This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 7, 2013 - At the front of the auditorium of Carr Lane Middle School the other night, for a forum featuring candidates for the elected board of the St. Louis Public Schools, stood five microphone stands.
No mikes, just stands.
As candidate Andrew Wimmer pointed out, the mikeless stands could be seen as a good metaphor for the elected board itself. With the Special Administrative Board that was put into place by the state in 2007 actually running the city schools, the elected board meets regularly at Carr Lane but doesn't really have a voice.
But that hasn't stopped five candidates from running for three open seats on the board that will be filled at the April 2 election.
Three incumbents -- Rebecca Rogers, Chad Beffa and Emile Bradford-Taylor -- have decided to leave the seven-member elected board, for various reasons. Bradford-Taylor had filed for re-elected but later dropped out, though her name will remain on the ballot.
Seeking to replace them are Susan Jones, Bill Monroe, Tony Schilli, Kathy Styer and Wimmer. All but Schilli took part in the candidate forum on Feb. 28; Schilli was represented by his grandmother, Mary Beth Purdy, who said he was forced to miss the event because he had to attend a class.
The forum was sponsored by the Parent Assembly of the city school system. Here is the case that each candidate made about why he or she should join the elected board, which remains in place but out of power even though the city schools have moved from being unaccredited to being provisionally accredited.
Susan Jones
A graduate of the city’s Gateway Institute of Technology High School, Jones works for the Ritenour School District as an interventionist assistant. She has a master’s degree from Webster University and is working on a second. She has experience as an intern for several organizations, including the University of Missouri system and the Board of Aldermen – experience she says would come in handy in service on the school board.
The main issues in her campaign are improved student achievement, safety in the schools and accountability for schools, teachers and parents.
On her campaign website she says that “education works best when all parties are involved and 100 percent supportive. All parties meaning: students, teachers, parents, leaders and community members. This type of support helps to make for effective schools, solid communities, and pronominal property values for St. Louis City. As well as prepare community members to assume even greater and more supportive roles in children’s lives and education in turn making St. Louis a better place to be and invest.”
She would like to see the money put into charter schools go to improving district schools instead. She thinks social media can play a role in the effort to save Cleveland NJROTC from closure.
Jones said she wants to serve on the elected board because “people want to feel as though what they say matters.”
Bill Monroe
A former police officer for the city and a graduate of Soldan High School, Monroe says in his campaign literature: “I do not know exactly what’s in the future in the association between the elected board and the special administration board but what I am sure of is that our sometimes forgotten youth, homeless, drop outs and under-served, will need a champion and I fully intend to represent their interest. Children First. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
He said that as a police officer, he used to kick down doors and go after bad guys. Now he wants to tackle the deficiencies in the city schools that are letting young city residents down. “That’s much more frightening than anything I’ve seen,” he told the forum.
He thinks the management companies that have run bad charter schools have failed the children in the city. He thinks the elected board should be able to meet at city school headquarters downtown, to give it more legitimacy. “It must have input and be respected,” he said.
Monroe said too many school services have been outsourced. “We’ve allowed the political structure and the money grabbers to come in and dismantle our schools,” he told the forum.
As far as a lack of money to run the schools, Monroe says: “I think it’s ridiculous for a child not to have a book or not have access to arts education.”
Kathy Styer
The mother of two students who graduated from the city schools, Styer is an accountant with an MBA from the University of Chicago. She is accustomed to working in the background, but she feels she has the skills needed to help the elected board.
She says her number-crunching ability would be a valuable addition to the board, which she hopes will regain power soon. She said more publicity for the board would help. “We have the power to be in their faces,” she said of the SAB.
Her platform includes small class size, teacher respect and development, stability, consistent discipline and a full range of ancillary services such as counselors, nurse and social workers.
Her campaign literature says she is seeking a seat on the board “because I want safe schools where our children learn not only book/school lessons but also how to succeed in life and learn basic citizenship responsibilities, manners, and essential character traits like honesty, self-control, and respect for others.”
Styer doesn’t like charter schools and would like to let people in Jefferson City know they are not helping city students. She favors magnet schools because they serve students who may not get what they need at neighborhood schools.
She hopes the city schools can reach full accreditation within two years, but she acknowledges, “We’ve got a long way to go.”
Styer wants to make sure that arts education remains in the city schools. “I think it’s a critical part of a child’s development,” she said, “but we have to have the funds, we have to have the teachers and we have to have the will to put it together.”
She wants to make sure discipline is maintained on buses. “If a child cannot ride the bus safely,” she said, “he cannot be on the bus. You can’t have them endangering all the other children.”
Tony Schilli
The grandson of long-time school board member Bill Purdy, Schilli attended city schools and graduated from Bishop DuBourg High School and St. Louis Community College-Forest Park. He also has an associate degree in electrical systems design technology from Ranken Tech.
He has volunteered at Stix Early Childhood Center and the St. Louis Children’s Aquarium.
At the forum, his grandmother/stand-in said Schilli is committed to continuing strong magnet schools, and he “wants the elected board to be put in charge again because elected board represents citizens, and that is what a school board should be all about.”
Andrew Wimmer
Wimmer has taught in middle school, high school and college. His two sons graduated from the St. Louis Public Schools. He feels there has been too much emphasis on testing in recent years and not enough on actual learning.
On his website, he says that “together, the Board of Education and the citizens of St. Louis face a twin challenge: to re-imagine the future of education for our children and then to work together to make that vision a reality. It requires a grassroots effort, and there is a role for every one of us."
He feels Mayor Francis Slay has paid too much attention to charter schools, which he says are a destabilizing influence, and not enough to the district schools. “While the mayor turns his attention to charters,” Wimmer told the forum, “he turns his back to the district.” He would like to see a moratorium on new charters in the city.
Wimmer wants the elected board to “gird its loins” and get ready to do battle to win back power. “This is a pitched battle,” he said, “when we have people like Rex Sinquefield coming back to the state and literally buying the system.”
He wants the elected board to help schools get back to the basics and make it easier for parents to get involved in their children’s education. And he wants to counter the idea that governments must get used to doing less with less.
“We’re living in a very hostile environment,” he said. “We have a very hostile state government. We have a very hostile corporate environment. We need to ratchet it up and really challenge these ideas floating around that tell us we have to live in poverty.”
On bus safety, he wants to take a more personal approach and not rely on things like cameras. “Cameras are not people talking to people,” he said. “We can’t rely on technology.”
In general, he said, City Hall has hurt the city schools and he doesn’t want to see “four more years of Slay’s policy of driving a wedge down the middle. I don’t think tinkering around is going to do anything. I think we might well be at the point where we need to rebuild things from the ground up.”