Riverview Gardens Picks Kirkwood as Second District for Paid Transportation of its Students

After Mehlville voiced concerns about having only enough space for 150 of all the transfer students from Riverview Gardens who wanted to attend there, I was curious where RG would choose as their second choice district. Now they even had some solid numbers to know where their students preferred to attend. If they had been looking out for their own students they would have selected a district already picked by a large number of their students like Ferguson-Florissant (200*), Hazelwood (149*) or Pattonville (60*), so that those students could have buses to ride there and not have to be driven every morning and afternoon. But instead they selected the Kirkwood school district, a choice picked by only 13 of their students. Plus Kirkwood is a smaller district with only one high school who has already stated they can only take in about 100 additional students. This choice makes almost no sense at all, unless Riverview Gardens is just trying to save money and deter as many students as possible from transferring. Following that logic, they should have picked someplace even tinier with even less room like Brentwood, so even fewer of their students could transfer.

As the KSDK reporter mentions, there were 562 Riverview students who selected Mehlville, but with only 150 open spots there, that leaves 412 who could not attend. So with the 100 spots in Kirkwood, that still leaves over 300 students who selected Mehlville who now must find somewhere else to send their children if they want to transfer, and they will need to provide their own transportation. So RG was able to make two selections which limits the total number of students they must transport to 250. If the school board was smarter they would have selected Brentwood and Clayton so they probably could have cut that number in half! What were they thinking? Their purpose there is to try to retain students and cut the flow of money out of their district, right?

I am guessing that both Normandy and Riverview Gardens are going to have to start cutting teaching and administrative positions here soon, and a bunch of those displaced teachers will probably end up taking the many substitute teaching positions that will be popping up in all the other districts receiving students. So ironically some of the transfer students may very well end up in classes taught by the same teachers as if they had never left (just in a much further location.)

Tomorrow is the final day for students to register to transfer to another district. The Cooperating School Districts of St. Louis web site has the latest numbers online for download. The Mehlville number is now up to 615, even after everyone knows they only have 150 spaces. The Clayton number is now a combined total of 55 + 118 = 173 students, or 6.9% of their student body or about 1 out of every 14. There is no way Clayton can come close to accepting anywhere close to that many students. Ferguson-Florissant has seen its number jump from 189 last week to 266 total now with 103 total requests for high school. Luckily they have three high schools and the district gets to decide how to split up the students between the schools. Ritenour is not so lucky, with 62 high school students wanting to attend their one high school. They have the highest number of high school students for any district with only one high school (Clayton has 45, Pattonville has 28, U City has 17, Ladue has 15, Kirkwood had 9.) Francis Howell now has 129 requests from high school students, including the one from Riverview, which will also be a hefty number to deal with in its multiple high schools.

Some districts have been hardly affected at all, including a couple very good ones. Lindbergh only has 3 transfer requests and Rockwood only has 8. They are a bit further out west and south, but Lindbergh is closer than Mehlville on the "I-270" loop and is a very strong district. I am curious why more students did not pick it. Webster only has 17, and their friendly rival, Kirkwood, only had 20, but the Pioneers' number should jump now that Riverview Garden named them as a "free transportation" district.      

* Latest numbers from Cooperating School Districts (Transfer_numbers_breakdown_7-30.pdf file)

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