As the first in his family to go to college—earning a full ride to Washington University—Eric Scroggins represents what is possible when one has access to excellent educational opportunities. After working with Teach for America for years, he’s on a mission to ensure that all young people have access to the same opportunities he did through his nonprofit, The Opportunity Trust. Scroggins recently talked with us about his new venture, his experience with Teach for America, and his vision for St. Louis.
What did you gain from your experience teaching in New York City public schools for TFA? Those two years were transformative for me and heartbreaking at the same time. On one hand, you see that children have enormous capacity to learn and potential to contribute their strengths to the world, and yet they don’t have access to schools and supports that enable them to give all that they have to give.
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What was it like to help launch TFA’s St. Louis site? Our launch got off to a very rocky start for many reasons. The original executive director decided that this wasn’t for her and left. The organization was in a very precarious position, so they asked me to come back and be the executive director at 24 years old. I, of course, knew nothing and was just determined and hardworking, but I was so fortunate to run into a great set of community mentors. We ended up having tremendous success, and St. Louis became one of the first fully funded sites for TFA and the blueprint for its growth nationwide.
What made you decide to leave TFA and return to St. Louis to launch The Opportunity Trust? I’ve had the great fortune over the past 15 years to see cities across the country go from making no progress to making extraordinary progress—to then come home to St. Louis and see us stagnate and struggle on so many levels. At the root of so many of our regional challenges was our lack of educational progress and opportunity. We can learn from those places that have made tremendous progress. The Opportunity Trust is the outcome of nine months studying what’s worked in places like Indianapolis, Denver, and D.C.—how those places transformed their education systems. In each of those cities, there was some sort of intermediary nonprofit that did long-term planning based on leveraging national research and deep local engagement. I thought that was essential, and it was even more important in St. Louis, given that we’re an incredibly fragmented community. You have to have someone who can reach across the city-county divide, work across school districts and the public-charter sector.
What’s the overall mission? To ensure that everyone who is born in St. Louis is prepared to thrive in the 21st century. We were never going to be able to set people up for success if we didn’t transform our public schools, so in 10 years we hope to grow the percentage of children who have access to a world-class school from where it is today, which is 10 percent in the city of St. Louis, to more than 40 percent. To do this, you need to grow the number of great schools and create new pipelines for teachers and leaders, a resource to help families find the right school and a policy environment that allows all of this to happen.
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities? One of the challenges we face is the silo-ing of our system, in that we have the city and the county. Every entity largely operates independent from one another. Not only does this create an enormously complex system, but no one’s learning from one another. The advantage of being the Show-Me State, however, is that we’re open to learning from successes in other places. The people closest to children in our education system know it’s not working, and they’re eager to be part of something transformative.
