Tuition-free, back-to-basics, inner-city private schools
The new St. Louis Academies seem almost too good to be true. But their founders insist that failure is not an option.
By King Kaufman
Oct. 29, 2001 | ST. LOUIS -- -- "My name is Gary Greer, and the first thing I want to do is be a veterinarian." The fifth grader addresses an audience of schoolmates, parents and teachers sitting on folding chairs on the blacktop playground of the St. Louis Academy at Perpetual Help. The academy, which occupies the inner-city site of a former Catholic school, is being "officially" opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony even though students are in the third week of instruction. "Second thing, I want to be a baseball player," announces Greer. "Third thing, a firefighter, and fourth thing, I want to be president."
The parents laugh. Everyone applauds. Gary Greer's list of ambitions may be typical for an American fifth grader with plenty of attitude, but his tuition-free school and its companion across town are unlike any others in the city, and they're nearly unique in the nation. Not surprisingly, the Academies' goals -- and chances of success -- can seem as hope-charged and wildly optimistic as those of its beaming 11-year-old speechmaker. But the main tenet of this enterprise -- that there is no excuse for failure -- has infused its teachers, students and administrations with a seemingly indomitable spirit. As far as Academies' folk are concerned, failure is not an option.
The two new St. Louis Academies are the brainchild of a group of black ministers led by Bishop Lawrence Wooten of the Church of God in Christ Worldwide. The church, frustrated by the fact that many of its young parishioners couldn't read or write, contacted other congregations asking for help. That call netted Marine Lt. Col. Tim Daniels, whose mother was a member of Wooten's church, the Williams Temple. Daniels, a native St. Louisian, flew to his hometown whenever his duties allowed him, participating in town hall meetings and conferences with parents and teachers, discussing ways to improve on the education offered by the city's struggling public schools.
"The problem [of failing schools] is just so pervasive in the inner city, I said that whatever you're going to do, it has to be unique, it has to be creative, it has to be something that has never been done before because everything that they've already done has obviously failed to work," he says. "If you look not only at St. Louis, but across the country, you'll find almost identical problems no matter what inner city you go to."
In St. Louis, the public schools have an ongoing teacher shortage and only partial accreditation. This month, 14 public schools were targeted for possible corrective action by the state as a result of low graduation rates and poor test scores. The graduation rate for the district was only 42.6 percent in 2000, up from the high 30s the previous few years. The dropout rate is close to 13 percent.
While still on active military duty, Daniels managed to lead a successful effort to open two much smaller free charter schools in Phoenix, where he was living at the time and where his school-age daughter still lives. Those schools opened in the fall of 2000. After his retirement from the Marines several months later, he spearheaded an effort by the Church of God in Christ to found several charter schools in St. Louis that would provide mostly poor inner-city kids with a tuition-free alternative to the struggling public schools there. But he failed, mostly due to state laws that don't provide for reimbursement of charter schools' sponsoring institution -- usually a local college -- for supervision expenses.
The Daniels and the ministers went ahead and opened the St. Louis Academies anyway. And that's why you're reading this.
On Aug. 20, Daniels and several Church of God in Chirst ministers, joined by Republican state Senate President Pro Tem Peter Kinder, who had become a powerful legislative ally, held a rally on the site of the closed Perpetual Help School in the city's impoverished, mostly black far north side. Daniels announced plans to open four schools on the sites of abandoned Catholic schools, that would serve 3,000 city students -- tuition free.
And that wasn't all. Seventy-five teachers already had been hired. A $4 million loan had been secured from ABS School Services, an Arizona company that provides financing and services, such as payroll accounting, to schools nationwide. And along with $800,000 in donations the churches had raised from their congregations, they'd hit upon a creative scheme, first tried by Daniels in his Phoenix schools, to use before- and after-school funds, federal day-care money, Medicaid and school lunch programs to help finance the schools, which would take a back-to-basics approach to learning.
And one more thing: The schools would open in a matter of weeks.
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