State education officials need to get prepared. With little notice, they could be handed the keys to the St. Louis Public Schools — along with this advice: “Good luck.”

Last year, the state took the keys to the failing district away from the elected school board and handed them to a three-member Special Administrative Board. One year into that board’s tenure, at least one of its members is coming to believe that reforming the 28,000-student district might be impossible.

Administrative board member Richard K. Gaines, an insurance executive and community leader who was an elected school board member from 1983 to 1989, worries that the budget he and his colleagues are considering would gut the district’s educational mission. At the same time, he agrees with his colleagues on the board that major cuts and school closings can’t be avoided. Student enrollment is shrinking, and so is revenue.

However, board president Rick Sullivan and board member Melanie Adams say that it’s possible for the school system to live within its means — meeting the $320 million budget target by cutting $30 million in expenses — in ways that don’t compromise its overall mission.

The proposal they’re considering, developed by former schools superintendent Diana Bourisaw before she left the job, leans heavily on cutting hundreds of support jobs — teachers’ aides, school social workers and psychologists, librarians and counselors — as well as reducing bus service.

That has caused grave concern within the St. Louis local of the American Federation of Teachers and School Related Personnel, which correctly points out that the district’s many troubled students desperately need those support services.

As the three board members work through this budgetary process, Mr. Gaines bridles at rigid requirements for such a complicated and troubled district. Without breathing room and resources, he argues, the state can’t reasonably expect the special board to deal effectively with the deeply entrenched problems of urban education.

There may come a time, he says, when the special board says ”enough” and drops the entire mess into the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s lap.

Is he serious? Or is he saber rattling, hoping that state lawmakers and education officials become sufficiently horrified that they offer more flexibility and free up more funds?

The Special Administrative Board has three years remaining on its charter. Of its three members, only Mr. Gaines has expressed doubts. Still, Mr. Gaines continues to work with Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Adams to try to create a healthy, well-managed, steadily improving, reaccredited district.

But when the state pulled the city school district’s accreditation last year, it cited “poor academic performance, frequent changes in executive leadership, declining enrollment, deteriorating finances, loss of public confidence and persistent conflicts within the board of education and between the board and a series of superintendents.”

There are bright spots in the district — dedicated teachers and principals who perform miracles — but the problems cited by the state remain. If a centrally administered urban district full of troubled students, entrenched political interests and an aging infrastructure can’t be maintained, and if the district doesn’t improve its academic performance within three years, what is Plan B?

It is a question that goes beyond the city of St. Louis. Surrounding the city are inner-ring suburban districts that struggle academically and financially in much the same way: Normandy, Jennings, Wellston and, to a lesser extent, University City. For that matter, Kansas City also faces chronic problems with academic performance.

At some point, districts that fail to meet minimum standards lose accreditation and are deemed “lapsed.” What does that mean? A spokesman for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education put it like this: It’s a “field covered with land mines on which we walk gingerly.”

State law lays out three options:

— A special administrative board can continue operating “all or part” of the district. That’s where city schools are now.

— The state can “attach the territory of the lapsed district to another district or districts for school purposes.”

— Or the state can break up the district into smaller subdistricts “with the option of permitting a district to remain intact for the purposes of assessing, collecting, and distributing property taxes.”

Thus, Plan B could see a special board continuing to operate the district or parts of it with other parts severed into smaller districts, parts of the city district attached to adjacent suburban districts or a combination of all three.

It’s significant that despite all the academic, financial and leadership failures of the city schools, the special board is intent on making things work as best as it can, rather than considering the more extreme options.

To even raise those possibilities would roil entrenched interests inside the district — including the district’s permanent bureaucracy of teachers and related unions and the politicians they support — that fear loss of control and influence. Outside the district, adjacent communities don’t want to be saddled with the problems of the St. Louis Public Schools.

These issues involve deep and unresolved racial grievances, many of them legitimate, others cynical and opportunistic.

But unless we are willing to doom the city’s children to academic purgatory, this conversation no longer can be postponed. It is not too soon to begin considering and planning for what might come next.

The questions are straightforward: What would be the practical consequences of a permanent loss of accreditation? What are the best and quickest options for creating a new system? Would a new model create genuine value or just make problems worse?

In crucial ways, the curtain already might be descending on the district. While Mr. Gaines wonders if the state might have to sort it all out, parents continue to vote with their feet. Each student who leaves the district — be it for a parochial school, a suburban school or a charter school — reduces the amount of money the state provides to the district for the expensive process of urban education.

The process of openly planning for the worst could deliver the shock that activates inert elements within the district and community into productive action, pushing aside those who confuse spectacle and self-indulgence with school reform.

Pictured: Members of the Special Administrative Board met for the first time at the St. Louis Science Center June 15, 2007. From left are Melanie Adams, Richard Gaines, Rick Sullivan and Superintendent Diana Bourisaw.
Robert Cohen | Post-Dispatch