Educational Larceny in The City of St. Louis School District: Corrupted Schools for Underprivileged Children

The City of St. Louis School District has certainly had it's problems. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay has this to say about his own school district, "That is a choice already available to many middle class and wealthy parents, who can afford to send their children to private or parochial schools, or to better public schools in St. Louis county. It is also a choice already available to parents whose children are eligible for enrollment in the voluntary interdistrict transfer program. Given those realities, why should we force low income parents - who already face a myriad of challenges - and those ineligible for the transfer program to send their kids to failing schools in the St. Louis public school district?"

In the previous quote, Mayor Slay was referring to the issue of Charter Schools in the District, but most feel that this statement is reflective on the topic of *enrolling under an address that is not yours*. Parents of St. Louis City children are faced with some unnerving issues on a daily basis. Violence among the kids themselves is the obvious cause of many of the problems. But on a more disturbing note, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been funneled OUT of the district due to corruption, misallocation and theft. The schools are in physical ruins. Many have been shut down because the cost of renovation would be far more than building new from the ground up. Unfortunately the *shut down* institutions have yet to be rebuilt, and it seems unlikely that we will see the *new* schools anytime soon.

Parents have responded to these issues in many ways, one being to simply enroll their kids in neighboring University City School District, which not only has higher tax revenue, but better equipped facilities. To this day, the St. Louis City schools that are still standing at the high school level, have 1 operational computer to every 100 students. Internet access being available on only half the systems. At the elementary and middle school levels, computers are not available at all. These students will be expected to compete for admission to Universities with students that have had access to the best technology their parents' tax dollars could buy.

Since Missouri gambling riverboats were allowed to open their doors in 1994, 1.8 Billion dollars have been allocated to the School Foundation Formula, which was slated to bring the quality of public education in Missouri to an all time high. And yet the City of St. Louis has boarded up school after school while building a new baseball stadium, and offering tax credits to hundreds of high-risk businesses, (most of which have failed to bring revenue to the city.)

Population has declined in St. Louis drastically over the last 2 decades, and this is the typical answer to the *Why are the schools closing?* question. Parents with no other option resort to this solution, simply lying about the student's physical address on enrollment forms in neighboring cities. So, is *Educational Larceny* a crime? If so, who is the *victim*? Currently over 60 parents have been *busted* in the University City schools alone. So far, none have been prosecuted, the current handling of the situation gives the parents 2 weeks to enroll their children in their own district.

St. Louis City schools are currently unnacredited. Most would agree that a 12 year enrollment in these schools qualifies as substandard education. Can you blame these people for trying to get their children into a better school, regardless of the consequences? Tax paying residents of neighboring cities need to quit wasting much needed time and effort hiring private investigators to weed out these *larcenists*, and use those tax dollars for the good of all, educating underprivileged students, regardless of what zip code they live in. Lack of acceptable educational facilities and prospective employment is what drives the crime rate in St. Louis to the level of *The Most Dangerous City in America*.