The St. Louis Board of Education approved the temporary relocation of students from schools damaged by the May 16 tornado to other buildings within the district.
The board voted 6-1 in favor, with Ben Conover's the sole vote against the plan.
Students from seven schools will be relocated to seven receiving schools:
- Ashland Elementary students will be housed at Jefferson Elementary.
- Hickey Elementary students will be housed at Walbridge Elementary.
- Washington Montessori Elementary students will be housed at Ames Elementary.
- Yeatman-Liddell Middle School students will be housed at Blewett Elementary.
- Soldan International Studies High School students will be housed at Gateway STEM High School.
- Sumner High School and Fresh Start students will be housed at Stevens Middle School.
- Beaumont High School programs will be housed at Clyde C. Miller College Prep Academy.
The plan to relocate St. Louis Public Schools students was changed from the original plan that was shared with the public on June 9, after the American Federation of Teachers Local 420, school administrators and staff unions insisted they be brought into the conversation around the temporary school consolidation plan.
Sumner and Fresh Start students were originally supposed to be relocated to Clyde C. Miller and Yeatman students to Gateway Middle School.
Stevens was closed in 2016 but was used temporarily in 2024 for students enrolled in the Nahed Chapman New American Academy and more recently for professional development, according to district spokesperson Carl Mitchell.
The district is in the process of finalizing transportation plans for all students, but especially those who were set to attend the storm-damaged schools.
For example, Chief of Operations Square Watson said students who live within walking distance to Ashland Elementary will still walk to the school, meet with members of the district’s safety and security team and then will be shuttled to Jefferson.
Students who were displaced by the storm and are still currently living within city limits will have school bus transportation. However, students who have been displaced by the storm to outside the city, but are still enrolled in SLPS, will be transported by taxi using McKinney-Vento federal funding.
The district estimates that at least 2,000 students are currently displaced by the storm.
The decision to temporarily relocate students comes as the district is weighing which schools to close in the 2026-27 school year, due in part to declining enrollment.
Many of the tornado-damaged schools are located in north city, which has raised concerns among some locals that the schools will be closed permanently.
Superintendent Millicent Borishade has said she does not yet have a final list of schools the district will permanently close.
Pushback to the original plan
Last week, Local 420 released a joint statement along with various school staff unions demanding that the district bring staff into conversations around what the district said is a temporary school consolidation plan.
Ray Cummings, president of Local 420, said he had safety concerns about some high school students being combined into one school due to possible neighborhood rivalries.
Teachers and school staff are often tasked with breaking up fights or handling classroom disruptions, which takes away from instruction time, he said.
“We’re in a more violent place in St. Louis. We want to err on the side of caution. We don’t mix these groups with different neighborhoods,” he said during an interview on Friday.
During a meeting on July 8, the school board failed to ratify a plan to relocate all students from storm-damaged buildings.
President Karen Collins-Adams asked the board to vote on an amended plan, which would have allowed the elementary students to be relocated, but that vote also failed.
Collins-Adams then asked district leadership to meet with the union by July 11 to figure out a plan to move forward with the temporary school consolidation plan.
Local 420 confirmed that the meetings took place and that they had reached a tentative agreement on Friday.
"The conversations were direct, but at every step, we reaffirmed our commitment to working together to provide our students, teachers, and administrators with the safest possible educational and work environment,” Cummings said in a statement released Monday. “We're committed to doing everything we can to ensure a smooth start to the new school year."
Rocky road to final approval
Board members acknowledged that the process to approve the district’s plan for temporarily relocating students and the associated costs was less than perfect.
Conover, who initially raised questions about the plan during the July 8 board meeting, called the process “chaotic at best.”
“We really need to improve how we're handling things here as a board in order to be able to successfully support this district,” Conover said.
“We have all failed, and now parents are five weeks away from school and they don't know where their children are going to be,” Vice President Emily Hubbard said. “ I would be really mad if this were my school, and I hope that we can all work better and…move forward for what's the best thing for children.”
Donna Jones, a longtime board member and north city resident who encouraged the board to take the unions’ concerns around student safety seriously, rebuffed Hubbard’s comments.
“I just wanted to say how proud I am of many of all our members for asking questions that needed to be asked, because there are people out here in the community that are asking these questions, and we don't always have to agree on everything, but we have one final goal, and that's to make sure that our students are safe and sound,” Jones said.
Collins-Adams said the board will strive to do better.
“This was a long process,” Collins-Adams said. “We had a lot of stumblings that we all did, and then we need to be able to get it right for the students. I think we all appreciate that we finally arrived at this point to be able to make a final decision so that we can actually begin the [2025-26] school year.”
