St. Louis Schools Head into Uncertainty Following Superintendent’s Ouster

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The oft-troubled St. Louis public school district entered a new cycle of tumult late last month after school board members unanimously voted to oust Superintendent Keisha Scarlett and replace her with an interim leader. But uncertainty over the future of public education in the city extends far beyond the question of who ultimately takes the helm. 

The direction of the 18,000-student St. Louis Public Schools will be set as its leaders await the outcome of an audit by the state of Missouri. The district’s chief financial officer recently announced that her office has turned over most of the financial and administrative records requested by state officials, including receipts and contracts “going back…years.” Meanwhile, Scarlett has said that she will appeal her firing under the terms of her contract. 

The state of the district has stirred concern among city leaders over the past few months, with Mayor Tishaura Jones calling the disarray at the beginning of the school year “unacceptable.” In a statement shared with The 74, a group of four former school board members, including two former chairs, called on the current board to win back the faith of community members.

“The current state of affairs at SLPS cannot continue,” the statement reads. “The lack of transparency surrounding the leadership change and new school year has eroded the trust of stakeholders and damaged the district’s reputation. The public deserves and is legally entitled to clear, honest information about the superintendent investigation and transportation struggles as well as common back-to-school topics like academics, finances, administrative vacancies, enrollment, and attendance.”

Responsibility for addressing those problems will now fall to interim Superintendent Millicent Borishade, whom Scarlett originally brought to St. Louis to serve as chief of schools. Borishade is one of a handful of high-level administrators — most of whom have subsequently been fired — who previously knew or worked alongside Scarlett when she held a leadership role in Seattle Public Schools.

But Borishade will first have to obtain credentials to hold the job. In a press release announcing her appointment, the district noted that its interim chief had filed paperwork to obtain a Missouri superintendent certification, and that her service in the role would depend on her receiving one. After initially stating that she held such certificates in both Illinois and Washington State, the district’s press office later clarified that Borishade had only held them in the past. 

The school board’s vote, taken in a special session, terminated Scarlettt’s contract only a year after she took the job. Though her arrival was met with high hopes for an academic turnaround in one of America’s worst-performing school systems, Scarlett took criticism for her hiring and spending practices, which subsequently led not only to the state-led audit, but also to an internal investigation.

Byron Clemens, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers’ St. Louis affiliate, wrote in an email that Scarlett had a right to due process and that the district needed to carry on in its improvement efforts, including an expansion of public preschool and recruiting more teachers.

“We don’t have the luxury of clutching our pearls and getting lost in anxiety,” Clemens said. “We are there for the children of St. Louis every day — we weathered the pandemic, and we will get through this as well.”

The hurried leadership handover is just one of a mounting series of challenges facing St. Louis Public Schools at the outset of the 2024–25 academic year. When a major bus provider unexpectedly pulled out of its contract with the district, officials had to assemble a patchwork transportation plan involving over a dozen vendors to fill the void in August. In all, over a thousand families were left without a reliable way to send their children to school, with some being issued gas cards to cover their driving costs.

Short-term finances have also been called into question. After beginning last year with a $17 million surplus, the district now projects that it will enter a $35 million deficit in 2024–25 — though those figures are still only estimates, and revenue raising mechanisms are being considered.

Even these setbacks are only the latest to afflict St. Louis Public Schools, which has lost the vast majority of its enrollment over the last half-century as families fled for charter schools, private alternatives or nearby suburban districts. Local education observers have increasingly pointed to the need to shutter under-enrolled facilities, both to offload costs and right-size a system that enrolls only about one-sixth the students it did in the 1960s. 

Even in the midst of a pandemic that inflicted significant harm on children around the country, St. Louis was particularly hard-hit, with testing data indicating that COVID cost the average student the equivalent of 0.8 years of reading instruction and more than twice that in math. An analysis conducted by The 74’s Chad Aldeman found that only about one-in-five St. Louis third graders are reading on grade level, far fewer than the city’s underlying levels of poverty would predict.

Krystal Barnett, a mother and CEO of the parent advocacy group Bridge 2 Hope, has criticized the district since this summer for failing to communicate with parents about transportation issues and called on school board members to resign over what she called failures of leadership. In an email to The 74, she said she wanted to know more about the grounds for Scarlett’s appeal.

“We need leaders over our schools that will hold themselves to a standard and not compromise,” she wrote.

Current school board vice president Matt Davis declined to comment on thes vote to fire Scarlett.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter