St. Louis Public Schools will not close any schools during this academic year, according to district officials.
In recent interviews with St. Louis Public Radio, interim Superintendent Millicent Borishade, school board President Toni Cousins and Vice President Matt Davis said district officials haven’t decided which schools will have to close their doors in coming years.
They did not provide a timeline for when the district would do so.
SLPS hired an architecture firm, Cordogan, Clark & Associates, to assess school buildings across the district. The firm concluded that it would cost $1.8 billion over 20 years to repair and maintain all school buildings — some of which are over 100 years old.
The architecture firm also is working with a demographer to determine exactly how many students live in St. Louis and where they live. The firm is wrapping up a feasibility study on how effectively each school building is being used, according to district officials.
Davis and Cousins said that once the studies are completed, the district will present the findings to the public through community events.
“We're doing it in a way that we can have all the information and come up with something where we're giving people, realistically, something better,” Davis said. “It may not be the best thing for your neighborhood, but it's going to be the best thing for your student’s education.”
Dorothy Rohde-Collins, an education, policy and equity doctoral candidate at St. Louis University, said the district should decide soon which schools to close.
“It's great that these studies have been commissioned, but I would say that the timeline has been drawn out so long that the need to decide whether or not to close schools will become even more pressing as we get into next school year and the years that follow,” said Rohde-Collins, who researches school closures.
Enrollment at St. Louis Public Schools has been declining for decades. The district’s peak enrollment was more than 115,000 students in 1967; this year, it’s around 16,500.
