Slay lauds outgoing superintendent — in Clayton
Mayor Francis Slay, a sturdy critic of the St. Louis Public Schools, has found a superintendent he likes across the city limits. 
On Monday, a note on Slay’s website lauded outgoing Clayton superintendent Don Senti, retiring after more than 12 years in charge of the affluent district, as “one of the region’s education heroes.”
Slay’s reason for being so complementary?
The hundreds of city students who have attended Clayton schools under Senti’s watch through the voluntary desegregation program — which includes the children of outspoken School Board member and Slay critic Veronica O’Brien.
“Dr. Senti’s strong personal and continuing commitment to educating children in a diverse environment has made the experiences of both city and Clayton students far richer than they otherwise would have been,” Slay wrote.
Meanwhile, the mayor has had little if any praise for the parade of superintendents in and out of St. Louis Public Schools headquarters.
Earlier this month, veteran educator John Wright took the title of interim superintendent as Diana Bourisaw quietly winds down her two-year tenure as head of the troubled district.
Perhaps the reason for the lack of fanfare is fatigue — while Clayton has had one superintendent since 1995, Wright will be the seventh for St. Louis since 2003.
Why not just put a permanent link to Slay’s blog on the paper’s homepage? That would be easier.
Don Senti and the Clayton and Parkway (where he was superintendent before Clayton) school boards cooperated fully with the federal court overseeing the St. Louis desegregation suit. After the initial rulings found that the state of Missouri was the primary constitutional wrongdoer (requiring segregated schools in its state constitution), the St. Louis School Board cooperated fully with the court. But the state, led by John Ashcroft as attorney general and then governor, fought the court at every turn. Had local, state and federal officials cooperated to rebuild the city schools and spend money on classrooms and instruction instead of lawyers, the St. Louis Public Schools would be a model today.
And who is in charge of city schools now? The state.
The only consolation is that the state-appointed committee is headed by Richard Gaines, a former president of the St. Louis board when it was under active court supervision.
Ms. Gilbert,
The head of the Special Administrative Board currently running SLPS is Rick Sullivan, not Richard Gaines. Sullivan is considered the CEO of the district and with him in place we do not even need a superintendent–he is authorized by statute to hold that position.
If you check the disaggregate data on DESE’s website for the Clayton district, you see that while white and Asian kids are doing very well, black students and those on the free-reduced lunch program (i.e., lots of the city kids being bussed in on the deseg program) are scoring in the low 30th percentile in reading and math. So these kids are not doing particularly well, but because Clayton is full of many other kids who are doing very well, those who are not are not as evident.
This is important because urban districts who have many, many children facing the challenges of the vestiges of racism and past and current poverty do not have the benefit of a lot of children of privilege to bring up their test scores and hide the true tragedy–the children with strikes against them are still failing. When pundits suggest that dissolving SLPS and sending city kids to the county will fix everything, think of this. The children won’t necessarily do any better. But the problems will be much easier to ignore. Is that progress? Is that all our children deserve?