UPDATED:

The troubled Paideia School will not open on Tuesday as previously announced.

A woman who answered the phone Thursday at the school's administrative office said classes will not begin Tuesday. She hung up without giving further explanation.

The school has faced questions about it's ability to open. Many parents who enrolled last year say they have been left in the dark about its plans. Officials for the school have repeatedly refused to comment.

OUR EARLIER STORY

ST. LOUIS  • All along, the troubled Paideia School has maintained it would reopen this year.

Even when the state stripped the school of its charter school status — and the stream of state and federal cash that comes with it — school leaders have doggedly said Paideia, with its two campuses, wasn't dead.

Never mind that the south St. Louis building it used to occupy now houses a competing charter school, or that many of the 524 students at both campuses last year have enrolled elsewhere. This week, Paideia's executive director, Brenda Johnson Pruitt, announced in television and radio ads that classes will start Monday.

"Prepare your child for the best life possible with the best education available at the Paideia School," she says in the 30-second television spot. "The Paideia School is a tuition-free public school with campuses in north and south St. Louis."

With no charter, no promise of public money and no apparent plans to collect tuition, how Paideia could reopen this year as a public school is a mystery to state education officials and others familiar with Paideia's history.

"This is like a phantom situation," said Rick Sullivan, president of the special administrative board that oversees the St. Louis Public Schools. "Paideia seems to be the school that won't die."

Officials at Paideia have refused to comment or answer whether the school has hired teachers, enrolled students or secured additional funding.

The school does appear to be taking steps to reopen at its College Hill Campus, at 2017 East Linton Avenue. A sign on the front door says school will start Sept. 7.

Over the summer, crews were at the school improving its grounds.

"It's all new," said Ocie McQueen, who lives across the street, as he gestured toward the fresh blacktop, the brick posts and the iron fencing lining the schoolyard. "The asphalt, the fencing, the whole thing."

Inside the administration building behind the school, an enrollment station took up part of the front hallway Tuesday. Administrators milled about, and adults came and went. When asked whether Johnson Pruitt would provide answers about Paideia's plans to open next week, a woman said that neither Johnson Pruitt nor the school's board of directors would talk about it.

Nor will Johnson Pruitt explain fliers that started showing up in south St. Louis last week on storefront windows and at a vacant school building. The fliers say Paideia will open at two campuses, one of them at 7401 Vermont Avenue — the vacant Lyon School owned by the St. Louis Public Schools.

District officials closed the building in June due to budget constraints. Several windows are shattered, and the playground is filled with weeds. With less than a week before Paideia is purported to begin classes, there is no sign that teachers have entered the building to set up classrooms or that anyone is making repairs to make it safe for students.

In addition, there is no agreement between the school district and Paideia, or anyone else, for the use of the Lyon building this school year, said Patrick Wallace, spokesman for St. Louis Public Schools.

Nevertheless, a flier was duct-taped to the door at Lyon Tuesday, listing the address as a Paideia campus this fall and directing parents to enroll at Paideia's administrative offices on North 20th Street.

THE BEGINNING

From its inception nine years ago, the Paideia school has been an unconventional educational venture.

The school, formerly St. Louis Charter Academies, attracted national attention in 2001 when organizers — including then-state Sen. Peter Kinder and several pastors — vowed to almost immediately open four tuition-free private schools for 3,000 children who wanted an alternative to the city's failing public schools.

Two campuses opened that fall. Eventually the project became Paideia Academy and operated as a charter school — a public school that receives state funds but is independent from school districts.

In June, the Missouri University of Science and Technology pulled its sponsorship of Paideia. That led the state board of education to revoke Paideia's charter, citing poor academic performance. Last school year, students at Paideia scored among the bottom four charter schools in St. Louis on the state's standardized test.

Legally, Paideia is no longer a public school. The school finished the school year with $462,578.93 in the bank, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. According to the balance sheet provided by the department, it's unclear how much of those funds are public money.

Michele Clark, spokeswoman for the education department, said the state has no statute that specifies what Paideia may or may not do with the money now that its no longer a charter school. "It depends on their bylaws," she said.

The money is a fraction of the $6.9 million that the school spent last year to operate its north and south city campuses.

But there is no sense of money problems in Paideia's television commercials.

In them, school executive director Johnson Pruitt vows to parents that the school will have 'small class sizes, certified teachers, plus nutritious meals and safe transportation."

'iT'S HEARTBREAKING'

This summer, a new charter school took over the building at 7604 Michigan Avenue, which had previously served as Paideia's south city campus. Carondelet Leadership Academy opened Aug, 23 as an elementary charter school for kindergarten through fifth grade. Since then, students wearing Paideia's pale blue shirts have appeared at the school building, thinking it was still Paideia, said Patrice Coffin, principal of Carondelet.

"It's heartbreaking," she said. "We just try to help them in any way we can."

Coffin said Carondelet has enrolled some Paideia students. But Carondelet only goes up to fifth grade this year, and Paideia serves children through eighth grade. Coffin has given the older kids and their parents contact information for the St. Louis Public Schools and other charter schools in the city.

"We don't have answers," she said.

Over the summer, Paideia officials organized a trip to Jefferson City to plead their case with three members of the state education department. Two students, five adults — mostly parents — and a school staff member went.

"They were asking us to reconsider the board action of not approving their charter," Clark said. They left empty-handed. The school last month also lost its legal battle to regain its charter.

Robert Whitehead said his fourth-grade son, Jake, blossomed at Paideia's south city campus. But by July, Whitehead wasn't getting a clear answer from Paideia's administrators about their school's future.

Last week, Whitehead said, Paideia contacted him too see whether Jake would be enrolling at their new south city location. Whitehead's son had already started school at Carondelet.

"They left us out there when it was too close for the school year to start," Whitehead said.

In the 11 years that charter schools have operated in Missouri, only one other school has reopened after losing its charter. Southwest Charter School in Kansas City reopened in 2006 as Renaissance Academy of Math and Science. The school operated for one year as a tuition-free private school, with the school's management company paying the $2.5 million tuition tab until the school could regain charter school status.

Whether Paideia reopens next week or not, Ben Gennaro said he'll leave his fourth-grade son at his new school, Carondelet. Gennaro saw the television ad this week announcing Paideia's plans to reopen and was astonished.

"Through the end of last year, they pushed for enrollment," he said, but Gennaro came to doubt them. "It seemed like they were misleading people. That's the vibe I got."