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Photographs by Samuel Zide
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Sitting on the patio at a Starbucks in St. Louis Hills, Gina Breitenfeld contemplates her daughters’ future. “I can’t imagine pulling my children from a school that they were established in,” she says.
Breitenfeld has two school-age daughters. Savannah is going into sixth grade and loves playing on her club soccer team. Elle, who’s entering eighth grade, enjoys literature class and hopes to be a veterinarian. “They’re good students; they’ve made friendships,” says Breitenfeld. “To pull them from that and place them…where? In an unaccredited school? I can’t even imagine that.”
Breitenfeld is weighing a set of choices familiar to parents in St. Louis city: Search for a good school in an unaccredited school district, pay tuition to a private or parochial school, or pay to send children to an accredited district that charges tuition to out-of-district students. Or, as in the case of about 6,000 African-American city children, attend suburban schools through the St. Louis Student Transfer Program, the voluntary desegregation plan that’s been in place since 1983.
Years ago, Breitenfeld decided to send her children to the School District of Clayton. Today, her daughters are the only city students left in the case of Turner v. School District of Clayton, a high-profile lawsuit filed in 2007 that has yet to be resolved, one that Breitenfeld’s attorney has described as a “lightning rod” that no one wants to touch.
During the past five years, Breitenfeld and other concerned parents have challenged the metro area’s public-school system, cost the Clayton and St. Louis city school districts more than a million dollars in legal fees, and led the Missouri legislature to consider educational reform—yet the case has changed virtually nothing about how the state provides public education in St. Louis.
After the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in July 2010, saying the children had a right to attend Clayton public schools free of charge because the city district had lost its accreditation, a lower court’s reversal of that ruling is expected to be appealed to the state Supreme Court again. With the Riverview Gardens and Kansas City school districts also unaccredited, and as other provisionally accredited districts teeter on the brink, the possible ramifications of the Turner case continue to loom large. The first state Supreme Court ruling was more than once described as a “landmark decision.”
At first, Breitenfeld wasn’t concerned with such far-reaching issues. She simply wanted her daughters to have a good education. Her oldest briefly attended the private New City School, but Breitenfeld was educated in public schools and thought that was important—so she sent her daughters to the School District of Clayton, rather than the city’s unaccredited schools.
The differences between the two districts are stark. The average Clayton teacher’s salary is more than $68,000; in the city, the average teacher’s salary is less than $50,000. Compared to the city’s 86 percent, only 16 percent of Clayton students qualify for free or reduced lunches. Clayton’s average composite ACT score is 25.8, while the city’s is 16.6. And the going rate for out-of-district students to attend Clayton schools? Around $10,000 for an elementary student, $15,000 for a high-schooler. (The state reports Clayton spending $18,065 per student.)
St. Louis Public Schools superintendent Kelvin Adams knows that parents in the city need solid public-school options, and he’s working on it from his end. “We are making slow and steady progress each year,” he says. “We feel good about the increases in some indicators—the hard numbers are getting better—but ultimately, accreditation is up to the state, and it might want to see improvement over a longer period of time.”
Progress isn’t happening soon enough for some parents, though. “Our taxes in the city are high, equal to places that have wonderful schools,” says Breitenfeld, a realtor whose husband is a civil engineer for the city. “Our tax dollars are not going to a good school system. The perception I heard was, ‘Why should I have to pay for your children to go to Clayton?’ Yet those tax dollars that are paid should be used.”
When Dr. Jane Turner invited roughly a dozen parents to her Central West End home in 2007—the year that St. Louis Public Schools lost accreditation—she was paying tuition for her sons to attend the School District of Clayton. She wanted to discuss the parents’ options if their children continued to attend Clayton schools.
Turner, who lived in Clayton years earlier, first sent her two sons to the upscale, private Forsyth School in Clayton, then to Glenridge Elementary School, a public school in the Clayton district. When her boys, Henry and August, started elementary school, the Turners lived in a Clayton condo. At the time, Turner was a single mom and needed after-school care and other support. Herself a product of Catholic schools in Webster Groves—Mary Queen of Peace Elementary School and Nerinx Hall High School—Turner considered a parochial school, but decided the education and support services were better at Glenridge. At the time, there was no expense other than the property tax she paid as a condo owner in Clayton.
“When I compared Glenridge to other schools, it had more resources and additional services,” says Turner, who’s the assistant medical examiner for the city of St. Louis, as well as director of autopsy services at Saint Louis University Hospital and an associate professor of pathology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
One of her sons required a reading tutor, which was provided at Glenridge. “As a single working parent, it did not require me to pick him up to bring him to a tutor,” Turner recalls. “It also had an after-school music program. Glenridge was stable; it was a good fit for us as a family.”
In 2002, Turner married her second husband, Judge Julian Bush of Missouri’s 22nd Circuit Court in St. Louis, who was required to live in the city. The family moved to the Central West End, but Turner wanted to keep her sons at Glenridge. “I was protective of my children; I did not want to introduce another upheaval in their lives,” she says. “My focus was their stability. I did not want to make more changes, and quite frankly, the city public schools had a bad reputation.”
Other parents she knew sent their children to magnet schools in the city, but they talked about the time it took to advocate for their children at school and monitor their progress. At Glenridge, that was less of an issue.
Turner signed up for Clayton’s program that allowed out-of-district parents to pay tuition. Other parents did, too: At the program’s peak, about 80 students in Clayton were out-of-district residents paying tuition. All of the parents Turner invited to her house that night in 2007 were parents who lived in the city and paid for their children to attend Clayton public schools. Turner had requested the list of parents from the district in writing, citing the information as a public document.
Breitenfeld (at right, with her daughters, Savannah and Elle) was one of the parents on the list.
“I called Gina—I didn’t know her—and I started my rote introduction into the topic,” says Turner. “She stopped me and said, ‘Yeah, I know that statute.’ She had been watching it. I asked her if she was an attorney—she isn’t. Some of the other parents were not familiar with the statute, but they were interested.”
She was referring to Section 167.131 of the Missouri Revised Statutes, part of the Outstanding Schools Act of 1993.
When the Wellston School District lost its accreditation in 2003, there were media accounts of Wellston families citing the statute when applying to nearby districts. At that time, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) had advised districts that they were not required to accept students from unaccredited Wellston schools. At the time, the Clayton, Ritenour, Normandy, Parkway, Pattonville, University City, and Webster Groves districts accepted Wellston students. Turner was aware of the law’s history and thought it would offer the same opportunity to her sons.
“I had no idea what we were getting into, but the more we discussed it, the more we realized we had the law behind us and that Clayton was not observing the law,” says Turner, who’d asked Elkin Kistner, an attorney with experience in litigation against government entities, to attend that first meeting. “We were cautiously optimistic.”
But after the case had crept along for five years, Turner’s sons graduated from Clayton High School. Henry’s now at Santa Clara University, majoring in economics, and August is majoring in environmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Turner withdrew from the suit in 2011, after her sons graduated.
Over time, other plaintiffs dropped out as well, due to their children no longer attending Clayton schools and/or concerns that a counterclaim filed by Clayton could force them to make up tuition payments suspended during the suit. In the St. Louis County Circuit Court’s May 2012 ruling, a judgment was entered against Breitenfeld for $49,133 in back tuition payments for her two daughters. Breitenfeld says that action and the lower court’s reversal of the state Supreme Court ruling has left her disheartened and dumbfounded.
Still, she’s not withdrawing from the suit.
Breitenfeld says she’s pursuing the case so her daughters can continue at their school, but also to raise the issue that other city kids deserve the chance to attend an accredited school. Once the state Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2010, Breitenfeld was baffled that the case wasn’t over.
“I’m disheartened by the system,” she says. “I found out, the Supreme Court is not as supreme as I thought it was.” When the case was sent back to the county circuit court, she didn’t expect the decision to be reversed. “I thought the judge would just figure out how to implement it,” Breitenfeld says. “I didn’t think he was going to completely rule the other way.”
Why wasn’t there a “Turner fix,” as it came to be known in the Missouri General Assembly? The phrase’s namesake sees the lack of a legislative solution as a failure of the system. She believes some type of program to control the flow of transfer students to accredited districts could have been created. “It made sense to me that they would devise a plan like that,” Turner says. “It certainly couldn’t have been me; I wasn’t charged to do that. But it made sense that somebody in a position of authority would devise a reasonable plan.”
In Jefferson City, state legislators had two sessions to use the initial ruling by the state’s highest court to bring some reform and relief to the area’s public schools, but their response was positively Neronian. Rome burned; legislators fiddled. Each bill that had a chance to pass collapsed. Advocates and opponents of vouchers, charter schools, and open enrollment stalled any potential bill.
Nonetheless, Turner hasn’t abandoned hope.
“I’ve got to believe that St. Louis is better than this,” she says. “It’s unfortunate that just about everybody saw this as a threat and not an opportunity.”
Former School District of Clayton superintendent Don Senti signed a letter to Turner in 2007 stating, “The School District of Clayton has determined that it will not participate in the transfer of students from the St. Louis Public Schools resulting from the unaccredited status of that district.”
Today, Senti is executive director of the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis, a consortium of 61 area school districts from eight Missouri and two Illinois counties that provides resources, information, and lobbying efforts. The CSD’s offices are on Craig Road in West County, next to Craig Elementary School in the Parkway School District.
Years before the city schools became unaccredited, Senti recalls, the School District of Clayton Board of Education had the idea that “when there were empty seats,” the district would allow tuition-paying students into Clayton public schools.
“Amazingly enough, people paid up to $15,000 to send their kids to a public school,” Senti says, citing the yearly out-of-district tuition for Clayton High School.
Yet when Turner cited the relevant Missouri statute in 2007, the district had a different response than it had for Wellston parents years earlier. Senti admits part of the reason for that response had to do with who was asking.
“Five of those students had never set foot in a public school in their life. They were paying tuition to come to Clayton,” says Senti. “These families said, ‘Oh, we’ll just get St. Louis Public Schools to pay our tuition.’ Clayton said ‘No,’ and St. Louis Public Schools said ‘No.’ So they filed suit. People really thought it was kind of a frivolous lawsuit. People in Clayton, reporters, people in general—everybody thought it was kind of a silly lawsuit.”
Senti says it bothered others that these were former private-school students or families that paid tuition to Clayton public schools. “What grated on a lot of people—on the board and citizens, too—was why should the city of St. Louis have to pay for private-school kids’ tuition to our district,” says Senti. “If it had been St. Louis Public Schools kids, it probably would have gone in a different direction.”
Some saw the parents, who previously paid tuition to Clayton Schools, as taking advantage of a legal technicality at the expense of a beleaguered city school district. A May 2012 Post-Dispatch op-ed described the city children in the Turner case as “affluent,” suggesting socioeconomic status is a factor in determining whether kids in the city should be allowed to attend an accredited public school.
On the other hand, some cast the plaintiffs as missionaries, trying to reform public education. But Kistner, Breitenfeld’s attorney, admits that if Clayton had offered a deal that would have allowed his original group of plaintiffs’ children to continue in school without paying tuition, the settlement probably could have been kept low-profile while other solutions were explored for the region’s far-reaching educational issues.
Thus far, legal fees for the Clayton and city school districts have surpassed $1 million, with Clayton spending $534,000 and the city paying an estimated $487,000. Yet financial considerations were a factor in other respects, because both districts thought that if the transfer rule had been widely applied, it might have cost far more than the case’s legal fees.
School District of Clayton spokesperson Chris Tennill says the district denied the Turner request from the start because of concerns about compensation. “There had been a number of districts left holding the bag for tuition fees from Wellston,” says Tennill, who adds that Clayton received about $1 million from Wellston for accepting 13 students from 2003 to 2010.
“The city was vocal about not being willing to pay that tuition, so we don’t want to create another situation of educating kids and not getting paid for it,” says Tennill. “And these were kids already in our district with legally binding tuition contracts to attend school here and pay tuition.”
Breitenfeld believes the perception of her family’s income bracket is neither accurate nor relevant to the case. “We’re definitely not affluent,” she says. “When we were paying tuition at Clayton, we were struggling. We had to go in several times and talk to them when we were behind in payments.”
Turner also doesn’t buy the argument that her tax bracket should affect her children’s access to a decent public education. “We’re not looking for a free education; we’re looking for an education that by law we are entitled to by the taxes we pay,” she says. “I don’t understand why people are not more outraged that they are paying taxes and not getting their money’s worth from the school system.”
Public education in America is largely funded through property taxes collected in local school districts. That proves problematic when a troubled district with concentrated poverty has meager resources to cure its own ills. And even when a struggling district begins to improve, as the city has, in a real-estate sense, those schools can lack curb appeal because the district’s image has suffered for decades. As recently as 2008, the city’s public-school system estimated that 42 percent of school-age children in the city do not attend its public schools.
When author Colin Gordon was researching his book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, it became clear to him that a stigma was attached to the city’s public schools historically. “The city school district is such a peculiar beast, because you have all of the parochial schools on the South Side and very limited buy-in to the public school system from anyone but the kids who are stuck in it and their parents,” says Gordon. “It has the type of stigma that would be attached later to food stamps and welfare—it’s just not seen as a public good.”
A professor of history at the University of Iowa, Gordon says local planning decisions in the early 20th century to incorporate a multitude of small municipalities and other governmental units in St. Louis County were part of an intentional effort to sort population by race and class. That history of localism led St. Louis to “avoid big-government solutions, because people are always leery about giving up localism.”
While one school district covers the entire city of St. Louis, there are 22 school districts in St. Louis County, with the Special School District covering the whole county as the 23rd district. Gordon points out that the “insanity” of funding public education through small, discrete local districts is a method unique to America.
One local attorney involved in the suit, speaking on condition of anonymity, believes that public education’s underlying funding and organizational framework is so flawed that it prevents any remedy. “Public schools are as fragmented as anything else in St. Louis: We have 90 municipalities and a dying inner city—we can’t figure this out,” says the attorney. “It’s cultural. It has racial undertones and have–and–have-not undertones that are not going to be solved politically because of the polarization of the whole area.” According to this analysis, there is no one with the political will or clout to come in and “clear the chessboard.”
If public education were administered more regionally and equitably, says the attorney, people would realize, “‘My God, of course, this works. It was ridiculous we did it the other way.’”
When Turner and her fellow plaintiffs—Breitenfeld, Susan Bruker, and William Drendell—got their day in court in 2008, it was just that: one day in court. They soon realized the odds weren’t in their favor.
Turner recalls Judge David Lee Vincent III walking into the court, sitting down, and asking the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Kistner, a question. “He asked Elkin how much tuition we were paying Clayton. Elkin turned to where the families were sitting and asked us. We told him how much we were paying. Then Judge Vincent said how many children were living within the city of St. Louis, and he said if you multiplied that number by the tuition, it would be impossible to do.
“That said it all,” she says.
The first trial resulted in a summary judgment and subsequent appeal to the appellate court. Eventually, it went to the state Supreme Court. When the case that bears her name finally made it to Jefferson City in November 2009, Turner made the trip. “It was the first time Elkin was able to argue our case, to be heard and taken seriously,” she says. “In circuit court? No, not at all. In appellate court? Somewhat. But in the Supreme Court? Finally.”
Once it was argued in full, the case convinced four of the court’s seven judges to find Section 167.131 of the Missouri Revised Statutes to have “straightforward and unambiguous language” that “applies as written.” That ruling was in July 2010.
And though the court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, it also decided that the plaintiffs’ contracts to pay tuition were binding, and they would not be reimbursed for past tuition.
The state Supreme Court victory was short-lived: The case would be remanded back to Judge Vincent’s court for further review. “I felt vindicated, and it was gratifying to be understood,” says Turner. “But I appreciated it was going back to Judge Vincent, and after observing how he handled it the first time, I was skeptical we had won.”
Kistner, too, was skeptical. It was skepticism borne of experience. “It was nice to have a Missouri Supreme Court ruling in your favor that you can point to and put the onus on these school districts to gin up some sort of excuse for not complying with the ruling,” Kistner said in a July 2010 radio interview on KDHX-FM. “To the extent that they start talking about impossibility, for example, it’s not impossible to put these kids in the Clayton school district.”
When the case went back to the lower court, the “impossibility defense” is precisely what was invoked, along with the 1980 Hancock Amendment to the Missouri Constitution—arguing that Section 167.131 of the Missouri Revised Statutes was unconstitutional because it triggered an unfunded mandate by the state on local school districts. (In a similar case, King-Willmann v. Webster Groves School District, the state Supreme Court recently ruled, “The question is whether the school district, which is not a taxpayer, has standing to use the Hancock Amendment as a defense. The answer is, ‘No.’” Still, that ruling did not prohibit taxpayers from citing the Hancock Amendment, which is what happened when three residents of the School District of Clayton, represented by the same attorneys as the school, joined its side in the Turner case last July.)
In his ruling against Breitenfeld, on May 1 of this year, Vincent cited both arguments. When he wrote about the impossibility of accommodating potential transfers in his ruling, the judge noted a “random survey of 601 city residents with school-aged children” conducted by Terry Jones, a political-science professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The survey estimated that approximately 15,740 city students would attend county schools if given the opportunity.
According to court documents, the law firm representing the School District of Clayton—Kohn, Shands, Elbert, Gianoulakis & Giljum—paid $40,000 for the telephone survey. In his deposition, Jones testified that prior to the survey, he’d met with the School District of Clayton’s attorneys and spokesperson Tennill to discuss possible changes to the questionnaire. (Jones and attorneys for the School District of Clayton declined to comment.)
Though Kistner worried that a survey indicating that thousands of city students would flock to Clayton and other county districts would not help his client’s case, he had no money to pay for an expert analysis of the survey. By that time, in May 2011, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster’s office had entered the case to defend the law (after previously contending that the legislature never intended for students in unaccredited districts to transfer to the public schools of their choice), but Kistner said he couldn’t convince the office to fund another survey or an expert critique of Jones’ survey.
During questioning, Jones stated that he had not checked with the School District of Clayton to see how many city parents had contacted the district to inquire about transferring their children. Clayton school officials later submitted to the court that number was just over 100.
Today, Kistner remains critical of the Jones survey, in part because he thinks it uses political and opinion-polling techniques that are not transferable to a survey about whether parents will send their children to other school districts in a hypothetical interdistrict program.
“The Turner case is a snowflake,” he says. “This hasn’t happened before. There is nothing to look at in the past that would help him predict what the future is going to be.”
Today, former state Supreme Court Judge Mike Wolff sees the case as being about two sisters: Savannah and Elle Breitenfeld.
“This is down to two kids,” Wolff says. “All of this stuff about thousands coming, well, no—this case is about two kids.”
When he was still a judge in 2010, Wolff sided with the majority in the Turner case. He believes the case should not turn on speculation about a stampede of students from the city to the county. In his view, the case was not about what might happen after those students were admitted—it was about what rights those students named in the suit have under the current statute. According to Wolff and the three other justices who ruled with him, those students had the right to attend schools in an accredited district in the adjacent county.
When the legislature failed to act, he says, it was the job of the trial court to fashion a remedy. “It was up to the trial court to determine what that relief should be,” says Wolff, who’s now a law professor at Saint Louis University. “That might involve the Department of Elementary and
Secondary Education, or telling the legislature that unless and until they did something, every kid that applied would have to be taken.”
CSD executive director Senti believes a program could be adopted in the next session. “I thought, and still do, that a deal should have been worked out,” he says. “The phrase we used was ‘reasonable parameters’—it wasn’t ‘no.’”
“What we will continue to do when it heads back to the Supreme Court is to say we need reasonable parameters to govern these transfers,” says Tennill. “We want to get to a situation where if we have three seats in a third-grade classroom available, we’ll take three kids and not the 30 or 300 who apply.”
According to the latest census data, all but three St. Louis County districts lost school-age population between 2000 and 2010. The Ladue district gained 10 percent in its population under age 18, Lindbergh gained nearly 2 percent, and Kirkwood gained almost 1 percent; Clayton lost a little more than 3 percent, and Maplewood–Richmond Heights lost 18 percent.
Students from unaccredited districts might consider transferring to such districts that already have empty seats. But who would fund these transfers? In Wisconsin, interdistrict moves occur when each district follows a formula to determine how many vacant seats are available. A student can apply to transfer to that district, with a set amount of state funding following the student. “Well, the seat’s empty, like an airplane seat would be empty. So $5,000 is $5,000. And you get yourself there,” says Senti, meaning that transportation costs aren’t covered—each student finds his or her own way.
“If you get your pencil out and look at the revenue you’d get for empty seats, is it social conscience or financial gain?” Senti asks. “Take your pick.”
Among the education bills proposed during the last legislative session, Senti says one had a good chance of passing. It set up guidelines to require districts to accept transferring students on a space-available basis. The criteria included class sizes during the past three years, as well as how “space” was demonstrated. (Districts could appeal to DESE for clarification.)
“There were safeguards against districts saying, ‘No, we’re not taking anyone. Go away,’” says Senti. “Nobody quite knows how many spots would be open, but something around 3,000 or 4,000 kids would have been the minimum. The statute had said anybody could come. This fix said that anyone who had been in a St. Louis city public school could go. That’s a big difference.”
If that bill had passed, the city students named in the case would not have been included, as they had not been attending city public schools. With the St. Louis, Riverview Gardens, and Kansas City school districts remaining unaccredited, and Normandy only provisionally accredited, the need for the legislature to address the Turner case—and the statute in question—remains.
Wayne Goode, a veteran state legislator of 42 years who’s now vice chairman of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, remembers that when Section 167.131 was revised in 1993, the intent was to warn the city public schools to get better. “This provision was put in to encourage the city school system to shape up and do a better job,” Goode says. “It was letting them know, if they lost accreditation, that students could go to other districts.”
Goode believes a regional approach works with the community-college system and the county’s Special School District, but in the case of a regional school-transfer solution, “it ought to be thought out. It makes sense, but it should not happen by accident.”
State Rep. Rick Stream (R-Kirkwood) sponsored the first “Turner Fix” bill in the 2011 session, but it collapsed under the weight of too many agendas. A former Kirkwood School District Board of Education member, Stream said his first bill was designed to protect county school districts from being inundated with too many city transfer students, though it would have allowed some transfers on the basis of space available in county districts. Stream says his bill and others got loaded down with a variety of reform ideas from other legislators, including vouchers and measures to expand charter schools. That dynamic could change in the future, if some key players leave the legislature. Stream believes a city-to-county transfer program could pass during the
next session.
“There is no silver bullet, no one solution. There are a number of things that could be done,” he says. “The transfer idea would not get shot down. That is a fix that most people would agree to; the problem we had with it was that it was getting coupled with something that was not agreeable to most people. We’ll have to see how the new session shakes out.”
From a pragmatic viewpoint, Stream also sees the urgency in improving schools in unaccredited districts. As vice chairman of the House Budget Committee, he discovered that 53 percent of the state’s prisoners are from the St. Louis, Kansas City, and Wellston school districts. This year, Missouri spent $670 million on its prisons. “If we could get a quality education going in these schools, think of all the money we’d save in prisons, Medicaid, unemployment,” Stream says. “They’d be productive citizens working and paying into the system.”
While St. Louis Public Schools are making improvements, Stream says much remains to be done. He’s a fan of KIPP Inspire Academy, a charter school in the long-shuttered school building adjoining St. Francis de Sales Catholic church. He believes a mix of more and better charter schools, some perhaps operated by suburban districts, and a controlled transfer program would create new opportunities for students living in the city of St. Louis.
As the Turner case winds through the legal labyrinth, challenges to other districts are possible. (Earlier this year, for instance, five city firefighters—who are required to live in the city for their jobs—sued when their children were turned away from Lindbergh, Kirkwood, and Webster Groves school districts.) No matter the second Supreme Court ruling, it appears the legislature wants to address the ongoing troubles of St. Louis city public schools, to give city students better opportunities.
Better opportunities are what Breitenfeld has wanted since the case first went to court in 2007. She wants them for her children, and yes, for others as well. “A lot of people wondered what I was doing,” she says. “But to this day, I still believe I am doing the right thing. My guess is we will win in the Supreme Court.
“I’ve always been optimistic, because I feel we are right,” she adds. “A law is a law, and if you believe the law is there for a reason and are on the right side of the law, you should be optimistic about the outcome.”
Still, Breitenfeld worries that some of the opposition, and even court rulings, have been “politically driven” by the educational establishment. “It’s like they don’t want things to be disrupted,” she says. “It’s not about buildings and buying land; if they have space for the kids, let them come.”
Five years on, the Turner case continues.
“I felt strongly not just about my children, but all the children who live in the city: Where do kids who are really interested in learning go?”
