In the summer of 2010, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that children in an unaccredited school district had the right to enroll in any school district in any adjoining county. The case resulted from a lawsuit filed by St. Louis resident Jane Turner, who wanted to send her child to Clayton's highly ranked public schools without having to pay thousands of dollars in yearly tuition.
In its Turner decision, the court ruled children must not be held responsible for the failure of adults to produce successful schools.
The ruling, however wise, has created an atmosphere of fear among school districts in the St. Louis region. For the time being, both city and suburban districts are ignoring the decision. They are worried about the potential financial calamity that could follow if thousands of schoolchildren left their failing schools for Clayton, Ladue or even St. Charles or Jefferson counties.
In the meantime, some districts are hiring private investigators to ensure that parents don't do exactly what the court said they had the right to do.
On Tuesday, Post-Dispatch reporter Jessica Bock described how school districts all over the region have hired investigators to ensure that parents do not surreptitiously enroll their children in school districts where they don't reside.
Something is wrong with this picture.
It is hard to imagine a parent in a troubled school district, be it St. Louis, Riverview Gardens, East St. Louis or elsewhere, not doing whatever he could to give his child the best future possible.
It's just as true that parents in the suburbs have every right to protect the quality of their children's education, including the limited class size and excellent facilities that many of them provide through higher property taxes.
School superintendents and school boards "have an obligation to the taxpayers in their districts to find out the truth" about parents who are lying about where their children live, an attorney with the Missouri School Boards Association told the Post-Dispatch.
That's true. But the greater obligation — as the state's highest court has ruled — is to the children.
When will we put them first?
This is the great challenge facing the St. Louis region. Until school and civic leaders deal with the Turner decision and the underlying problems of urban education, this region will continue to allow thousands of children, most of them poor and many of them African-American, to fall through the cracks of a broken system with no easy fixes.
There are ideas that might fulfill the spirit of the Turner decision and help to improve our urban schools. Among them: Allowing open enrollment within the public school system, as several states have done, including Colorado, Iowa, Ohio and Arkansas. Another would be to erase the school district boundaries in the St. Louis region and develop one unified school district similar to what has happened in Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Ky.
Some in St. Louis have suggested that successful suburban school districts could operate charter schools in the city, bringing their expertise to the city's facilities.
There is no magic bullet. But if our priority is the children, then we must work harder and faster to find a solution. Punishing parents who are trying to do right by their children isn't the answer.
