Six years might not seem like a long time, unless you’re in the first grade or you’re a parent waiting and wanting to have your child attend a tuition-free school that is perceived to be safe and capable of giving students a chance to succeed.
Six years was too long for the Turner kids, who aged out of local public schools before the landmark case that bore their name was resolved. “Resolved” might be too presumptuous of a term, as the local school district hierarchy is still scrambling to figure out what to do next, now that the Missouri Supreme Court has decided, for the second time, that children living in an unaccredited school district have the right to attend a school in an accredited district within the same or an “adjoining” county.
Jane Turner and Gina Breitenfeld live in the city of St. Louis, but they paid tuition to the Clayton School District so their children could attend public schools there. Once the city school district lost its accreditation, they filed suit claiming they should not have to pay tuition because their children lived in an unaccredited district.
Missouri Statute 167.131 was revised to state as much in1993, so it’s hardly news. The suit was filed in 2007 and a victory for the plaintiffs was first upheld by the Supreme Court in 2010, but rolled back down to a lower court, where Turner v. School District of Clayton was found to be a violation of the Hancock Amendment, among other things. It rolled back up to the Supreme Court, where on June 11, justices found 7-0 in favor of Gina Brietenfeld, who was the last plaintiff standing, since her two daughters are still in school.
In the interim, the city school district became “provisionally accredited.” For now, at least, the city is out of this equation. Maybe—more on that later. Normandy and Riverview Gardens, however, are unaccredited. Other county districts teeter on the brink.
Meanwhile, school bells start to ring in August.
Normandy school officials have said its district will pay transportation to the Francis Howell School District in St. Charles County for those students who want to transfer. Normandy has been sparse in its responses to why it picked Francis Howell, a district that has good schools that show well when considering test scores and other metrics.
The more suspicious and cynical surmise that by picking a district so far away (20 miles), fewer students might choose that option. Also, the unaccredited school district has to pay the tuition for each student in the receiving district, and Francis Howell has a lower per-student expense than Clayton, Ladue, or some other, closer districts. Sending Normandy students to Francis Howell, even factoring in bus fare, would be cheaper than sending students to a more pricey district.
Some even more conspiratorial-minded observers say that Normandy might be thinking a “Turner fix” by the Republican-dominated state legislature is more likely if a school district in St. Charles has an influx of students from unaccredited Normandy.
Whatever the motivation for the Normandy selection of Francis Howell, it should not prevent Normandy or Riverview Gardens parents from picking a totally different school district for their children. The difference is, at least initially, those parents would need to ferry their kids to schools on their own.
Of course, the complexity has only begun. The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has issued guidelines, yet it’s unclear how enforceable they are. Worried about being paid by the unaccredited district for incoming students, one school district reportedly wants the money upfront.
For Elkin Kistner, the lead attorney who first filed the suit, none of this is surprising. Kistner said even before the suit was filed, when Turner wrote a letter to Clayton asking that her “tuition” payments be waived because of Statute 167.131, she received a flat “no.” Turner has said she hopes accredited school districts have not seen her request, and even the lawsuit, as a threat and instead used it as an opportunity to improve public education in the region.
“It was a bunker mentality, and they were only inviting their own kin into the bunker,” Kistner says of the defendant’s response. “When Jane Turner wrote that letter in 2007 to Clayton, Clayton declined to participate. Now it’s a statutory mandate. The Supreme Court has agreed with us—twice.”
While much is unclear, one aspect is clear: Transferring hundreds, even thousands of students to other districts is not “impossible.” In addition to ruling against the contention that the statute triggered an “unfunded mandate” prohibited under the Hancock Amendment, the state’s highest court also deep-sixed the “impossibility” defense. The court said sufficient efforts had not been made to show transfers were impossible, and virtually ignored a telephone survey the defendants paid for that claimed huge numbers of students would transfer from city schools.
“Having to deal with the supposed evidence that supported the notion that the ‘parade of horribles’ would ensue, and that the sky would fall, was extremely frustrating, because to put it into legal terminology: It was all a bunch of hooey,” Kistner says.
In the six years of the suit, only a few people contacted him to see if their children could transfer. Even after the first Supreme Court ruling, a Clayton School District spokesman said slightly more than 100 people contacted them.
“Very, very few people had contacted me,” Kistner says. “That was more than passingly curious, it was sad. It is possible a lot of people will awaken to their rights. But it’s not likely to occur. I don’t think the general public pays much attention to it.”
Even at its peak, with an institutional structure supporting it, the voluntary desegregation program hovered around 15,000 students leaving the city for the suburbs. The aftermath of the Turner case has none of that organization. DESE guidelines and court rulings may sort through some of the morass, but chances are it won’t reach anywhere near those levels. Plus, the Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts together only have about 7,000 children.
As the conversations increase, and become more heated, there are numbers to consider. For one, there is the sheer economic gap between troubled school districts and well-thought-of school districts.
The percentage of students who qualify for free-and-reduced lunches often is used as marker of economic disadvantage, and possible educational challenges. According to DESE numbers, Riverview Gardens has 92.2 percent of its students qualifying for free or reduced lunches. That is the highest number of any Missouri school district in the St. Louis metro area. Normandy is number two at 91.7 percent. Clayton comes in at 15.4 percent; Francis Howell at 17.6 percent.
Some legislators are talking about taking up the school transfer case in a special session, but if past returns are a predictor of future performance, anyone looking for a solution might think twice before looking to Jefferson City. For six years, and six sessions, the legislature’s response has been a whole lot of nothing.
Kistner even hints that the city school district might not be off the hook. Seen by some as too big to fail, city schools dodged the second Supreme Court edict by becoming “provisionally accredited.” Kistner says some suspect this was a “matter of convenience” so they’d be outside the suit.
“There are phrases in the statute and ‘provisionally accredited’ is not one of them,” Kistner says. “It is not clear to me that ‘provisionally accredited’ means you are accredited within the meaning of the statute.”
So this school transfer issue is far from resolved. It has fueled a discussion of school funding. The concept is that the money should not be seen as belonging to the district, but to the child who lives in that district and has a right to an education. That thinking has the money following the child to a good school, wherever that school is.
Mike Jones, senior policy adviser to St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley, also is a member of the state board of education. When discussing the early stages of the Turner case, Jones thought the suit laid bare the inadequacies of the current splintered structure of school districts. St. Louis County alone has 23 districts, with the Special School District a 24th district covering the whole county.
“The question the public ought to be asking: ‘Knowing what we know now about education, if we were starting over, would we do it like this today?’ For a lot of people the answer is no,” Jones says. “What we have not figured out is what it should look like.”
