This Monday, Robert Harvey, a member of the St. Louis Board of Education, will be in court, answering questions under oath about where he was living in the first 10 months of 2024. If the judge doesn’t find his answers persuasive, Harvey faces removal from the school board.
And that could have big consequences. Last Tuesday, Harvey was the pivotal vote in a series of 4–3 decisions to close schools across the City of St. Louis. If he is bounced from the board for failing to meet residency requirements, litigation to force a revote seems possible.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
And if the issue isn’t resolved quickly, the whole thing gets even more complicated. One of the other members voting with the majority in favor of closure, Emily Jane Hubbard, lost her seat in the Nov. 3 election. She’ll be replaced in January by Wendy Goss, who spoke at the meeting urging delay on the closures. Suddenly, a 4–3 vote to close eight schools could theoretically become a 4–2 majority against the plan.
“Having Robert Harvey on that board as a tie-breaking vote is very, very problematic for this board,” says Matt Davis.
Davis, a former school board member, is the lawyer who brought the lawsuit challenging Harvey’s residency. That was back in February, and he had hoped for speedy resolution. Under state law, a group of more than 10 residents of the district can band together to bring a removal action and, in theory, the court should act on it in 10 days.
Davis says that was probably always unrealistic, but he has stressed the dangers of Harvey’s qualifications remaining an open question while the board takes major action. As he notes, questions about Harvey’s qualifications were raised even before the board formally appointed him to fill a vacancy. Yet nine months later, the matter remains in limbo.
Davis and his clients have made a compelling case that, while the law requires St. Louis school board members to reside in the district for three years prior to their appointment, Harvey did not do that. They have produced documentation showing that he owned a sizable home in the county—and paid taxes there—in 2024. The district has produced no documentation showing Harvey paid the taxes required of city residents prior to October 2024, when he bought a home within the city limits. All they’ve offered, Davis says, is Harvey’s own word.
Davis previously told SLM that he came into the case willing to drop it if the school board produced any substantive evidence of city residency. “All they had to do is show me anything that this guy had lived in the city. Anything. A utility bill. I’d have dropped this.” Instead, he says, the lawyers tried to argue that the three-year residency didn’t apply.
Judge Thomas McCarthy did not grant their motion to dismiss on those grounds. That suggests Monday’s hearing will come down to Harvey’s testimony and any other evidence that either side presents.
A district spokesman previously said SLPS does not comment on litigation as a matter of policy, and Harvey did not respond to a request for comment relayed through that spokesman. Neither party responded to additional requests for comment yesterday asking both about Harvey’s residency and the possibility of the closure votes being overturned.
As for Goss, she says she urged the board at Tuesday’s meeting to delay its vote on the closures in part because she wanted to participate. A longtime educator who’s taught in both SLPS and the Ferguson-Florissant School District, she says she’s seen the impact of school closures first-hand, and was concerned about how many questions seemed outstanding.
That said, Goss is not eager for a revote. She declines to speculate on the court case over Harvey’s residency, but suggests she would not support reversing the board’s decision if it came to that. “If you think about how many times the proposal was pushed back, how many versions it went through, and the confusion that it caused—at this point I don’t know how much more damage that would do to families, to staff members, if a decision was reversed again,” she says. “I don’t foresee the decision changing.”
She adds, “You have to respect the decision that was made. Moving forward, what I’m what I’m most focused on is making sure that we hold the superintendent, we hold cabinet members, we hold all the district leaders accountable for this plan to ensure that parents have all the information that they need, to ensure that teachers and support staff have everything they need to have a smooth transition and to make sure that we do the least possible damage to students.”
Davis says it’s unfortunate that everything is now coming to a head.
“We’re not doing this because of the school closures,” he says. “I mean, this started way back before that, but it was in anticipation that there are consequential decisions in every meeting. This just happens to be one that was very high profile, and now is affecting thousands of families. And who knew that that was going to come to this?”
