Learn why good schools are essential for strong and thriving communities. Discover how they attract residents and businesses, provide places of safety and social-emotional nourishment for children, and contribute to economic stability.
Image is a courtesy of Chester Asher
What is one of the most common questions asked when people are looking to move into an area? “How are the schools?” Good schools provide anchors in communities – in both the people served and the facility itself. They attract residents, businesses, and educated professionals. They provide places of safety and social-emotional nourishment for children. They provide communal spaces where families meet, interact, and grow together. They represent a rites of passage that transition young people into positive, productive, and responsible adults. They help to increase property values and create economic stability in neighborhoods.
The opposite is also true. “Bad” schools, characterized by abandoned, decrepit, and dilapidated buildings, become eyesores within a community, deterring any type of investment or desirability for residences or businesses. They can turn into magnets for drug use, criminal activity, gangs, trash accumulation, and overall economic wastelands for taxpayers.
At Sculin School, shuttered about fifteen years ago by SLPS in North City, Maxine Clark, Founder of Build-a-Bear, sought to purchase or lease the building to use as a charter school. Rather than making good use of the building, it sits today off Kings Highway, as a home to the homeless with its roof caving in, windows shattered, and trash scattered through the property. Drug paraphernalia and remnants of fires can be found in one of the buildings that remains open to any wanderer.
Last spring at Cleveland High School, one of SLPS’ abandoned properties, a teenager was shot after wandering onto the school grounds. Saint Louis Public Schools currently has twenty-one properties listed for sale on its website. Some properties, like Ralph Bunche school, photographed above with half of the roof hanging off the side of the building, are not listed. It has numerous other properties that are underutilized. The SLPS Board of Education abides by its policy to not rent, lease, or sell its properties to any public charter school. Unable to sell or maintain and unwilling to sell or lease these properties to viable buyers like charter school operators, many of the buildings have fallen into disrepair resulting in neighborhood blight. With St. Louis’ long history of racism, this is no accident. It is yet another stain in the long history of degradation and dispossession in the Black community.
The City of St. Louis has become well known for sustaining many blighted communities and much of it has been documented in Walter Johnson’s book about St. Louis, “The Broken Heart of America”. Particularly in Black neighborhoods, like Mill Creek, the determination of blight isused by city officials to condemn and destroy these neighborhoods for the benefit of majority white developers for use by mostly white people. The dispossession of land from Black residents, dead or alive, is a long-held practice in St. Louis. Whether through the use of eminent domain used to build interstate highways through Black communities like Mill Creek, eminent domain used to dig up the mostly Black deceased in Washington Cemetery, using zoning laws to confiscate land in Meacham Park, or outright killing Black people like in the Massacre of 1917, the city has a history of degrading and divorcing Black people from their land. Sadly today is no different.
This policy to maintain empty derelict buildings across St. Louis is a new means to degrade Black communities and dispossess property. Rather than leasing or selling the property to operate a school, rather than having sports programs, hiring teachers, custodians, counselors, and kitchen staff, rather than convening parents for plays and celebrations, rather than selling cookies and baked goods, rather than having science fairs and spelling bees, rather than having children reading, writing, and giving speeches, rather than selling or renting the properties and earning millions of dollars that could be used to help the children in other neighborhood schools, SLPS has decided to pay millions of dollars to let these properties sit, rot, and become crime scenes. These intentional policies degrade the quality of life for residents across St. Louis at tax payer expense. They create hazards and eyesores in our community, require public funds to cut the grass, put up fencing, and maintain minimal upkeep, while making it cheap for the mostly white real estate developers that purchase these properties and redevelop them for wealthier mostly whiter residents. This is what racism in the year 2024 looks like and we should not allow it to continue.
good schools, community, education, children, families, property values, safety, social-emotional nourishment, economic stability
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