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News Briefs
City of St. Louis
State’s first charter school closes temporarily
The Missouri State Board of Education voted on May 22 to temporarily close the first state-sponsored charter school, the Can! Academy, in order to address problems, officials said. The school asked the state to suspend its operations.
Can! Academy, which opened last fall, served St. Louis Public Schools high school students who had dropped out or were at risk of dropping out and was operated by a Texas-based, for-profit company.
Jocelyn Strand, director of charter schools for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the school had high teacher turnover, fluctuating enrollment and its staff lacked administrative experience.
About 440 students were enrolled at the academy at one point during the 2007-2008 school year. Of those, 118 students were enrolled for the entire school year, and 102 students were enrolled for less than two months. The other 220 students may have left the school at some point and returned later in the year, Strand said.
School officials are talking with the SLPS district about students returning to either traditional district high schools or the district’s own alternative program.
“We have not done this before, and we don’t have a process,” Strand said. “Our main concern is to maintain the security of student records and to work with the Can! staff to provide for an orderly shutdown at the end of the school year.”
Only 50 percent of Can! teachers were certified, according to a DESE review in February. By law, charter schools are required to have 80 percent certification.
Mayor Francis Slay pushed for the hurried implementation of the program last May as a way to address the SLPS district’s 20 percent dropout rate for males and 16.4 percent for females.
Superintendent Diana Bourisaw said in a statement last May that the district was working on expanding its program for dropouts. However, officials in the mayor’s office responded that the attempt was insufficient.
The charter school’s late approval and quick start-up contributed to the problems the school encountered, Strand said.
State extends term of special board that oversees SLPS to 2011
On May 22, the Missouri Board of Education voted to extend the tenure of the Special Administrative Board that currently oversees St. Louis Public Schools.
Due to the unanimous vote by the state board, the appointed governing body will now remain through June 30, 2011. Previously it was overseeing the district on an undefined temporary basis.
Last year, the Missouri Board of Education voted to take control of the district after the elected school board neglected to reach financial and academic goals that had been set for it. That decision was a lightning rod for controversy, with busloads of angry SLPS teachers and parents protesting the meeting in which the vote took place.
SLPS Chief Executive Rick Sullivan is due to give the Special Administrative Board a full update of the district’s progress in late June.
St. Louis region
River ports and rail lines to receive Homeland Security funds
Missouri will receive $6.6 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to increase railroad and river port security, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill announced on May 19.
The bulk of the grant, $4.25 million, will go toward the St. Louis and Kansas City port areas. Under the East-West Gateway Council of Governments’ authority, St. Louis will receive $2.6 million to make the area safer against an assortment of hazards, city officials said. The project details and equipment purchasing are confidential information.
Missouri will also receive more than $1.8 million for freight-rail security, which will go toward a “vulnerability assessment” and continued training on handling potential hazards and threats, city officials said.
An additional $597,000 grant was issued to the state through the Buffer Zone Protection Program. The details about expenditure of these funds have not been made public, but the program is intended to protect high-risk facilities such as chemical facilities, financial institutions, stadiums, nuclear and electric power plants, and dams.
Local groups advise caution on air pollution
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tightened the air-quality restrictions this year, and local organizations are asking residents to monitor the air pollutants they put out before the summer heat begins.
The EPA calculates the Air Quality Index on a scale of 0 to 500 by looking at the five main air pollutants: ground-level ozone, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
Any air rating above 100 is considered unhealthy. With the new EPA calculations, the St. Louis area will most likely have more yellow and red ratings, meaning moderately unhealthy and unhealthy conditions respectively.
Typically the air is more hazardous later in the day. Those who exercise outside in the afternoon should consider changing their workout times to the morning.
The St. Louis Clean Air Partnership, a collaboration of local governmental and nongovernmental groups, said St. Louisans make six million vehicle trips a day, and five million of those are made by single drivers. Every day St. Louis-area drivers produce 88 tons of ozone-forming emissions.
Located in the earth’s upper atmosphere, the ozone layer protects the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. However, ozone in the lower atmosphere is harmful to breathe, and it damages crops, trees and other vegetation. Motor-vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions contribute to producing ground-level ozone.
Summer’s hot weather causes the ground-level ozone to become more concentrated. To see daily air-quality forecasts, visit www.cleanair-stlouis.com.
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