This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: When two buses from Riverview Gardens rolled up to Oakville High School after an hour-long trip south Thursday morning, the first person students met wasn’t the school’s principal or the Mehlville school superintendent.
It was John Wolff, the district’s director of communications, who wanted to greet the students and give them notice of the scrum of reporters and cameramen they would have to navigate to get into the building. They were free to talk or not before they began their first day of classes in their new school.
Once they got off the bus, they got a more formal welcome from Superintendent Eric Knost.
“Good morning,” he said as students got off each of the buses, which arrived about 20 minutes apart starting a little after 7 a.m. “How ya’ doing? How was the ride?”
The 57 students who were enrolled at Oakville were part of the more than 200 students transferring from unaccredited Riverview Gardens. Their home district is paying tuition, and for Mehlville, transportation costs as well under a law upheld by the Missouri Supreme Court in June.
Since that time, districts – both the unaccredited ones, Riverview Gardens and Normandy, and the prospective receiving districts like Mehlville – have been scrambling to get ready for classes and to address the concerns of parents and others on both the sending and receiving ends.
There has also been legal maneuvering, as the American Civil Liberties Union and others have questioned whether Mehlville and other accredited districts have the legal right to limit the number of students they will enroll.
As of Thursday morning, no lawsuits had been filed, and Knost said that angle of the whole situation was not what he and his staff were focusing on.
“Everybody seems to be real student-centered,” he told the Beacon as he waited for the buses to arrive. “We are concentrating on the first week of school. We haven’t been concentrating on lawsuits.”
Later Thursday, the Children's Education Alliance of Missouri announced that it would not file a lawsuit against Mehlville at this time. The group said that all of the five families considering a lawsuit had finally found spots in a school district with which they were satisfied.
Knost said he was pleased with the communication the district has had with the families at orientation and other times.
“We’re all glad the first day of school is here,” Knost said. “It’s a nervous time for kids and for their families. We want it to be smooth for them.
“The icing on the cake will be a good first day and a good school year.”
The effort to achieve that goal began with a video put together by students and staff at Mehlville and continued Thursday morning, with staff welcoming students at the door to Oakville High. Pulsating music, a bubble machine and TV monitors wishing happy birthday to a variety of students greeted everyone walking through the door.
Those who needed to have their photo ID taken were directed to Gym B; around 8 a.m., kids began filing into Gym A for an assembly where all new students, not just the Riverview transfers, were given special recognition.
'We rock!'
Principal Jan Kellerman – who arrived at the assembly on the back of a motorcycle driven by one of her assistant principals – noted that Oakville had about as many new students from elsewhere as it did from Riverview, among a student body of 1,800, so the transfers from north St. Louis County weren’t the only ones who would have to get used to new surroundings.
“How is everybody this morning?” she asked the assembled students, who had to answer again more loudly when she taunted, “I can’t hear you.”
Welcoming the new students to “our house,” Kellerman noted the new theme for Oakville this year, that life is a highway, and that every student, not just the new ones, would be traveling along a new path.
“All of you are on a journey this year,” she said, adding that everyone needed to help the others succeed.
“Our mission is to tell you and show you all of the people who are going to travel on that journey this year,” Kellerman said.
“We’re going to show the whole country just what goes on at Oakville High School and Mehlville School District. We rock!”
Later, she said in an interview that the circumstances around the transfers added to the excitement of the new school year and the new theme.
“We’ve been in the news,” said Kellerman, who is in her third year as Oakville principal, “but that’s kind of cool because people can see what a great school we have here.”
The assembly continued with the introduction of staff members, music from the band, perfomances by cheerleaders and the Golden Girls dancers and a cheer, with one side of the gym shouting “T-I-G” and the other side responding, “E-R-S.”
Students arriving for their first day also seemed ready to put the drama of the preparations behind them and get down to work.
Courtney Clark and Hayley Cusumano, both proclaiming that this is their final year at Oakville with “Senior” on the front of their shirts and “14” on the back, said that their parents weren’t necessarily happy about Riverview Gardens choosing Mehlville as its transportation district, but they themselves didn’t have any objection.
“It really doesn’t bother me,” Courtney said. “It’s not a big deal.”
Brothers Jacob Athanas, a senior, and Sam Athanas, a junior, also were pretty nonchalant about what had bothered a lot of adults, on both sides.
“I guess its great for the kids who are coming here,” Sam said. “I’m not sure it’s going to make that much of a difference for us and the school. It’s going to be different for the kids coming here, because they’re getting another opportunity to learn.
“I was watching on TV and saw people saying kids would have to walk 15 minutes to get to their bus stop. I thought that was kind of sad.”
Students getting off the bus from Riverview Gardens seemed pleased to be getting the year started as well.
Freshman Keyron January said he had to get up at 5 a.m. to catch his bus in time and was nervous about finding new friends, though he said orientation last week helped make him feel a little more confident.
Was he sorry about leaving his home school district?
“No,” he said. “They’ve got no accreditation. That’s very important.”
Keshyra McKinnies, another freshman who had a 5 a.m. wakeup call, then a 10-minute walk to catch her bus at 6:10, said the timing didn’t bother her.
“I know that we have to get up early,” she said, “but I can get used to that.”
Still, when asked by reporters who had stuck microphones in her face whether it was worth it to be on a bus that long, she hesitated before saying: “Yes.”
Keshyra said transferring to Mehlville was her parents’ idea, not hers, but she was willing to do it because “I can get a better education.”
The first day of school’s commute was a little more frantic for senior Terriel Williams. She said she had been told to be at Moline Elementary School in Riverview Gardens at 6:20 a.m. to catch the bus for Mehlville, but when she got there, she found that the time had been changed to 6:15 a.m. and the bus had left her behind.
“I was gonna cry,” she said. “I’m a senior, it’s the first day of school and I was gonna miss it.”
But she found transportation from an unlikely source – a KTVI reporter who was covering both ends of the transfer story and offered to give her a ride to Oakville, an offer she accepted.
Terriel doesn’t plan to miss any more buses. From now on, she said, “I’ll be there at 6:10.”