Karen Collins-Adams, president of the 51ºÚÁÏ School Board, was only partly right last week when she said, in reference to a report that recommends closing more than half of 51ºÚÁÏ’ largely empty public school buildings, “We need to be able to do things methodically, with a lot of community input and consider not just the data but the emotional impact that it has on everyone while we’re doing this.â€
Yes, the decisions must be made methodically. Yes, There must be community input. But — sorry — “emotional impact†should be nowhere in the calculus.
The math is clear: 51ºÚÁÏ must shutter many, possibly the majority, of its school buildings. And it must do it soon.
The report that Collins-Adams was referencing, commissioned by the Board from the architectural firm Cordogan, Clark and Associates, recommends closing 37 of the city’s public schools, with all students consolidated in the remaining 31 buildings, in response to the drastic drop in enrollment in recent years.
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The school system, like the city as a whole, has been wracked by population decline. Falling birth rates generally, combined with 51ºÚÁÏ’ historic depopulation (the city in the 2020s has dipped below 300,000 souls for the first time since the mid-1800s), means those 68 schools serve about 18,000 students. That’s barely half their capacity.
As Steve Raskin of Cordogan, Clark put it bluntly to the Board last week: “One out of every two chairs in the classrooms are empty.â€
The costly waste of the situation for this financially struggling district cannot be overstated. As the Post-Dispatch’s Blythe Bernhard reports, those half-empty schools mean teachers, bus drivers, coaches and the rest of the people who run day-to-day operations at the schools are spread thin, depriving students of resources. Most of the buildings are old and expensive to maintain. Damage to some of them from the recent tornado will drive up that expense.
The money is real. The report estimates the district could save some $42 million in the next school year alone by consolidating students and staff into less than half the current buildings.
Specifically, the report calls for closing five high schools, five middle schools and 27 elementary schools. It doesn’t specify which ones.
Are those the ideal numbers of closures that the Board should approve? No, that’s a starting point; the right number might be somewhat lower or higher. But the necessity of shuttering a significant portion of the district’s schools is a mathematical certainty.
In addition to the question of numbers, there’s the question of what to do with the shuttered properties. That topic merits an entirely separate conversation, but this should be at its core: Allowing those buildings to stand vacant is the worst solution.
Those that can be sold should be, quickly. Those that for whatever reason aren’t marketable or usable in some way should be demolished and the land sold. For the school district to just sit on vacant properties in perpetuity is only slightly preferable to the intolerable proposition of continuing to operate half-empty schools all over the city.
Collins-Adams, the board president, is correct about the necessity of moving forward methodically and with public input. But that process must not be used as an excuse for putting off these difficult decisions. No one likes the idea of a neighborhood losing its local school, but all the district’s students are ill-served by the current situation.
