Woes of the St. Louis School Board

I'll just come out and say it, The St. Louis School Board is an inefficient, backwards cluster-fuck.

I apologize for the obscenity but it really is the perfect prose for the given situation.

Last Tuesday, January 30 about 1,200 parents, teachers, students and ordinary citizens packed into the Harris-Stowe auditorium to protest the proposed takeover of the St. Louis Public School District by the state of Missouri. People lined up as early as 7:30 a.m. to make sure that their voice was heard.

In theory their opinion made sense. If the School Board was appointed by the state and not elected by the voters then the voters lost all say in the education system.

Sounds like a legit complaint but there's one main problem with it.

The voters are terrible at selecting members for the School Board.

Here's a list of things that have happened recently in the School Board:

1. The cash strapped School Board had 2 Apple iPods and 4 MacBook Pros charged onto it's credit card. The iPods and 4 of the MacBooks are sitting at the office unused. No member of the Board has claimed responsibility for ordering them. One former employee said that School Board President Veronica O'Brien ordered them for her children. O'Brien says former liaison to the Board Chip Clatto ordered them. Clatto says that O'Brien told him to order them and the circle of blame continues.

"Where are the other 2 MacBooks?" you ask. Oddly enough no one on the Board seems to know.

2. About six months ago O'Brien refused to sign ten board approved contracts that would allow for the purchase of needed desks, textbooks and even a heating bill. So children in several schools went without heat in November and December due to the lack of a signature. O'Brien claims that superintendent Diana Bourisaw failed to send the contract to her. Bourisaw says that she did. The Board backs Bourisaw's story.

3. On January 16 the School Board voted down an investigation into how successful a state run board would be. This was just a study to see if a state run district would improve the schools, not an actual choice to hand it over to the state.

4. On January 3 O'Brien barely held on to her job. In what has become routine in the School Board the last few years the president was nearly ousted but kept her position in a 4-3 vote.


These are recent events yet the dysfunction and incompetence goes back years. Board members have been caught on camera calling for God to curse other Board members.

And these people were elected.

Anyone that's against a state run School Board needs to ask themselves one question,

"Could it be worse than what we have now?"

No. Not a chance in hell.