Around a decade ago, both these districts failed to meet state standards and received the status of “unaccredited.” Because these districts lost accreditation, students were allowed to transfer to an adjoining district—and Riverview Gardens and Normandy had to pay tuition to these nearby districts.

Over 2,000 students (a quarter of the two districts’ enrollment) immediately took the opportunity to transfer—with many enrolling in Kirkwood, Mehlville, Hazelwood, Ferguson-Florissant, and Francis Howell. No receiving district gained more than a five percent increase in its student body. This exodus of students was rooted in families’ desire to improve their children’s livelihood—a sentiment that still exists today. One mother described the ability to choose a different district as follows: “She is thriving and has found a place where she fits in. She feels safe in her school environment and as her mother, I don’t worry about her safety while she’s at school.”

Reverting back to the local control is probably not going to dramatically improve the situation in Riverview Gardens or Normandy; these districts have performed terribly both before and after state control.  Parents need to be able to hold these districts accountable. Parents demonstrated they wanted choice back when students transferred out of these failing districts, and they still want it now.

Some people worry what would happen to struggling districts if families had school choice. However, these districts would not simply collapse, as they are allowed to use enrollment from any of the past four years for funding. And school choice could have other benefits for these districts. A smaller student body could lead to more academic success, and the threat of closure could serve as a wake-up call to those who love these school districts.

How much better would it be for a district if students were enrolled because they actually wanted to be there? Perhaps having a student body who actually wants to be at their school would lower the soaring absentee rates we see in these two districts and throughout the state. While I cannot guarantee that parental accountability through choice will save these districts, saving particular school districts isn’t the goal of education policy. It’s giving every student in Missouri the best opportunity to succeed. And that means giving every student in Missouri the chance to pick a school that best fits their needs.

The post Riverview Gardens and Normandy Are Regaining Local Control appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

To summarize, about 20 years ago Hazelwood annexed a part of unincorporated St. Louis County that had been served by Robertson Fire District. Because of an obscure and misguided law (RSMO 72.418), Hazelwood was not allowed to use its own fire department provide fire protection services to the newly annexed area. Instead, Hazelwood was required to keep paying Robertson Fire District the amount it was due from property taxes within the part of its district now within Hazelwood. (It’s more complicated than that, but those are the basics of the arrangement.)

That part is troubling enough, but what happened over the ensuing years is that the fire district was able to convince voters in that area to increase their property taxes dramatically, because the residents did not owe the increased taxes like they normally would. In this case, the entire city of Hazelwood had to pay the higher taxes that benefitted (perhaps) a small number of residents. These elections were likely held on little-attended election dates where small groups of residents were able to wield outsized influence. The fire department union probably comes into play here, as a very politically active union can more easily dominate a fire district than a city fire department, although it can certainly do so with the latter, too.

Over the years, it has gotten to the point where Hazelwood is considering bankruptcy to pay the insane taxes it owes a fire district for services Hazelwood could and should be providing itself to these residents. This situation reflects everything that can go wrong with local government in Missouri—high taxes, inefficient government, and the imposition of taxes on taxpayers who have no say in the matter to benefit special interests. I wrote about this issue in my paper on Special Laws in Missouri. RSMO 72.418 needs to be changed so that cities that annex or incorporate have the option of providing fire services to the new parts of a city if that is what the new residents want. It is reasonable to require some type of payment to the fire district in these instances, but the current law allows the rampant abuse we are seeing in St. Louis County by the Robertson Fire District and needs to be substantially changed.

The post Robertson Fire District Changes Move Forward appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A few decades back, the City of Hazelwood annexed some adjoining land into the city. That land was previously unincorporated and had been served by the Robertson Fire Department. Because of an arcane and misguided law applicable in St. Louis County (RSMO §72.418), Hazelwood was required to pay Robertson the property tax revenue in the annexed area for Robertson to continue providing service there, even though Hazelwood was entirely willing and able to provide fire services in that area via its own municipal fire department at lower cost. As part of the agreement reached after the annexation, the residents of the area pay a portion of the property tax (as is normal), but the city itself pays anything above the initial tax level. Since that agreement was reached a long time ago, voters in Robertson have approved extremely high property tax rates, which is easy to do because the city—not the property owners—is responsible for the increased property taxes for the portion of the fire district that lies in Hazelwood. Confusing? Yes, it is, and that’s the point. Fragmented government, low-turnout elections, obscure special taxing districts, politically active public-employee unions: taken together, they create the perfect environment for government mismanagement and abuse.

The situation has gotten so bad that Hazelwood is saying it may have to declare bankruptcy. Some residents of Hazelwood have put together a citizen’s group to demand change, and they have successfully placed a recall election for the Robertson board on the November ballot. Average citizens are now engaged in this issue, and that is what the Robertson board should fear the most.

What is the solution here? Well, there are several options. There is the political solution, which will be addressed in the upcoming recall vote. Then there is the direct policy solution, which is to repeal RSMO §72.418 and allow municipal fire departments to serve annexed areas. But there is a bigger issue here, and that is the political influence of the firefighters union and its ability to dominate independent fire districts (and some municipal fire departments, too, no doubt). From this Post-Dispatch story:

Also opposed is Local 2665 of the International Association of Fire Fighters. Only a handful of districts in St. Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson County—including the Northeast district—have fire boards controlled by directors whose campaigns weren’t backed by the union.

The Robertson issue is just one local example of this larger debate. I saw what happened when local politicians in University City tried to oppose the fire union, and it wasn’t pretty. I commend the Hazelwood elected officials for their stance here, but to stop the abuses of firefighters unions in our area many more voters and local officials will need to get involved.

The post Where Is Robertson Fire District, and Why Do They Take So Much of Hazelwood’s Tax Money? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Hazelwood’s biggest issue is that it is being held at figurative gunpoint by Robertson Fire District, a taxing district here in St. Louis that could qualify as one of the most obscure taxing districts we have. Robertson Fire District probably should not exist. The City of Hazelwood’s municipal fire department should be providing fire protection services to the entire city, but can’t because of a special law in Missouri that limits the ability of cities in St. Louis County that annex unincorporated areas to provide fire services in those areas.

Cities must pay taxes for the fire district to provide the fire services, which they do less efficiently than municipal fire departments. And it is much easier for fireman’s unions to get control of a fire district than a city government (though they can do that, too.). Anyway, Robertson has significantly raised its property tax rate—a rate that the City of Hazelwood, not just the residents within the fire district, must pay. These expensive bills from the high-spending Robertson Fire District are the primary reason Hazelwood is making the cuts mentioned at the start of this piece, and considering filing bankruptcy. From a Post-Dispatch story on the topic:

Median employee pay in the [Robertson] district was $116,066 in 2021, according to district salary records.

In 2021, the city paid Robertson $4.5. million out of a total budget of $30 million, and that does not include the cost to fund the Hazelwood municipal fire department, which covers other parts of the city.

The Robertson contract requires the city pay any fire district tax exceeding 99 cents for each $100 of assessed value. That cost has ballooned over the years, Hazelwood City Manager Matt Zimmerman told the Post-Dispatch in April. [Author’s note: The current rate is $2.41, much higher than $0.99, although the district claims it is going to lower it.]

This story is an example of a special law that is harming Hazelwood, and other cities, too. Cities within St. Louis County that incorporate or annex new areas should be allowed to provide municipal fire services within those areas. Frankly, Chesterfield should be operating its own city fire department; it could save Chesterfield residents a lot of money.

There is another special law, however, where Hazelwood gets the better end of the deal and uses that special authority to stick it to taxpayers. This law relates to hotel taxes. Hotel taxes within St. Louis County are pooled and used to fund tourism promotion, the downtown dome, and a few other things. The tax rate paid on hotel rooms everywhere in St. Louis City and County is 7.25 percent, on top of the normal sales tax rate. But a few cities (four to be precise, most near Lambert Airport) are allowed to have a hotel tax on top of that rate, and the most egregious one is Hazelwood, with a rate of five percent. The combined sales and hotel tax rate in Hazelwood is over 20 percent, and that is unjustifiable. (The other three cities’ extra hotel tax rates are all under one percent.)

In other words, throughout St. Louis City and County hotel taxes of 7.25 percent fund regional items, but a special law allows Hazelwood to charge an extra five percent to just promote Hazelwood. That needs to be changed and excessive hotel taxes need to be disallowed.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. I fully agree that Hazelwood’s primary financial problem is derived from a harmful special law that needs to be removed (the fire district law), but the legislature also needs to address the hotel tax that benefits Hazelwood unfairly.

I look forward to the Mayor of Hazelwood supporting both changes, not just one of them.

The post Hazelwood, Bankruptcy, and Special Laws appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The case is complicated. My purpose here is not to get into the legal minutia of the lawsuit filed by the ice rink owners against the city of Hazelwood. But the broad strokes are important. The suit claims that the city has harmed the owners of the ice rink by taking ownership of much of the property in the mall. With the city owning much of the land, it becomes tax exempt, thereby making the ice rink pay even more of the bond debt. The suit also claims that the City of Hazelwood is dragging its feet on approving a youth sports center proposed for the site, and instead favors building an industrial park. The ice rink owners want the youth sports project to help share in the current tax burden, and clearly don’t want to wait for a possible industrial park years down the line.

The whole thing, as Marty Huggins might say, is a mess. SMI analysts have discussed this failure before and for good reason. The entire project from its inception is a perfect example of why local governments need to stay out of the economic development game, not get more involved in it. The mall is partly within a floodplain, in a struggling area, and was launched when indoor malls were already falling out of favor. The original project building the mall may well not have gone forward if Hazelwood and Bridgeton had not supported it with tax subsidies. If it had gone forward anyway, it would have done so with private money. But no, tax dollars—in the form of subsidies—helped propel this financial failure.

Hazelwood seems to be doubling down on its efforts by taking ownership of the land to promote its preferred use of the land. The city’s track record doesn’t justify such a move. A private entity wants to put a sports complex there now. Unfortunately, this sports complex will be getting some tax subsidies. But those subsidies are coming from St. Louis County, and they’ve already been approved.  The best Hazelwood can do at this point is get out of the way and approve the project—more taxpaying entities in the mall will help ease the unfair burden on businesses such as the ice rink. The city doesn’t need to try and do more—it has done enough damage already.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The post “It’s A Mess” Up There in Hazelwood appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The residents of St. Louis County are either served by municipal fire departments, such as the Clayton Fire Department, or by independent fire districts, such as the Monarch Fire District. The fire departments are run by the mayors, city councils, and city managers of their respective towns. The fire districts are run by independently elected fire boards.

In past years, there have been plenty of scandals in fire service management in St. Louis County. Clearly, the scandals must have been in the municipal fire departments, which is why the plan is to eliminate these departments and replace them with the Ceasar’s wives of the fire districts. Right?

Wrong.

The scandals in the fire districts have been well documented over the years by the Post-Dispatch and others. (Unfortunately, I am unable to locate online the main series of investigative stories from the Post-Dispatch that was published about 20 years ago—the lessons in it still stand.) It is the fire districts that have seen consistent financial mismanagement and worse. So why would somebody propose eliminating fire departments and expanding fire districts? Who would possibly propose such a thing?

The fireman’s union, of course. It is likely easier to take electoral control of an independent fire district than a city hall. People pay much more attention to their votes for mayor than their votes for fire district board. Mayors and city council members must consider the costs of fire service as one of many important services their cities provide and put that within a context of overall taxes and spending. Fire district officials just think about spending money on fire services, usually with much less oversight than a city hall gets. In a few places in recent years, such as the Mehlville and Monarch fire districts, newly elected members of the districts have attempted to better control costs. Things have improved at those two major fire districts, but at the price of constant vigilance by the residents. There have been more recent examples of taxpayer abuses in the Northeast Fire District, and the Robertson Fire District is continuing to squeeze the City of Hazelwood to this day.

While nobody says democracy should be easy, you also don’t want to make it harder than it needs to be by constantly growing the number of special taxing districts that voters have to carefully pay attention to. Special interests can benefit from this lack of attention by the average voter, and that is why fire departments should remain under municipal control in St. Louis County.

Merging a dozen municipal fire departments in mid–St. Louis County into one large fire district is a bad idea. You almost have to admire the audacity of it.

There were some good ideas and some bad ideas in the Better Together proposal of a few years back. The work the organization did with the fire departments was probably some of its most poorly done work.

We do need more consolidation, service sharing, and less fragmentation in St. Louis County government. This proposal by the fireman’s union is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.

The post Ready, Fire, Aim appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So I am excited by some recent, positive steps in the area of local tax subsidies. For too long, state and local governments in Missouri have erroneously believed that tax subsidies spur growth. In fact, the opposite is true. They almost always fail in their purpose of increasing economic growth. Slowly but semi-surely, more people seem to be realizing that.

In Kansas City, there is a serious debate over a bill to further tighten the subsidies offered by the city government (here is my testimony on this bill). When it was first introduced, the bill was stronger. The current version does not go far enough, but, hey: baby steps, man, baby steps. If the bill tightens up subsidy rules at all—and it does—then I think it would benefit Kansas City.

I have already written about Chesterfield rejecting a community improvement district (CID)recently. Hopefully, this is part of this larger trend, both in St. Louis County and statewide.

Earlier this week, the St. Louis County Council delayed a proposal to use tax dollars to support a private youth sports development in Hazelwood. This is a slightly different issue. The tax money at issue here is not an abatement or tax break. St. Louis County would be using hotel tax money raised via measures passed by voters to support tourism-related projects. Nonetheless, the questions raised by those on the council are valid. They want to be certain that if there is a shortfall in hotel tax money (a very reasonable concern in the present environment) that the developer is on the hook for any shortfall, not St. Louis County taxpayers via general revenue tax dollars.

That said, this is fundamentally a private development. While I wish the developers well as they attempt to replace the fiscal, environmental, and totally predictable disaster that was the Hazelwood Mills Mall, they should rely on private funding, not public tax dollars. The fact that elected officials of both parties are questioning the spending is heartening.

Now, time for that tonic and gin . . .

The post Signs of Progress on Local Tax Subsidies in Missouri? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis County Executive Sam Page has proposed an $848.5 million county budget for 2021 that includes $4.3 million in pay raises for county employees, a big funding boost for the police department and no job reductions or cuts to services.

The plan called for pulling back spending just 2% from this year’s budget despite a projected 9.5% shortfall in revenue this year from the coronavirus and an abundance of uncertainty about the county’s ability to recover.

But wait—how is the county going to account for the 9.5 percent shortfall in revenue mentioned in the article? Tax increases, of course:

Page told the council in a four-page letter on Friday that the county needed to “identify additional revenues” to sustain existing programs, including increasing the property tax rate either by a council vote or a ballot initiative.

The county could also see a $10 million annual boost in sales taxes, he wrote, if the state Legislature were to pass legislation allowing the state and its municipalities to begin collecting taxes on sales in the state from out-of-state vendors.

Why raise taxes on citizens already struggling in the midst of an economic calamity instead of looking carefully for cuts? In the Post-Dispatch story, a county official is quoted saying that cuts “generated a whole bunch of bad outcomes. So, ultimately, none of those were accepted.”

It’s possible that some service cuts aren’t feasible and really would harm citizens. But the idea that there’s simply nothing in the budget that can be cut doesn’t pass the smell test. We already know one area where the county misuses gobs of taxpayer money: economic development policy.

One does not need to strain to find examples of the county wasting money in this fashion.

Just a few years ago, in a plan to revitalize part of North County, St. Louis County negotiated a lease for the former Northwest Plaza mall that could cost the county up to $77 million. Serious questions were raised about the negotiation process, which led to ethics hearings. A member of the county council has since called the lease “obscenely long and overpriced,” and the county is now enmeshed in litigation while trying to break the lease.

The county also contributed millions to the farcical, doomed-from-the-start Loop Trolley project, which last December financially imploded after barely a year of operation. And the county regularly subsidizes smaller projects that don’t make headlines. Last year, the county and the City of Hazelwood together spent millions in a scheme to redevelop the decaying St. Louis Outlet Mall. Late last year, St. Louis County doled out more than $4 million to HVAC company Johnstone Supply to help it build a new headquarters in Earth City.

Institute analysts have spent years documenting the problems with these projects, which often lack accountability and oversight, allow government to pick winners and losers, and shift risk from private investors to taxpayers. But most importantly: They simply don’t work, frequently failing to deliver promised benefits.

While those mistakes have already been made and the money already spent, the county is taking the wrong approach here. Why should taxpayers entrust a government that has been a poor steward of their dollars with more money? St. Louis County should work harder and more transparently to find opportunities for budget savings before asking its citizens to pony up additional taxes.

The post St. Louis County Should Find Budget Cuts Before Hiking Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last month, the Hazelwood City Council passed a resolution approving the redevelopment of the failing and deeply indebted St. Louis Outlet Mall. After failing to secure financing for the same project in Chesterfield, the developer, Big Sports Properties (BSP), now plans to convert the mostly vacant mall into a 138-acre youth sports complex called POWERplex, with the help of taxpayer money.

The deal includes nine sources of public financing, which can be divided into four types of incentives:

• The first type of incentive used is special taxing districts, including a community improvement district (CID) and transportation development district (TDD), and they would together levy a 2% sales tax.
• Second, the existing tax-increment financing (TIF) district (from the original mall development in 2003) would also collect half of all economic activity taxes paid at the sports complex, and the agreement includes tentative approval of a new TIF, slated to go into effect next January if the project is on schedule.
• The third type of incentive used involves Hazelwood assisting the developer with debt financing, using economic development loans, Chapter 100 property tax abatement, and property assessed clean energy (PACE) financing.
• Finally, the fourth source of incentives comes directly from the City of Hazelwood and St. Louis County in the form of $3.6 million to revitalize infrastructure.

If this all sounds too complicated, it’s because it is.

There’s plenty of reason to doubt this project will be a good investment. When the mall was first built in 2003, it received public funds totaling $52.5 million from a TIF and TDD. However, the mall sold for $6 million in 2015, just 6% of its original cost. Earlier this year, it was announced that the mall would be closing, and the TDD was mired in debt. In fact, the TDD’s bondholders agreed to settle the debt for $10.5 million, a reportedly substantial discount, which will be paid by the newly formed CID.

The mall was a taxpayer-subsidized failure, and the city is asking for us to trust them again. Even if BSP manages to see the project through this time (part of the reason the development in Chesterfield failed last year was that BSP missed an important deadline) and the first few years are successful, the long-term risk is substantial. Hazelwood might find itself in a similar situation another 16 years from now.

Besides the risk to taxpayers, government should not be picking winners and losers. Hazelwood pulled out nearly every subsidy in the book to help build a private business with no guarantee of success, and taxpayers got to bear the cost. It’s hard to imagine a time when businesses relied on market forces to decide where to build. Instead, it has become a competition between cities to see who can give away the most taxpayer money, and Hazelwood has done an exemplary job showing us where that leads.

The post A Field of Subsidies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I wanted to take a moment to put this tax increase into perspective. According to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the average tax rate ceiling for school districts in Missouri was $3.70 per $100 of assessed valuation in 2015. Regionally, however, property tax rates are considerably higher. The average tax rate for Saint Louis County school districts is $4.528. On top of that, county residents pay an additional $1.2609 per $100 of assessed valuation for the special school district. This brings the county average up to $5.788.

The table that follows shows how Saint Louis’ school property tax rate would stack up to Saint Louis County school districts. For county districts, I combine both district and special school district rates.

As has been written on this blog before, Saint Louis could do other proactive things to address the budget crisis, such as selling vacant school buildings. And as Joseph Miller has pointed out, the city could help the district out a little by ending its flagrant TIF and tax abatement policies.  Nevertheless, it is certainly within the right of the school district to seek a property tax increase. If this one passes, Saint Louis will still have the lowest school taxes in the area. 

The post Should Saint Louis Raise Property Taxes for Public Schools? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Hotel taxes are not an uncommon occurrence in Missouri. In fact, the Show-Me Institute’s Sales Tax Fast Facts pamphlet has 17 entries for cities/counties with a hotel/occupancy tax, and that list is by no means exhaustive. As you can see, hotel tax rates can range from 3 percent in Hermann to 12.25 percent in Hazelwood. In most cases, visitors to Saint Louis County pay the same hotel tax rate (7.25 percent) because of the countywide pool which, among other things, goes to pay off construction costs for the Edward Jones Dome.

The Bridgeton City Council, however, wants more hotel taxes to go directly to them. The council placed a proposal on the April ballot that will raise its hotel tax from 85 cents a night to three dollars a night. I can see why this would be an attractive option. Many people who stay in hotels are not residents of the city/county where the tax is imposed. For politicians and residents alike, getting others to pay for city services sounds like a good idea. However, just because a city can extract revenue from visitors, doesn’t mean it should.

Hotels already pay commercial property taxes and the Saint Louis County property tax surcharge (the highest in the state). They have to pay business licensing fees, and guests already have to pay the city and county sales tax. Why does Bridgeton need to levy even more taxes? Is it because it keeps relying on TIFs? Maybe Bridgeton should stop giving away special handouts and broaden their tax base instead of shrinking it and relying on higher rates to make up for lost revenue.

I highly doubt I will ever stay in a Bridgeton hotel, so when I wake up in the morning, the effects of this proposal won’t be staring me in the face. However, city residents should ask themselves whether they want to approve a tax increase, no matter who it may hurt.

The post Paying for the Privilege . . . to Stay in Bridgeton appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Case in point. In the course of my research regarding public pensions, I found that the city of Hazelwood maintains a pension for just its mayor and city council. It isn’t a very large pension. As of 2012, it had $96,000 in assets. But I question why such a pension exists in the first place. Is it really necessary for the council of a small municipality that meets only once or twice a month on average to have its own pension? No other municipality has a separate pension plan for its city council. Despite its size, the city still spends money on the plan. For fiscal year 2014, the city plans to spend $17,000 on the city council pension plan. That is $17,000 too much.

I’ll be the first to say that there is a large difference between $17,000 and $1.3 million. However, before asking for more taxpayer money, I would look at ways to trim the fat. As much as the law allows, I would phase out Hazelwood’s pension for the city council and save the city some money. It is not nearly enough to offset this proposed tax increase, but every little bit helps.

The post Hazelwood Tax Increases And Places To Cut Spending appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) reports the SSD spends more than $161,000 per-pupil, but SSD reports their per-pupil expenditure to be just above $14,000. The figure from DESE is calculated using the district’s average daily attendance. This is problematic for the SSD because the district “serves more than 21,000 students for whom it does not take attendance.”

Most of those students are counted in the average daily attendance figures of their local school district, which means local taxpayers give money to their local school district and to the Special School District. To my knowledge, this is the only system like this in the state. One would think that because the special needs students are primarily served via the SSD that the local property tax could be lower. After all, most school districts throughout the state educate their special needs students with local, state, and federal dollars without an extra SSD.

As it turns out, the average tax rate for operating funds in Saint Louis County school districts is 4.0 percent, ranging from 2.75 percent in Ladue to 5.3411 percent in Hazelwood (2011 data source). The state average is 3.3 percent.  When the additional 1 percent for the SSD is placed on top of the local taxes, Saint Louis County school districts have an average tax rate that is approximately 50 percent higher than the state average. Add an additional .19 percent on this and the tax rate will be more than 55 percent higher.

I am all for supporting services for special needs students, but there may be other ways we can do this. For starters, maybe some of that money could be used to provide opportunity scholarships for special needs students to attend the private school of their choice.

The post Proposition S: A Little More Nuanced appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

LoMonte writes:

But there can be no debate on how ending tenure will impact the teaching of journalism in public schools. It will effectively end it.

As a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school, I cannot help but sympathize with LoMonte’s fear. But I am not sure that it is grounded in much reality.

Free speech is already limited in schools. LoMonte does not mention this, but high school newspapers are not forums for free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court (in a case that originated in Hazelwood, Mo., no less)  ruled in 1988 that school administrators could censor drafts of the high school newspaper if they can demonstrate that there is an educational purpose for the censorship. Currently, students cannot freely report on any topic they wish.

Administrators already can (and do) punish journalism teachers. LoMonte lists several ways that journalism teachers can be punished for encouraging students to question the operations of their schools. He writes that teachers can be fired, demoted, or transferred as punishment. But arguing that these options will become available if teacher tenure reform is passed is incorrect. Demotion and transferal are already available to school administrators if they want to punish teachers. Firing is as well, though it is very difficult.

The following cases that LoMonte recounts are deplorable:

Teachers like Darryl Adams, who was stripped of his journalism duties after his principal questioned his loyalty for refusing to censor an editorial critical of the school’s random student searches. Teachers like Teri Hu, who was reassigned — and whose students were threatened with discipline — after the newspaper accurately revealed that the school was out of compliance with district regulations on the use of teaching assistants.

But they are all possible under Missouri’s existing teacher tenure law.

Journalism teachers are a small fraction of the total teaching force in Missouri. Perhaps some marginal number of journalism teachers will be fired if teacher tenure reform passes. And, perhaps their firings will be due to encouraging students to pursue meaningful and contentious journalism. I agree that this is a disturbing possibility. But many of our smallest districts likely have no student paper. Elementary, middle, and high school math teachers, for example, certainly outnumber journalism teachers significantly.

In life, there are always difficult trade-offs. And we have to consider whether preserving the jobs of a few good journalism teachers is worth keeping teachers who have a track record of failing students in the classroom.  I would argue that illiterate students and students who cannot do simple arithmetic are problems that we need to address first.

Student speech exists outside of the classroom. Sadly, LoMonte ignores the possibility that students can exercise their right to free speech openly and outside of the classroom. When I was in high school, I was part of a group of students that started a monthly print newspaper during our free time — because we knew that the student paper could, thanks to that Supreme Court decision, be censored.

We wrote about high school dropouts, janitors who had been hired despite having a criminal record, and other topics that likely would have been tough to have printed in the official school newspaper. Given the rebellious nature of most teenagers, and the ease of online publishing, I trust that students will continue to express their right to free speech, even if they cannot do it within the pages of a district-financed paper.

The post Fear Of Censorship Has Little To Do With Teacher Tenure Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.