Crooked Timber

It’s often useful to mention that I went to public school in Missouri; it’s technically true, and helps burnish my populist credentials. But it’s also true that my particular school district was a lot closer to Dalton or Exeter than to almost anywhere else in the state.

For folks raised in the St. Louis area, the defining social question is famously “Where’d you go to high school?” and my answer predisposes many to resent me. The tony inner suburb of Clayton, my real hometown, is the region’s leading outpost of Richistan, and more or less the local equivalent of Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or the Philadelphia Main Line. I once had a colleague at Columbia University with some STL roots who froze me out the moment she learned where I came from.

Which really wasn’t fair; as a child of social workers, I came up comfortably but hardly lavishly—still clipping coupons, perusing yard sales, and wearing hand-me-downs. Growing up a few decades ago, there were still some relatively affordable domiciles in the Clayton School District if fewer and fewer in Clayton proper, as well as a robust voluntary transfer program bussing in kids from the inner city: we had much more diversity of race and class than we ever got credit for. But, yeah, there were also plenty of pampered princes and princesses parking the brand new Mercedes they’d gotten for their sweet sixteens.

Clayton homeowners’ soaring property values had long since become inextricable from the prestigious reputation of their top-ranked school district, not just in terms of test scores and graduation rates but especially as a feeder to the Ivies et al. The schools really were outstanding, at least for those of us on the honors/AP track: the whole John Hughes experience preserved in amber for the concentrated offspring of many of St. Louis’ most upscale professionals, and with a formidable roster of great teachers poached from throughout the county. As I’ve recently written, my education at Clayton High School easily outclassed almost anything I found in the Ivy League. But that was over twenty years ago, now.

In the meantime Clayton has changed, and not for the better. What was once a charming hamlet dotted with Mid-Century Modern architectural gems has been reduced to a wasteland of shoddy McMansions and corporate HQs enabled by shady exploitation of eminent domain. As the broader metropolitan area has declined, a deepening regional inferiority complex has spurred a desperate rush for the fanciest zip codes—and as such, the Clayton School District has enjoyed a golden halo and general carte blanche for whatever it’s deemed necessary, including endless building and renovation projects with few tangible benefits. This despite gradually eroding enrollment and test scores, and dwindling seriousness about the fundamentals: somehow, the elementary schools are still using a discredited literacy program developed at—and now disavowed by—Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Take it from a longtime reporter at Columbia, for so stubbornly ideological an institution as Teachers College to cut bait on such a prominent program is a huge red flag.)

At least most of the previous boondoggles had been put up for a vote before the distracted citizenry, who assumed on autopilot that everything would further increase property values, and reliably rubberstamped gratuitous expenditures including the demolishment and reconstruction of what was a readily renovatable middle school—without concern as to any potential glaring conflicts of interest from school board members. But, as of early 2024, the vaunted Clayton Schools might have finally slaughtered the golden goose.

I was back in town visiting for the holidays, seeing family and staying with my mother at her west Clayton ranch, when the news came in. Out of the blue after the new year arrived an abrupt report that the school district was suddenly in the final stages of supposed due diligence to spend an undisclosed tens of millions of dollars on a soon-to-be vacated corporate campus next to the high school and near a major highway, nine acres of some of the most plum real estate in the whole Midwest, for undefined purposes. It was to be an excitingly inclusive “empowerment campus,” was all we “stakeholders” were informed in disquieting corporate jargon, with details not to be revealed until after everything was irrevocably a done deal, for legal confidentiality reasons of course.

The bombshell landed to a day or two of stunned silence—it was just so unprecedentedly outrageous that nobody quite knew what to say. But soon enough an open letter from prominent local citizens (including the host of the local PBS public affairs show) emerged, amongst united opposition from Clayton’s mayor and four of her predecessors. All were up in arms that a major source of tax revenue for the City of Clayton for decades was to be replaced by a question mark rather than commercial space and/or many more of the relatively attainable two-bedroom condos in bottomless demand.

The controversy soon flared into a Nextdoor firestorm, especially as the district bungled its response: instead of pausing to acknowledge the people’s concerns, it posted a subtly defiant press release doubling down on the obfuscation, now claiming that the mysterious deal would somehow offer an enhanced security perimeter for vulnerably at-threat high school students. It was all so flippant and bogus and contrived that it stoked further public indignation, and prompted me to start shit-posting about the sheer ludicrousness, eventually landing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Roiling outrage finally forced the Clayton School Board to schedule a belated public forum, and officially announce that they cared what their constituents think. Yet that too turned out to be a sketchy whitewash, with precious few details in what felt like an obligatory sales job, evading hard questions and attempting to steer clear of elephants in the room, as extensively covered in local media.

Many concerned citizens allege outright corruption, and there are a bunch of indicators that don’t look so good: is it really appropriate that the president of the school board be a real estate attorney married to one of the biggest developers in town? Is it proper that the transaction involves a law firm that employs a member of the board? Why haven’t any developers been willing to acquire the property? How many more conflicts of interest are still out there festering, eventually to be revealed?

My own sense is that the board probably really does mean well, but is grappling with awkward existential issues that it doesn’t know how to talk about. For decades Claytonians have whispered that the district is skating on thin ice; as the town has gotten more and more expensive, fewer and fewer families can afford the price of admission, and the writing has long been on the wall that enrollment would eventually enter a death spiral.

It’s not just Clayton; nationally, the entire education sphere (not to mention Social Security) is careening towards a demographic cliff. The viability of the system is predicated on a level of population growth America’s collapsing fertility rates no longer sustain, and second-tier colleges in the region and across the country are already struggling to fill seats. The stark numbers explain part of the unspoken rationale of why the Biden administration has been ushering in so many millions of undocumented migrants: to have more warm bodies to kick the can of the institutional status quo a bit further down the road.

The present composition of Clayton schools is probably unsustainable: one way or another, the district is going to need to find more students, most likely by expanding the voluntary transfer program (aka “deseg”) and/or by merging with another district. But that will entail diluting Clayton’s prestigious reputation, and making it less competitive with elite private schools. My best guess is that the district is plotting the new “inclusive empowerment campus” as a whole separate high school to park the bulk of out-of-towners while attempting to preserve Clayton High School itself as an esteemed pseudo-private institution.

It may well be that the school board’s plan is the least bad course of action, but the regrettable way they’ve handled this delicate situation has torpedoed their credibility and permanently dinged the Clayton brand. There is no more potent political issue in St. Louis than maintaining local control, and their opting for stonewalling secrecy rather than transparently levelling with voters has created a PR crisis such as well-heeled Clayton has never seen.

Meanwhile, I’ve been having a blast firing off broadsides and heckling my alma mater. In my day to day work whistleblowing about ultra-elite national institutions, any progress is incremental and against impossible odds. But battling local avatars of elite authority is so much easier, with vastly more chance of actually making a difference. Send a shot across the bow of an Ivy League dean, and you get strategic silence; it’s not in internationally-renowned institutions’ interest to help platform their critics. But demand a school board president’s resignation, and you’re liable to at least get a passive-aggressive response.

Over twenty years ago my Clayton High School classmates elected me senior class president, and to be honest they made the wrong decision. Sure, I helped our class win the Homecoming parade, but the primary job of a class president is to organize reunions, and I’ve been MIA working in New York. This school board scandal has provided a golden opportunity to make up for lost time and demonstrate some Greyhound pride.

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ADDENDUM:

The people prevailed! On January 22, the very afternoon their controversial deal was set to close, the Clayton school board issued an anodyne statement that the plan had been terminated and expressing gratitude to be blessed with “such a passionate and engaged community.”

The immediate reaction on Nextdoor was curiously muted; it seemed that most critics were relieved, sick of the rancor, and too Midwestern Nice to rub it in. But unfinished business and unresolved issues still loom: the hard mathematics of demographic reality remain imminent storm clouds on Clayton’s horizon.

What us concerned citizens really wanted and needed, beyond canceling the crazy deal, was simple acknowledgment that mistakes had been made, a sincere apology, and some kind of solemn pledge for complete transparency from here on out. But what we got was yet another evasive whitewash refusing to take any kind of responsibility for the whole embarrassing shitshow.

Like it or not, before long Clayton must inexorably face some painful choices and compromises; and the school district will need every last ounce of credibility it can muster for what will undoubtedly be a contentious reckoning. With all due respect, this board and superintendent have lost all credibility, and it would be in the district's ecumenical best interest to turn the page with an entirely new slate of leadership.

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Next: How Broken Is Academia?

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