Missouri law only allows state-funded charter schools in Kansas City, St. Louis and unaccredited school districts. Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis NAACP chapter, said the geographic restrictions keep a “foot on the necks of educating black children in urban districts.”
Pruitt wasn’t advocating for an expansion of charter schools, certain to be a hot topic of debate in the Missouri Legislature next session. Instead, Pruitt, as NAACP leadership, is among the plaintiffs in federal court motion alleging Missouri is violating the terms of a St. Louis school desegregation agreement by sending tax revenues to charter schools.
The motion would require charter schools to return $42 million in funding collected over the last 10 years.
“If they win this, it will be devastating. We wouldn’t be able to continue,” Marshall Cohen, the executive director of Lift for Life Academy in St. Louis, told the St. Louis Dispatch.
The school boasts 92 percent graduation rate, with 88 percent of graduates accepted to college, technical schools or the military. St. Louis schools have a combined graduation rate of only 45.9 percent.
As part of a 43-year-old desegregation case settlement, voters in 1999 approved a 2/3rd-cent sales tax to fund desegregation programs, like all-day kindergarten, preschool, busing, and magnet schools. In 2006, the Missouri Legislature reworked the state’s school financing formula, and since then, about $42 million of the desegregation sales tax money has been directed to Missouri charter schools.
“The quagmire in all this is how the state funds poor districts, and schools that have underserved populations,” Pruitt told the Dispatch. “Poor kids in the public schools and poor kids in the charter schools shouldn’t have to fight one another for money.”
Back then, Pruitt said the court motion isn’t an attack on charter schools, but according to Missourinet, he told a legislative hearing that charter school’s geographic restrictions are an effort to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods in St. Louis.
State law allows Missouri charter schools to establish geographic areas around the school and give enrollment preferences to students in that area. The law specifically limits schools from establishing geographic areas that would create racially or socioeconomically isolated schools.
“It’s an issue of what I would call reverse discrimination or it’s an issue of the state going back to its historic past of coming up with harebrain ideas that have run amuck,” he said.
There are about 23,000 students attending charter schools in Kansas City and St. Louis. Missouri lawmakers are expected to consider expanding charter schools during the 2018 legislative session which begins on Jan. 3.