Over 100 public schools and charters have closed in St. Louis since 1991, and nearly 90 have opened, according to a new study released this month by St. Louis University’s Policy Research in Missouri Education Center. However, researchers say the unpredictability of those closures can cause harm to students, families and teachers.
“What we’ve ended up with is this constantly turning system of public schools where it's very unpredictable from one year to the next,” said Dorothy Rohde-Collins, an education, policy and equity doctoral candidate at SLU and former SLPS Board of Education president. “Which schools will be open? Which schools will be closed? What does that do to our students and families and teachers to work within this system (that) is constantly changing?”
Rohde-Collins, along with Cameron Anglum, an assistant professor at the Lehigh University College of Education in Pennsylvania, were provided $4,000 by SLU’s PRiME Center to conduct the study. Rohde-Collins said this is the second summer they’ve probed education in Missouri.
Key findings
Researchers found that of the 88 schools that opened in St. Louis between 1991 and 2023, 27 were by St. Louis Public Schools, and 61 were charter schools. Meanwhile, of the 106 schools that closed during that period, 87 were SLPS schools, and 19 were charters.
Public tax dollars fund all these schools, but SLPS is governed by a democratically elected school board while charter school agencies are run by privately appointed boards.
Rohde-Collins has children in the SLPS district, and she said the unpredictability of school closures is hard to navigate as a parent.
“It’s really hard to plan when your set of options is constantly changing from one year to the next,” Rohde-Collins said Monday. “If you’ve got multiple children, the choices that you have available to you for one child may be completely different when you have other children going through the system, and so you're always starting over trying to learn and understand what's going on.
"We don't have a lot of places to go to get those questions answered, and when we do, it's really time-consuming,” she added. “We have to seek out those answers from individual schools, and it just is exhausting.”
Against the backdrop of national and local tensions about whether charters harm traditional public schools by soaking up funding and other resources, researchers advocated for more collaboration between the two, specifically in St. Louis.
"I think that if we want our public school system to improve and thrive and truly serve the children of the city, we have to stop fighting. That hasn’t gotten us anywhere. We’ve been in that mindset for 25 years."
— Dorothy Rohde-Collins, study researcher and doctoral candidate at St. Louis University
Rohde-Collins noted that they face similar challenges like child poverty and staffing shortages. According to the St. Louis school district, about 20% of SLPS families are homeless or considered housing insecure.
“If a city were to recommend trying to figure out if they should allow charter schools into their city, I would recommend against it,” Rohde-Collins said. “I think they divert resources. I think they stress the system. I think too much choice is harmful.”
However, she said, St. Louis is in a different position. She thinks charters and the SLPS district have a unique opportunity to work together.
“We’ve got magnet schools that act as neighborhood schools and neighborhood schools that are more like magnets, and it's this extremely convoluted system of choice in St. Louis and so here, I don't think the differentiation is helpful anymore,” Rohde-Collins said. “I think that if we want our public school system to improve and thrive and truly serve the children of the city, we have to stop fighting. That hasn’t gotten us anywhere. We’ve been in that mindset for 25 years.”
SLPS Chief Financial Officer Angie Banks suggested at a school board meeting last month that the SLPS district should be “right-sized” to help save money amid a projected $35 million deficit for the 2024-25 school year. The district is currently undergoing a state audit that began Aug. 13 after growing concerns about Superintendent Keisha Scarlett’s hiring practices, transportation woes and district spending.
Byron Clemens, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers Local 420, the union representing SLPS’s teachers, teaching assistants and other staff, said downsizing is a bad idea, however. He championed public schools as anchors in the community.
“We know how it has a negative impact just seeing an empty school,” Clemens said Monday. “But we feel like we should be repurposing schools and making them into smaller community schools and offering resources in those buildings, (like) full-service community schools, even with health clinics and resources and state social workers.”
Other findings
Researchers suggested that strategic planning and investment in public schools could stabilize the city's population and improve overall education. The study also pointed out an uneven distribution of SLPS and charter schools across the city’s wards.
The two wards with the most SLPS schools are currently located in north St. Louis while the two wards with the fewest schools are in south St. Louis. However, researchers said the distribution pattern of charter schools is less clear.
The study found that wards in south St. Louis tend to have fewer charter schools than those in north St. Louis.
Over the last 10 years, the study found SLPS student enrollment has declined from around 25,000 to just over 16,000. Black student enrollment decreased from more than 20,000 to around 13,000 and white student enrollment decreased from nearly 3,000 to just under 2,000.
On the flip side, charter school enrollment spiked over that same period from around 8,500 to nearly 11,500. Black student enrollment increased at charters from less than 6,000 to more than 8,000, and white student enrollment also increased from around 1,700 to more than 1,900.
Some of the shifts in enrollment are due to the decreasing population in St. Louis, Rohde-Collins said. She said one way to stabilize the population is to place schools more intentionally.
“I think building new schools would be a great way to spend the Rams money as an investment for the children who live here now, but also investing in neighborhoods,” she said.
