arriving late to school.
For parents who need assistance with transportation, Borishade said the quickest way to receive assistance is to contact their school principal.
“What we are finding is in some cases, the parents have not yet registered or enrolled in St. Louis Public Schools,” Borishade said. “The building principal will reach out to their network superintendent and someone will respond to the parent. We want our students in school, so someone is going to respond.”
When asked about students who miss school due to transportation woes — such as a family car breaking down or if private vendors have issues — Borishade declined to answer and said she’d provide further insight on how school absences will be treated in those cases.
She said a more detailed presentation on transportation will be provided to the Board of Education after Labor Day.
Community School Partnership
In a partnership with SLPS that began 10 years ago, the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis began working with families and students through the Community School Partnership program.
SLPS has been paying Urban League $500,000 a year for the Community School Partnership, according to Board of Education Vice President Matt Davis. But the SLPS board will vote next month on whether to continue paying them for the services.
The services began at Clay Elementary School in 2014, which at the time had a high mobility rate of about 90%, said LaChrisa Crenshaw, director of School Partnerships at the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis at a Board of Education meeting this week. Mobility rates measure the number of students who transfer in and out of a school during a school year.
The daily average attendance at that time was about 76% at Clay Elementary, she said. The original model consisted of three student and family mentors working inside the school to help stabilize families to ensure students are ready to learn in the school setting, Crenshaw said.
“We were working to try to help that school to be able to have wraparound services and to have what they needed to be able to show up in a space where their children could come to school at least a 90% rate,” Crenshaw said.
Within a few years, the mobility rate was brought down to being in the 20% range, she said.
“We had one family where seven people were in one car, and it was about trying to find a hotel to get them in until we were able to get them into a shelter, and then get them into a transitional living program and then eventually get them into housing,” she added.
The success at Clay Elementary allowed the program to expand into Bryan Hill Elementary during the 2016-17 school year, she said. Clay Elementary closed in 2021, however.
Bryan Hill also had three mentors in the school, and during the 2017-18 school year, they were up to 96.8% average daily attendance, which was the highest in the district at that time.
Services provided through the Community School Partnership include crisis intervention, daily school attendance monitoring and phone calls; housing, food and utility assistance; support for after-school programming and more.
The program has since spread to nine schools in the SLPS district, and instead of three family workers at each school, they now have one.
“It doesn't happen overnight, and a lot of times, our staff in the school are so busy doing what they're doing in the schools to educate, to make sure children are ready to learn in the classroom, there has to be somebody who can support on the outside to make sure they're there to the family is Ok to get the children there every day, and that's what this program is about,” Crenshaw said.
